apple tree swarm

Tom stuck his head through the front door and told me to grab my camera. He doesn’t do this too often, so I thought it might be worth dropping everything to do it. When I got outside, he was holding a branch from our apple tree, looking like a boy who had caught a trophy fish, and dripping off of it were about 1,000 bees in a tiny swarm cluster.

Sometimes, half of the colony will swarm and that could be about 30,000 bees. He walked away with them down the driveway and shook them into one of the empty bee boxes in the back field hoping that they’ll like their new home enough to stay in it.