A Bee Saga

We've had an interesting little exercise going on at our house, for the past 6 months or so we've had a swam of bees living under the eave on the side of the house, we have been keeping an eye on them but leaving them to their own devices hoping they'd move on with time.

A week ago they swarmed, which was an impressive site but as we discovered on the weekend they didn't go far, they nestled nicely in under the Jasmine on the side fence.

Isn't this am amazing site.

Because they were now in a place that could be disturbed by the dog or when the garden is watered we thought we'd better get in an expert, he came Sunday morning with a box and suited up and manually moved big hand fulls of bees into the box hoping the rest would follow over the day, he returned at dusk but the bees weren't playing the game and hadn't gone into the box, so on went the suit and out came the smoker to subdue them and try and get them in.
He returned the next night and we thought we'd succeeded as there were only a few stragglers around but when he moved the box they were all down behind it, so away he went to return last night.


Funny thing happened yesterday afternoon (I missed it as I was at school) they decided that their new home was too close to the old one so they took off on mass again, mother in-law said as they were swarming the wind picked up and they disappeared up over the garage and a few back yards and have now become somebody else's problem, so the poor bee keeper went on his way with an empty box.