Kind of like us here. We are our own swarm, but also not liking be handled too much? So we pull away even when the hands are helping hands.
Hugs to you arfie.
J.

Bees and wasps scare the hell out of me. Ur very brave.

arfie, I was just thinking, I wonder if the bees, even tho they flew off, would come back to the hive you made for them? I don't know about bees...do they think together as a swarm and return and how would one know...yet it's comforting that they have each other and staying together is important! Hugs

Cheesecake, You might be right. The swarm has returned to the same spot I swept them away from at dawn. That spot is not very far at all from where I set up the new hive. Keep buzzing. Maybe they will hear you.

Not so brave, rotti. Just more than a bit of a feral child. If my resurfaced memories are accurate, I started wandering away from human civilization as a toddler. I was the 5th of 11 kids in a highly dysfunctional family, so it is real easy to believe I was able to spend days and nights in farm fields without being missed. I think I remember nursing on a mother pig. It be the human swarms that terrify me...

Yes, Jewells. Like us, only with enough natural sense to act on it...

Amen to what Jewells said...
And gentle hugs. Thanks for caring about our pollinating friends...

Oddly, I dreamed that ants were vacating a house where I was staying, just like a bee swarm, because they sensed an impending catastrophe. And they carried something with them, which I assumed was their queen, but it turned out to be bees. They were carrying captive honeybees : (.

I like that thought of the bees wanting to stay together so much.

This is one of the best communities I have ever hung with together. We make a lot of honey out of bitter experiences here, too.

Since the swarm reassembled in the same spot, I got to try again. Of course, you will never get ALL the bees when you sweep them into a box and you will lose more when you dump the box into the hive. The big prayer is that you get the queen and the rest of the swarm will follow the queen. Once the big dump is done, you close off the hive to trap them until they have time to calm enough to investigate their new surroundings. The hives have a screen bottom so that the floaters can know where their sisters went.

The deed is done and the missed bees are floating around the closed off hive. That is a sign that I did, indeed, get the queen. If the floaters have gathered on the screen by morning, I will know I got the queen. I think. The expertise of having experienced 3 swarms with only one successful capture leaves me a bit shaky...

You rock!

Our "pest control" actually gathers hives and moves them--- I saw them do it once --- he was so slow, so careful, so gentle --- and then he said later, "I knew I had the queen when they started following me." It was like a bee-charming thing in a movie....

Bee-charming Arfie!!!

Donna, love your dream. There are ants who practice agriculture, including keeping livestock, so it is not so far fetched.

Alas, I have also watched ants eat bees alive... It is a brutal show...

Leo, I have already been approached about hive removal from houses. On investigating the "how-to" of it, I discovered that a hole in that particular system is what to do with the bees after you remove them.

I wonder if a bee rescue center could qualify as non-profit?

There is no question that bee work is a Zen workout. Fall out of the zone and you are in trouble. To think, early bee charmers once had no protective gear to work in. Oh, Great Swami Beyondana...

Around here, the die-off was bad a few years back, so farmers will let hives be moved to their property---pest control and hive removal people advertise or ask, and vice versa....

Maybe call it a "bee sanctuary"? Or "Pollinaton Recovery Center?"

Yeah, I' remember my great-aunt calmly walking through an orchard with a piece of comb in her hand that had the queen, this huge thing held by this tiny woman, and the bees just moving with her like a shadow, utterly at ease....
All she wore? Was her old go-to-church gloves, the really old-fashioned kind from like the 1940s.

I remember her moving a hive further from my grandma's house, but keeping it on the property for the crops and orchard etc.

My uncle lets someone keep bees in the back pastures. THey give him a gallon o f honey, he gets crops pollinated, all works out.

Sorry, it's just---I grew up in that idea of working *with* nature, not trying to beat it up.

I seriously think you could get non-profit status as a bee rescuer. The bee situation is national news - I think the NY Times Sunday magazine had a story on it. That would be quite a job title: Itinerant bee whisperer. It's actually very important work! Beautiful, blessed work.

That is a gorgeous image, Leo. Love it!!!

It's not OT, but even if it were, who cares? : D

New avatar! Cute.

Ever explore the Bee Therapy idea?

I'll look into honey therapy- I'd love doing the research.