Wild Week of Joy and Sorrow - Part One

On Sunday I was in the garden pulling a few weeds. Ted was mowing. He crossed the back yard to put a tool away in the shed next to me. A few moments later he stepped out into the yard again and said, "Look at all the bugs in the yard!" Suddenly a cloud of hundreds - thousands- of flying insects formed a golden tornado in the center of the yard. They were flying too fast to make out what they were.

I stepped into the tornado. "They sound like - bees." I ran to grab my iPad and began searching for local beekeepers from the vantage point of the deck. 

A blackish mass gradually took shape in the wax myrtle, about 12 feet up. The tornado slowly dissipated. Only a remnant hovered around the swarm. I took a few photos with my phone. 

Beekeepers preparing to move the bee swarm.

After following a daisy chain of phone numbers, I got in touch with a beekeeper who would drop everything to bring his equipment and collect the honeybees. He and a helper gave us a crash course in bee biology while we waited for the all the bees to follow their queen into the bucket. 

The beekeeper said if we hadn't called there was a good chance the swarm would be sprayed and killed by someone when it moved away.

I made a slideshow of the photos and video I took:

Our swarm will replace a hive that died over the winter. It is estimated that over 40% of the honeybees in America died last year. A type of pesticide called neonicotinoids has been implicated as a main cause of colony collapse disorder. A third of our food is pollinated by bees -  treats like apples, almonds, strawberries.

Bee swarms are one of nature's great miracles - thousands of individual animals acting as a "super organism", as if they were different cells of of a single animal. What a joy it was to witness and to know we helped these amazing animals survive.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about the sad event that happened today.
P.S. Toby is fine, it's not about him!