Sunday, May 24, 2009

Honey Bee Swarm

This afternoon we were privileged to be the temporary hosts for a Honey Bee Swarm. The short story is that a new queen hatches out in an existing hive. When she is mature, she leaves the hive taking a number of drones with her. They land in a temporary place while scouts search for a new suitable location. They can be there for minutes, an hour or a day. After hanging out on our mailbox for about 5 hours, they left. We followed the cloud as it moved across our yard and disappeared over the corn field. Very cool.



I see a Honey Bee stamp in my future.

4 comments:

  1. I'm glad to see that they didn't think your mailbox was the suitable home. Yikes!

    Will the Honey Bee Swarm box be a postal?

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  2. Good thing it was Sunday and some poor postal carrier didn't have to try to deliver your mail! :)

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  3. That's quite a 'number of drones' she takes with her! lol!

    Wow...I'm sure you handled it better than I would!

    :-)

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  4. Believe me, there was no "handling"! Just watching. Thankfully they left on their own, but we would have sought professional help if needed. With all of the honey bee death already, we didn't want to have to destroy them.

    We are going to leave a picture in the mailbox tomorrow though, so our mailman can see what he missed. :)

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