It all started with an ecstatic-looking looking man in biking gear running towards us and yelling: “There is a swarm of bees! Yahoo!” It was the farm’s bee-keeper, Max. Turned out, some bees from the main hive defected because there were too many bees in one space. So, some worker bees made a new queen, and once she matured, they flew away with her. Their temporary home turned out to be a little pear tree sapling, so it was very easy to see what the bees were doing. So far they were just sitting there, chilling. Occasionally several bees would fly out and return to tell others about a potential site for their new home. They were doing a little “dance” – jitter-bug (pun intended), to communicate with other bees about their discoveries. Apparently, bees communicate with pheromones, and so the smoke that some bee-keepers use hinders their communication.
Max and the other bee-keeper, Sarah, quickly found the box (the future bee-house), the masks and other equipment, and were trying to figure out how to
transport all bees into the box. If the bees were on the horizontal branch, they
would simply lower the branch into the box. But because they were placed vertically,
it was more tricky. Max finally decided to simply shake the bees off the tree trunk!
As long as the queen got into the box, all bees would eventually go where she
would be. And that’s exactly what happened. It was very cool to just see bees
flying around and getting into the box. Max was stung only once (most likely
because he was wearing black, bees’ least favorite color). The entire procedure
took about 20 minutes. Hopefully I’ll participate in some bee-keeping projects
in Ghana! Honey-bees seem to be awesome creatures. Gotta read this book: "Honeybee
Democracy" by Tom Seeley.
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