Asakiyume mita

Two days ago was World Bee Day. One day ago, in the evening, my neighbor up the street reported on FB that he had a swarm of bees in the branches of one of his oak trees.

A swarm of bees! I've never been so lucky as to see a swarm of bees. A swarm of bees is like a fairy hunt, a wild racing, everyone together, the queen at the lead. HOW COOL.

Today, a woman who raises goats and has two beehives came to relocate the swarm. I got to see her work. I can't begin to convey how magical it was to be within this globe of whirling bees, the intense buzzing, as she worked to get at the crook in the branch where--she presumed--the queen was. She worked with cheerful calm and grace. Here are some photos:

Most of the time she was atop her minivan



At one point her son or grandson got up and helped.



Here she's carefully putting the key piece of branch into the box where she's collecting the bees.



A box of bees!



The goddess of bees--if you click through to Flickr and click "magnify" twice, you will see a bee perched on her eyebrow.



Once the branch was in the box, you could feel the bees calming down, the whirl of energy beginning to settle.

The side is open so those few bees who are still on the outside can climb in:



To top off the wonder of it all, the wife in the family whose house all this happened in told us a story about her husband. What you have to know about him is that he's always been very lawn-proud, always putting herbicides on to keep it pure grass. But....

"He started getting interested in honeybees and what was happening to them, the declines. The other day I saw him bowed over, looking at a dandelion in the grass. 'There's a bee on it,' he said triumphantly. He said, 'I'm so sorry I spent so much time trying to get rid of dandelions, not knowing how important they were for the bees.'"

I felt in that moment like the whole world had been saved.

Here's a beautiful instrumental track, "cerca de abelhas" (close to bees) to go along with this bee story.