Movin' on up.

Three weeks into beekeeping I was gaining some confidence. I had kept my queens alive and they were laying eggs like a hyperactive chicken. My original 40,000 bees had already increased to at least double the original number. They were eating sugar water like it was candy. Liquid candy. And best of all, they were building comb and storing honey. I decided I must be a natural beekeeper. My bees were happy bees. They weren't like some bees that cause trouble, getting upset when things don't go their way. They didn't loiter idly around the bee yard looking for trouble, stinging wild animals for fun and spitting wax to look tough. No, my bees were jolly, happy, honey making fellows (and gals).

Then one day as I was coming home from a quick trip to the hardware store, I decided to swing by the ol' complex and check on my tenants. Just to make sure they were having a good day. As I pulled up by the hives, I noticed an odd fog in the air. When I opened the door, I also noticed a loud buzzing, almost like thousands of bees were flying all around my truck. Actually, thousands of bees were flying around my truck. And over the hives, and over the field. It looked like an entire army of bees had taken flight. I quickly closed my door and went through a mental checklist of things I had read about beekeeping. What did the books say about thousands of bees out for a stroll at once? It hardly seemed normal, but what did it mean?

As I looked at them, a little word came into my mind that seemed to suddenly shoot to the surface of my thoughts and burst through with explosive force. SWARM!

Get back in your room...all ten thousand of you!

I didn't have my bee suit and equipment with me, so I tore up the hill in my truck and grabbed my box of beekeeping gear and headed back down the hill. I was gone a total of three or four minutes tops. When I pulled back up by the hives, it was quiet and peaceful. No swarming bees, no loud buzzing. It was if it had never happened. I was baffled. I looked around to see if I saw any bees still flying around. I saw a few way in the top of a tree, flying around that...what was that thing? That big, black, thing in the top of the tree that looked like...looked like...oh! A swarm of bees!

Actually, it was two swarms of bees. Apparently my tenants weren't so happy after all.

I knew I had to do something. I wasn't just going to let twenty thousand bees leave without paying their rent (Honey Money). I had to get them back before they found a new place to live. Problem was, they were in the top of a tall skinny tree and there is no way tall fat me was climbing that tall skinny tree. Then I though of Scooter. He's skinny! Somehow I didn't think I would persuade him to climb the tree and capture thousands of bees though, so I came up with another plan. If you can't get to the bees, bring the bees to you.

I called Scooter and told him to bring his truck with a ladder and a come-along that we use to stretch fence wire. As soon as he got there, I set the ladder up by the tree and climbed as high as I could to tie a rope around it. I then tied the other end of the rope to the come-along hook, and hooked the come-along to his truck bumper. It was nice of him to volunteer his truck like that.

As I tightened the rope, the tree started leaning towards us, slowly bending. The swarm in the top moved closer and closer to the ground. I kept pulling it until it was about eight feet from the ground. At that point, the trunk of the tree started cracking and I was afraid it would break, slinging the bees down to the ground. There were two problems with that plan. One, they would just fly off and find a new tree, and two, I was between the bees and the ground.

Never Try This At Home!

Since I couldn't bring them all the way down, I decided it would be fair to meet them halfway and negotiate their return. I backed my truck up directly under the swarm and then climbed onto the toolbox in the back, which put me just a couple of feet away from the swarm. I picked up a five gallon water cooler with a lid in the back of my truck and, removing the lid, eased the swarm down into the canister. Then I gave the limb a quick shake, and the whole ball of bees fell into the cooler. Well, most of them. A couple thousand then entertained themselves by buzzing around me in a most disturbing manner.

Once the queen was in the bucket (I know there is a joke there, but I can't quite find it), the other bees wanted nothing more than to be in the bucket with her, so they all clung to the outside of it. They eventually all gathered on the outside of the cooler, and I put it in a plastic tub and drove the whole thing up to the house where I quickly put together a makeshift hive, transferred them to it, and set it back down the hill with the other hives.

Victory! You can just call me King Bee. The King of Sting. Buzz Lightyear. Apiaire Extraordinaire. "Money-G" of the Honey Bee.

Bucket-O-Bees

Two days later, after placing an order for a whole new hive setup for my now content tenants from a customer service lady who sounded as sweet as the honey the bees would soon be making me, I went to check on them and see how they were liking their new, spacious apartment. When I took the lid off, I was surprised just how spacious it was. In fact, it was not crowded at all. In fact, it was...abandoned.

"Sorry sir, your order has already shipped" the sour customer service lady said when I called with the bad news. And to think, I called her "Honey" and "Sweetie" last time we talked! I won't make the mistake of wasting my excellent bee humor on her again!

With nothing left to do, I disassembled the have and evicted the stragglers back to their original hive. As I drove back up the hill, for some reason the theme song from the old Jeffersons show was going through my head.

"Well we're moving on up

Way up high

To a deluxe apartment in the sky..."