Pest Control
The swarm on the washing line
On the strange, oddly moving business of persuading several thousand bees into a cardboard box, and why it never quite stops feeling like a small miracle.
Swarms have a way of turning up in the most inconvenient and most memorable places, and a swarm settled on a rotary washing line on a warm afternoon in June is one Ian still talks about.
The homeowner had gone out to bring the washing in and found, instead, a low humming football of bees — a good-sized swarm, several thousand strong, hanging from the crossbar like something that had been carefully placed there. Understandably, the washing stayed out.
A swarm like that is not a wasp nest and it is not treated like one. It is a colony in transit: a queen and her workers, having left an overcrowded hive to look for a new home, resting in the open while scout bees go off to find somewhere permanent. Handled properly and calmly, a swarm at this stage is about as docile as bees get — which is not something you can easily explain to someone standing at a safe distance in their garden, looking at several thousand of them on their washing line.
The actual work is almost anticlimactic after that build-up: a cardboard box held underneath, a firm, controlled shake of the crossbar, and the bulk of the swarm drops in as one. The stragglers and the scouts follow the queen's scent in over the next hour, in a slow, patient stream, until the box can finally be sealed and driven away to a hive that badly needed the company.
It is, whatever else you want to call it, one of the more peaceful parts of this job. Nobody gets stung if nobody panics, the bees get a home, and the only real casualty that afternoon was a load of washing that had to go through the machine a second time — just to be sure.
Got a story of your own brewing?
If something has turned up that you can't explain, we would genuinely like to hear about it — and we can usually tell you what it is over the phone.