Almost every spring, there is a day when I arrive home from work and find my yard alive with bees. Not on the flowering trees and bushes, but like a storm of buzzing gold and black raindrops flooding the warm air.
It is moving day for them.
Their collective has outgrown its hive, wherever it is, and so they have made a new queen and sent the old girl and a swarm out to find a new place to re-establish egg-laying and honey-making operations. Their work will be done away from raiding humans who value the sweetness of the golden elixir but may not appreciate the complexity of its production.
In my yard, the swarm is focused — disinterested in me or the neighborhood kids, who are at once scared and entranced. As the day cools into evening, they come together in a mass, always on the same columnar juniper at the back of my yard, always on the same branch.
This is the time we can get so close that we can put our hands out and feel the vibration of beating wings keeping the air around the beloved queen just so, until morning, when they continue on the long flight home. Dana Coffield
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