This is so cool.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a honeybee colony in a silver maple across the street. Silver maples grow really fast, so new neighborhoods in Denver were once planted thickly with them, but because of their growth rate they have weak wood and are prone to breakage and holes. So we have lots of natural nests for starlings and squirrels and bees. This hole is about seven feet up, and I was concerned what might happen if the city discovered it. (The property-owners probably wouldn't: they might as well live in suburbia for all they use their front yard but enter through the back near the garage instead.)
The colony explained where the scores of bees who love my front garden live. My catmint especially but everything else as well regularly hums with bees.
Just a little while ago I glanced out the screened front door and saw them swarming. The noise was terrific. First I worried for the original nest: did this swarm represent some few survivors? But the original nest seemed fine, still with traffic. Less traffic than I have observed before, but I don't pretend I had been keeping a close enough eye to gauge the difference.
I wrote to an acquaintance who has just begun to keep bees and then commenced to google. It seems likely that, with all this rain and consequent spike in nectar production, the hive is doing well enough that 40% to 60% of the bees, including the queen (who can fly?) or perhaps a virgin queen, have left to seek new quarters. For now, they are clustered high in my European ash tree, along a stretch of branch, forming a living cylinder about the size of a three-liter bottle. Over the next few days, scouts will search for a new home, and then they'll all move.
My concern is that they'll find a way into the attic. I would love for them to continue to live nearby but I do not want them in the house, in the attic, in the structure anywhere. And I am not about to become a backyard beekeeper, which seems like a full-time occupation, and which furthermore would probably lead to my divorce. RDC is not so much a fan of bees--spiders are his job and bees mine.
But honeybees are nice. They aren't mean, like yellowjackets, and they make honey, and there'd be a lot less to eat around the world without them. Plus, while they swarm, they have no brood or honey to defend and are much less likely to sting (I just read that).These are European bees, bigger than the native American ones that aren't big enough to fly far enough to pollinate fields as big as Usans plant (a factoid I think I learned from Sue Hubbell's A Country Year: Living the Questions).
Anyone want a swarm of bees? At this point all you'd have to do is somehow erect an extension ladder without disturbing them--the cluster isn't near the bole--and clip their branch into a container. Simple.
It feels like it's about to rain. What will that do to them?
I expect the sequels and prequels to Rebecca suck as much as those to Jane Austen's novels, but I am intrigued. Why did Maxim marry Rebecca to begin with? How could he have been so misled? And I just watched a cheesy Cary Grant movie, "In Name Only," similarly with an interloper; and I wonder why his character married his first wife. It's based on a book probably even more cheesy, Memory of Love by Besse Breuer, and maybe that has more background. Or not, because that title sounds like teen Harlequin shlock.
Danvers is a fright, isn't she?