natural excitement

I had a brand new experience this morning. I went to check the mail, then noticed quite a bit of garbage on the 3.5 acres on which I live, more visible because the property was mowed yesterday. P1 returned my call from earlier - she's coming over tonight for dinner and to have a beer on the porch with S and me - and so I had the phone to an ear, the other hand full of bits of paper, plastic, foil, etc., and the mail tucked under an arm. The dog and pig were following me along the inside of the fence; I noticed lots of baby figs on the tree by the road, and then a sprinkling of bugs flying in the air. As I trained my eyes on them, I realized it was more than a sprinkling, it was a cloud - a swarm! - a swarm of bees. I came out of my shoes as I ran backwards toward the more open area of the yard, my head hit a low branch of a tree. I cut P1 off in the middle of a sentence to tell her what was going on.

After we hung up, I discovered a moving lump on the branch of a pecan tree hanging over the fence into the front yard. I called P1 back to tell her of my discvovery She asked if I could take a picture, which I tried to do after we hung up again, but iPhones are not made for close-up pictures of bees in the shaded limbs of a tree.

It was exciting, but my second thought was one of regret. Other than P1, there was no one who would likely share my excitement about the bees. S is afraid of them. Little p would love to see them, probably, but then her dad would likely go after them with pesticide; the thought of it bummed me out.

Just yesterday I said to S that when we move into the containers I would like to get a beehive. He didn't show much excitement - I guess because of his fear - and said, "That'll be nice for you."

I didn't know how this cluster of bees in the front yard was going to act, if it was going to grow and grow until we were overrun with bees and even I was ready to see them gone. I came inside and got online. Apparently, when a hive gets overcrowded, the queen lays eggs that will become new queens - I guess those stay behind for the existing hive, but didn't read much about that - and then the worker bees engorge themselves with honey and leave with the queen to find another suitable home, sometimes resting on a branch for a few hours or a few days (with the queen in the middle) while scouts go out looking for their new residence.

I was relieved, and intrigued. I started looking online for beekeeping supplies, thinking that I could keep these bees as my own personal honey-makers. But there are no beekeeper shops nearby, and I'm strapped for cash currently, and I would "definitely" need a bee suit. The whole process started sounding daunting, especially as I'm sitting at the computer waiting for work to come in.

I found one of little p's cameras (I thought it had a video feature, but couldn't figure it out) and went outside and got pretty close to the cluster (the websites all said that the bees weren't likely to be dangerous - unless they were the aggressive African bees, which are in the Southern half of the country from California to Florida, which is where I am, but I felt at one with the critters for some reason). When I first discovered them, they were stretched along two or three feet of the limb, thicker in the middle; when I returned half an hour later, they were confined to the size of a ball smaller than a volleyball.

I took some pictures, which didn't come out very good, and I don't know how to transfer the pictures from the camera to the computer, so I cheated and grabbed a random one off of the web. The tree limb in this picture is smaller than the actual one, and the bees in this picture look larger than the ones on our tree, which Wikipedia says describes the African "killer" bees - but it also describes harmless Egyptian bees.

Well, anyway, I'm still alive, and I just went out to look at them again for an update, and they seem to have reduced even more, to about the size of a toupee. Or maybe my memory of them was enhanced earlier by the excitement.