Dear Andy:
 
I enjoyed your story, especially since I had my first experience with a
swarm, followed by two others, early last spring. I went 30 ft. up a pine
tree because I thought all of my 10 yr. old son's beloved bees were in that
basketball-sized swarm. As the mother of six children, all now in school &
one graduated, I'm no spring chicken, but we got the bees and hived them.
 Then the "mother hive" swarmed two more times; once in a lower pine tree and
lastly in a high rosebush.  The rosebush was the worst.  The whole ball fell
right on top of my son and I. We know we didn't get stung, but the thorns
were worse. After that, I told Kevin if his bees swarmed again, they could
just keep going!  We went from one hive to five hives that summer.  In our
ignorance about moving hives, we tried to move that first swarmed hive from
the tall pine from one side of the yard to the other.  Most of the bees went
with the hive and stayed there.  A couple of thousand sat and waited for the
hive to appear on the bricks we left behind.  So we vacuumed them and tried
to dump them back into their proper hive.  They preferred the bricks.  So I
sat a new hive down and before I could get the top on, they all ran inside.
 So Kevin said we should put a couple of brood frames in there and see if
they'd make a queen.  They did. This was in early July. Between the old hive
and the four much smaller new hives, we collected 120 lbs. of honey by late
August, at which time we treated them for mites and then took no more honey.
 Since we have had a warm autumn, I look out back a little nervously because
I know they have already filled those frames with honey from the late flow.
(We live in NJ).
 
Now we have our house up for sale (no one likes to check out the backyard
<grin>), and have a bid in on another house with an acre and a half,
surrounded by farms and parkland. You guessed it.  We want it so that Kevin
and Mom can raise more bees. He called his apiary the "Drip-Drop Honey Shop".
 So Kevin is kind of like you as a kid. He brings out the little kid in me
too.
 
Bev