When young people come to look at the observation hive, some ask if the bees can get out. I explain that they have an entrance through which the bees are free to come and go to get what they need from outside, and that this is not like a cage or a jar with holes punched in the lid where we have them captured against their will. Never did I expect them to exercise their option to move somewhere else, but that appears to be exactly what they did the other day.

I was called to look at the hive due to strange activity. When I arrived I found this:


My first reaction was that there must have been too many bees and they had decided to swarm and split the colony. When I went inside to look in the hive there was frantic activity with bees rapidly moving all around. I went outside to videotape the hive entrance as you see it, above. A minute after I stopped taping the cluster of bees broke up into a cloud and the cloud moved away into the woods.

Unfortunately, when I went back inside, there were only a few hundred bees who had not gotten the memo. The colony had decided to find another home.