Superbees?


When I returned home in the afternoon, my wife tells me someone with an
unusual swarm just called me, the bee man in Shawnee, OK.  The bloke works
at the nearby Air Force base, about thirty-minute drive away.  As he got
out of his work, he saw a big swarm resting on his white van, covering the
driver-side headlight and bumper!  Scared, he gingerly got in, using the
passenger-side door, and drove home, hoping the bees would just fly away.
He then drove home doing at 70 mph on I-40 while observing at one point a
good lump fall; however, about 500 or so bees were still hanging, tooth
and nail, on the headlight and bumper when he got back home, hence the
call.  Come to find out the queen was missing, gone probably with the lump
that got dumped in the bump.  I did not bring any brood to lure the
queenless swarm.  Having watered them and flopped a good number of them
down into my special swarm-retrieval box, filled with ten deep
foundations, I left the box alone till sundown.  They were all moving in
and out of the box, frantically searching for the missing Mother Superior
till finally they decided to settle, painfully slow, into the box at
dusk.  I combined these extra bees with another colony.  The man said
while he was driving home other motorists would gesture him in an attempt
to say something about this gob of bees hanging on his van as he was
driving along the Interstate at 70 mph!  Go figure.

Yoon

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