Swarm Saga, Pt. 2 (Mission Accomplished...Not!)

Yep, me and Karen were feeling pretty damn proud of ourselves after ketchin' that swarm....(Man's dominion over nature, etc.)

I was riding on an abundance of post-swarm endorphins, happy to find that my left leg had finally stopped shaking, feeling very King Bee.Karen was fine-tuning her "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" Beek-in-Flight moves.
Yet all was not entirely rosy. At least half the swarm appeared to have re-clustered in the sumac from which only hours before we had so painstakingly and incompetently removed them. (And here, I mean the royal we, since Karen bears no responsibility for any of this insanity.)

OK, so all those bees that landed on my suit and on the ground and in the air—plus any of the scout bees that were off premises looking for a good home far, far away from Gerry Gomez Pearlberg during Swarm-catching Attempt #1—all of these bees were now back on their branch, perhaps with the all-important queen, without whom the colony is doomed. Sigh. It was fun the first time, so why not do it all again? I felt terrible, but the colony had to be united. A bee colony is a superorganism whose survival depends on the sum of the parts.


In a painful case of deja vu all over again, the Brother fax box was brought back out from the shed and placed under the sumac in which this most unfortunate honeybee clan had cast its lot. This time, we clipped the branch on which they rested and gently laid it in the Brother box. The bees were pretty calm this time; too blue to protest, I guess. Or perhaps they appreciated the gentle treatment.
We placed the Brother box directly in front of the Office Max Recycled Copy Paper box, in the hope that a happy reunion would ensue.
The Brother box contained a rather astonishing number of bees. It was amazing that I could have missed or misplaced so many of them in the initial swarm-catching effort. Learning Curve Alert #79!

I had a funny feeling the queen was in the Brother box...in which case, everyone would probably leave the Office Max box and go into the much more exposed (and vulnerable) Brother box to rejoin their hive mother (who, in a Chinatown-like twist, is also their sister...but let's not go there at this time).

We decided to give it overnight and see what the bees decided to do. But before departing, I posed proudly by the box. I really need to stop doing that—it's bad beekeeping luck!

Because as you see, we still hadn't accomplished our mission! (Yes, it's political allegory, all right.)

This last group was easy to grab, and we added it to the Brother box and left the bees to their own devices.

But first, one last pose with the honeybee popsicle.


To be continued...