Posted on 08/01/2012 2:01:55 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A swarm of relocating bees in southern Sweden chose to leave an overcrowded hive to squat on a bicycle parked on a central square in Kristianstad.
Passers-by witnessed how bees were swarming around a bicycle at Kristianstad square Södertorg, reported local paper Kristianstadbladet.
“Then the Queen arrived and they started to come in droves after that,” said Jan Ekdala, who became a witness to the event, to the paper.
Ekdala watched as the bees started swarming over the bike, literally covering parts of it.
“In only five minutes it was a gigantic bee-swarm,” Ekdala told the paper.
He told the paper that watching what was going on he became increasingly pleased that it wasn’t his bicycle that the bees had chosen.
“It would have been too large a number of stowaways to be able to use the bike,” he told the paper.
The phenomenon, when a bee Queen and a number of worker bees leave one hive to go looking for a new home, is called swarming.
The swarm at first only relocates to a nearby gathering place, such as a tree branch – or in this case a parked bicycle - sending out some 20-50 scout bees to find a suitable new location for the colony.
Got an empty hive? Shop-Vac in the car?
Sounds like a textbook example of Francis Bacon’s truism that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. I suspect that any brute-force attempt to remove them would not end well.
Bees removed from Ontario house dripping honey
OWEN SOUND, Ont. -- The bees are gone and so is the family whose home they invaded.
A Varney, Ont., couple and their toddler son left their 1-1/2 story home over the weekend to allow for cleanup and removal of thousands of bees nesting and producing honey in their ceilings.
Loretta and Dave Yates and their young son Justin haven’t returned home, but the bees were removed during a five-hour period Monday.
The Yates family hadn’t realized the extent of the bee invasion until cracks appeared in the ceilings of the two rooms and honey began to drip onto the floors. On closer examination, they noticed a dome kitchen light fixture was also starting to fill with honey.
Beekeeper Dave Schuit and three helpers pulled down the ceilings in the kitchen and living room Monday, and successfully removed the two beehives and several honeycombs -- some filled with honey, others containing brood stock.
That does remind me that I need to do some painting. It is so darned hot and humid to be outside though.
Finding the queen and caging her are not steps that are included in my swarm collections. Take an empty deep (brood chamber) and scoop the bees in or whatever maneuver best collects the balled bees. Have never lost a queen. Most of the time I even skip the cardboard box.
The word ‘homeless’ has so many negative connotations. I suggest the more nuanced term “hive-challenged bees.”
I had a swarm of 8-10 K show up at my house a few years back, in a wall that faces my bathtub. When they didn’t leave after a couple of days, it was obvious they weren’t on a stop, they were planning to stay.
I called a beekeeper and he croaked the lot of them. I wasn’t willing to shell out the hundreds of $$$ it would have cost to repair the exterior wall.
My grandfather-in-law was the first to truck hives to Florida for the orange crop, back in the 1920s. He was quite the bee entrepreneur - queen breeding, honey sales, etc.
His day job was Methodist minister, which in those days didn't pay particularly well. He also was a U.S. Marshal in Arizona Territory back when things were still pretty wild and wooly out there.
I’ve been fighting a red wasp and yellowjacket invasion since moving in to our new home.
They attempted to take over my motorcycle. The yellow jackets tried to build a nest on a bolt near the front end.
The red wasps built a huge nest on the security light under the car port.
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