1 June 26
A Time For Swarming
Yesterday afternoon I stepped out our front door and heard a whirring roar coming from the trees immediately to the north. Looking up there were many bees about and clearly there was a bee swarm nearby. The swarm turned out to be in a sumac tree in the yard of our neighbor immediately to the north.
Our neighbor quickly found a response to the new inhabitants of the backyard. There is an organization called Swarmed that is a community-based bee rescue network. At the Swarmed website there is a form to report a bee swarm; soon thereafter a beekeeper gets in touch and volunteers to retrieve the bee swarm to add to their own apiaries. The swarm yesterday was handled by an 83-year-old beekeeper who gathered it up with some sort of vacuum device and transported it (estimated at 60,000 bees in number) to its new home near Marysville.
This morning another bee swarm showed up in the same sumac tree, but about five feet higher. The photo is of this second swarm. Our neighbor reported it through the Swarmed site, summoning a different pair of beekeepers. They don’t seem to be as skilled as yesterday’s beekeeper, and as of 5 PM today the swarm is still up in the tree.
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