Don wrote:
 
> It worries me when swarms take flight. My wife and myself have seen
> several and it is awesome. The neighbors are normally gone
>or are inside when it happens, so they dont know about them unless I
tell
>them. One fellow gardener even helps me capture them.
 
Speaking of swarms and neighbors - a couple of years ago, relatively new
neighbors living behind me, observed a swarm when it left the hive and
told
my wife they thought that the bees swarming meant that I was "letting
them out"
for awhile. : )
 
That same year with another swarm my next door neighbor stood on his back
porch
with a can of bug spray, spraying merrily away into the air in general.
Fortunately,
they went high up into a tree and his spraying was for nought. We
attempted to "educate
him" and this year I gave him a jar of honey (which he wolved down in two
days flat!)
 
This same neighbor is a bit of an odd duck - he puts used motor oil
filters at the corners
of his house "to keep the bugs away". One year he "painted" the trunk of
a pear tree as
high as he could reach with "used motor oil" for the same reason. Much to
my surprise
the tree was thriving the following year. He subsequently cut it down for
no known
sensible reason.
 
Al
 
Al Needham--Scituate,MA,[log in to unmask]
"The HoneyBee"--An Educational Program About Honey
Bees With A Superb Slide Show-Version 2.0 (c) 1997
Download From: http://www.kuai.se/~beeman