a swarm of bees in May

This afternoon I watched a swarm of bees disappearing into the wall of my house, and I have a nasty feeling that they are probably mine.  Well, they are certainly mine now, in the sense that they have taken up residence in my house.  Years ago at the county beekeeping conference a barrister who also kept bees gave a thoroughly entertaining talk about bees and the law, which covered the rights of a beekeeper who had lost a swarm out of their hive to retain ownership of the absconding bees.  I forget the details, but vaguely recall that keeping the swarm in your sight at all times came into it.  I have a sort of feeling that you are supposed to bang a saucepan during the chase, but maybe I invented that bit.  Nobody appeared hot foot in pursuit of these bees, banging a saucepan or otherwise, so wherever they came from I have now taken possession, but I darkly suspect they came out of one of my hives.

I've been worried since the failed inspection when I couldn't find the queens in the colonies that were showing signs of swarming, and had to resort to simply splitting each colony in two.  I knew then that it wasn't a very good solution, but didn't have a better bad idea.  I don't think it's worked this time.  Bad ideas don't always.

I was suspicious that something was going on earlier in the day when I had to keep evicting bees from the hall and the kitchen.  The apiary is at quite a distance from the house, and they don't normally come inside.  Mid afternoon I noticed a number of bees fussing around the timber cladding on the south east corner, just above the way through to the patio (or terrace) and darkly surmised what was to come, but there was nothing I could do about it.  At about five o'clock, which is surprisingly late for a swarm to be on the move, I heard that tell-tale humming sound as I was kneeling weeding the long bed.  A swarm of bees in flight makes a noise like nothing else, a dense, busy drone unlike the steady buzzing you hear if you stand underneath a large tree that's being worked by bees.  I looked up, and sure enough there was a swirling mass of bees over the gravel at the southern end of the house.

It isn't so unusual to get swarms entering gaps and cracks in buildings.  The space behind the timber cladding of our first floor, or the gap under the floorboards, or wherever they have gone, will not be so very different to a hollow tree or a crack in a rock.  It was only last week that I received a message from a non-beekeeping friend worried he had seen a bee go into his roof, and asking whether that were possible.  My reply then was that it was, and that they wouldn't do any harm per se, but there was a risk that the weight of the nest might eventually cause the ceiling to collapse.  I suggested contacting his local beekeepers, to see if they could remove the colony, but stressed that if he were to use a pest controller he must make sure it was a reputable operator who would block access to the roof completely so that other bees couldn't find the remains of the nest, and in robbing out any honey take the poison back to their own colony.

Sadly, I fear that this swarm will have to end with an appointment with the pest controller.  The entrance to the gap under the cladding is right by the main route through from the gravel by the front door to the back garden.  A tallish person's head will pass within a metre of the bees' front door each time they walk by.  That is too close for comfort, should the bees turn out to be a defensive lot, or on a thundery day when they're feeling tetchy.  None of my colonies are nasty, but there's always the potential for change with each new queen.  It's a great shame, but we simply can't afford to have the cladding removed in order to try and extract the colony alive.

Of course they may not be my bees at all.  When I next open the hives, if I see that they've swarmed even then I'll never know where they went.