Timing is Everything

What we first noticed was the sound, an orchestra of bees, thousands of them, circling. 

Spring is not to be trusted. This is the time of the year when one never knows what the weather may bring. It’s time to celebrate ‘layers’ and be prepared for just about anything. But even for those of us who, by nature and nurture, have learnt to cater for all contingencies this week has been challenging – we’ve had spring sunshine, torrential rain, blustering winds direct from the snow-capped mountain peaks and now we return to sunshine. The kind of sunshine that makes you rejoice and sow seeds. It’s also the kind of sunshine that encourages bees to take their chances and swarm. Which is exactly what ours did … at the beginning of the week. The same aforementioned week of chaos. Last Sunday our bees decided to re-camp. Their timing was good and their luck was in. Their timing fortunate because they picked a divine T-Shirt wearing windless day, which is their want of course. If you’re a queen bee asking the workers to follow then you need to get that right.

It’s not a random act though, before the swarming event the hive have initiated the production of several ‘successor queens’, one of who will be the chosen one in the existing hive. But before the new queen hatches the old queen has to leave. And that is where the timing comes in, there is about a week between the making of the new queen and her entry into the hive. And so, on a spring day last Sunday our queen took her chances and swarmed. What we first noticed was the sound, an orchestra of bees, thousands of them, circling.  The sight was likewise amazing. Not unusually they didn’t go far from the original hive, settling on a piece of garden furniture, right by our front gate!

The luck component relates to the fact that we were home, that we knew what to do and that we had a spare top-bar hive ready to go. And so with much excitement we donned our bees suits and set about manoeuvring them from the wooden bench into the top-bar. Unexpectedly, bees are not angry when they swarm, they have a belly full of honey and are focused on re-homing. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t some moments of “yikes!” to be had but generally we stayed calm, as did the bees and luckily (there’s that word again) they liked the new real estate on offer. So they settled in. Which was very very fortunate because the next day the torrential rains began. Happily they’ve stayed, which means we are a 2 hive family again, just like we were before the black summer bushfires. Timing. 

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