On a beautiful sunny day recently, Paula was sitting on the front porch of the house we are renting in town, and she saw what she thought was a cloud of flies moving through the air. Then they descended to a pine tree about thirty feet from the porch, and began coalescing on a branch.

It turns out they were honey bees, swarming. We had never witnessed this before: a large clump of bees — hundreds of them — forming a hanging pine-cone-like mass in the tree. So we googled “swarming bees” and found out that honey bees sometimes do this during the Spring, as they are looking for a new home. When they swarm, they are protecting the queen bee, who is not the best flier, while “scout” bees are out looking for a new place to set up a hive.

We talked to neighbors, and friends of a friend were interested in relocating the bees near an “eco-village” down the street, so they came over in the early evening, armed with a plastic storage bucket, and positioned the plastic container under the branch, gave the limb a whack, and the bees fell into the container. The lid was quickly put on.

And that was that. After a bit of conversation, they drove away with the bees.

Several dozen bees were still flying about, though, and now, days later, there’s a small clump of bees near the same branch. Paula says the bees seem a little more aggressive — and no wonder.

We’re hoping the queen bee was relocated along with the rest of the colony, and not left behind with the stragglers.