Well, I’ve failed again.

Failed to stop the bees from swarming. Repeatedly.

Of course, I thought I had it all under control. I saw the queen cells under construction and planned to perform an artificial swarm, to pre-emptively divide the colony and prevent the natural swarm, a few days later. My mistake was the “a few days later” bit. I should’ve done it straight away. The queen cell development was further advanced than I thought.

As I was eating lunch on the day appointed for the artificial swarm, the bees swarmed, beating me to it by a matter of hours.

They went and hung in the damson tree, out of reach and on the wrong (the neighbour’s) side.

Plan B was required. And not too much imagination was required here, as I’ve been in this predicament before. Plan B = get swarm into box or skep, wrap it in a sheet, bring it to a new hive, tip the bees out on the sheet and let them walk up a ramp into the new hive.

Unfortunately for Plan B, it went the same way as Plan A. Just as I had got the new hive nicely set up and ready with its ramp, the bees took off from the damson tree and filled the air.

According to the books, the bees spend the time in their tree-hanging swarm deciding where to set up their new home, which may take several days. So did I have decisive bees, who took only a couple of hours to decide the location of their new home? Well, if they had decided on it, they were also determined not to let their beekeeper find out where it was. We followed that cloud of bees…over the house…over the neighbour’s house…down the high street…across the road…back over the neighbour’s house…back over our house…and on to our roof. From which point, they vanished. Vanished gradually but completely.

The logical conclusion seemed to be that they must have gone INTO the roof. However, we couldn’t see or hear them in the attic. And, more tellingly, we haven’t seen bees flying to or from the roof. So, where are they? If they didn’t go into the roof, how did they manage to disappear before our eyes?

Anyway, step up Plan C. I divided the colony anyway, splitting the frames of bees across two hives, each with some queen cells. And a few days later I went back to the first hive and removed all the queen cells except one, in a further effort to prevent them swarming again.

Well, that didn’t work either. Because they did swarm again. And in fact, every lunchtime for the past few days a cloud of bees has issued from that hive in a buzzing mass, filling the apiary air, then evaporated into nothingness. I’m unsure whether they have all been swarms (did I miss that many queen cells, and can there be any bees left?!) or if they might perhaps represent a new queen leaving the hive with a large escort before returning. These airborne interludes don’t last long, and end with bees covering the landing board fanning their tails - emitting a homing signal from their Nasonov glands.

So, we’ve arrived at Plan Z. Plan zzzzzzzzz, in which the bees do whatever they want, and the beekeeper stands by helpless as usual.

Video above: Miniature swarm cloud

Video above: Nasonov fanning on the landing board of the hive

Zzzzzzzzz Aaaaargh