World Bee Day

When I visited my mother today, all of a sudden a cloud of bees appeared in the garden. A colony of honey bees was swarming.

At first, they were all flying around the pine tree (see extra for some impressions), while more and more bees clustered around one tree branch, protecting their queen, who would have been in the middle of them.

The main blip was taken at the end of this process, with all bees sitting clustered together. I did go quite close, because bees are not aggressive when swarming. My mother once kept a few hives of honeybees, so I learned a lot about them.

We thought about calling an old friend of my mother’s, who still keeps bees, whether he would want to try and capture the swarm. But he is also over 80 by now, and the bees were sitting high up the tree, so we decided against it. Anyway the swarm left shortly afterwards, flying into the forest. 

I was grateful for this rare sight, and for the bee blip on World Bee Day.