Although you have to look hard at the picture to see it - right in the middle of the picture there is a dark mass. Sort of a triangle on the bottom. There - see it? Ok - what you are looking at is a swarm of honeybees. I had better pictures which I put on this blog about this time last year. Today however these guys have a more happy ending.
I just got back from my 10 day trip to Sweden/Denmark, visiting my homeland and a good friend and have been working to get my lawn tamed again after 2 weeks of rain and now hot weather. I am having my house painted as well. The guy painting the house is really nice and just started and he likes to talk so when he came to where I was mowing I didn't think much of it. He looked very concerned though and I shut the mower down and listened to his story. He was pounding with a hammer on the house and he heard buzzing - he thought he disturbed a hive of bees living in the siding.
We walked over to where he had been working and saw a cloud of bees in the air. I knew these were my bees and they were looking for a new home. They slowly disappeared and we thought they were gone. We walked around and he was going to start working when I spotted the swarm in the tree. This time it was much closer to the ground. I raced to get my bee suit on and a box. I had read about this, but never had done it. I took the box under the triangle you see and shook the branch really hard and all the bees fell into the box. It sounds almost too simple but for the most part they all just fell in! I then closed the box and walked over to the hive that I knew was the weakest of my three, took the top off and dumped them in. That didn't go quite as well, but the bees clung to the outside of the hive and after about about 15 minutes they were all inside again. Pretty slick.
If I wasn't at home and if my painter hadn't been so afraid of a few thousand crazy bees I probably wouldn't have been able to save them, it was quite a rush. When bees swarm they are leaving a crowed hive and looking for a new home, giving them a place to go usually makes them much happier. I wish I could have taken more pictures, but from the shake off the branch to the end only took about 30 seconds and I didn't want to stop and fumble with the camera.
The trees part of my title (unless you count that the bees were swarming in a tree) doesn't have anything to do with the above but with something my dad said earlier. He told me that almost all of my grandpa's apple and fruit trees were dying or being blown down in the wind. It started about a year before he died - one of his peach trees died. After he died the other peach tree died within weeks. This summer will be the 2nd year after he died and out of his 15 or so fruit trees all but two of them are actually alive. One giant one that was probably 50 years or more old blew down in a storm last week. Three more died over the winter. Really strange since my dad has been the one who has been really taking care of them for the last 5 years, pruning, spraying for bugs and doing a lot of the picking.
What got my attention when he was telling me this is something similar I read a while ago about bees. They wrote that bees usually don't do well or completely fail when their keeper dies. That made some sense to me at the time, since they are used to being cared for in a certain way. Why trees though - especially since my dad was the one doing things after my grandpa was no longer able to trim them and pick any fruit higher than he could reach?
The whole idea of plants being attached to their keepers is something I find fascinating, I don't think people today fully understand the concept of a "green thumb". For example if I water a plant or you water a plant it still gets water, it's the same either way. It has to do with the thoughts going through the persons head who is doing the watering, weeding or other thing. My plants have to be tough or they won't survive. That's the way I think and they usually respond accordingly. I don't know if any of that makes sense to anyone looking on with a purely scientific background, but that's the way it is.
