The Day the Bees Fell on My Head

I was 50 years old, 50 feet up a tree, when 50,000 bees fell on my head. That many bees weigh more than you might think—maybe four or five pounds. 

The mass landed with a buzzing thud, pushing my hat down to my ears. Within seconds bees oozed down my body like a mass of living, breathing, buzzing pudding. Luckily, I had worn my bee veil. I had my beekeeper’s gloves, too, but they dangled uselessly from my back pocket because I had wanted a better grip on the branches. Those bees tickled and itched as they crawled over my unprotected wrists—and my white knuckles as I held on for dear life.

For some reason, at this moment I got to thinking about a honeybee’s stinger. It is an amazing organ, with three moving parts. When a bee stings, she jabs a needle-sharp stylus into you, and then two barbed lancets catch in your flesh and push the stinger deeper and deeper. The venom gland pumps the venom and ouch—that’s when you feel the sting. When the bee flies away, the stinger is anchored so securely she can’t escape until her rear end tears off. The stinger remains, with venom gland pumping away.

The unfortunate bee flies off and dies. If you are allergic, you could die, too. Even if you are not allergic, getting stung by a few hundred bees can be quite serious—especially if you find yourself 50 feet up in a tree. This was not the time or place for panic. 

Then again, I couldn’t help but notice that these bees were not stinging me. After all, bees don’t want to sting people. If they sting, they die. However, to defend their home, their babies, and their queen, they will sting and give their lives.

This was a classic bee swarm, not a virulent hoard of stinging marauders. These bees were homeless. They had outgrown their hive and left it for the next generation. Without a home to protect, they had little reason to sting.

Homeless? Why were these bees homeless? I looked down and could see all my neatly painted hives lined up, where I had hauled in cinder blocks for hive stands to keep them off the moist ground. I had installed foundation for them to make their honeycomb. I had fed them when they were hungry and given them medicine when they were sick. Who did these bees think they were, hanging out up here homeless?

But such is the way of honeybees. This swarm consisted of field bees and the queen from one of those hives below. They had been working since the maples bloomed in February. They had filled their hive with comb, brood, and honey. The hive was getting crowded, so they were leaving it to the next generation and starting over somewhere else. 

A typical swarm leaves the hive and lands nearby as a large, buzzing gob. From there, scout bees fly off to explore the countryside looking for a new hive site. An alert beekeeper can often catch the swarm—it’s a relatively simple way to increase your hives and also reclaim runaway bees.

In fact, that’s what I was doing up in the tree. This swarm was as big as a bushel basket, right near the top of the tree. These were all the working field bees and the queen from my strongest hive. With that workforce gone, I knew I probably would not get any honey that year from the bees that remained.  

Yes indeed, I wanted that swarm. So I put up a 25-foot extension ladder that reached the first branches, and from there, I climbed the tree.

I carried a pruning saw and a long rope. The bees had amassed on a branch about a foot out from the trunk. My plan was to tie a rope onto that branch, carefully saw it off, and slowly lower the branch that held the swarm 50 feet down to my hive below.

It might have worked, if it weren’t for that one dead branch right under the swarm. In order to test its strength I had held on to other branches and put one foot on it to see if it would hold me. As soon as I had most of my weight on it, the branch snapped. I was holding on securely to those other branches, but when that dead branch snapped, the whole tree shook. And that’s when the bees fell on my head.

Now I had all these bees on my head, crawling all over my body and flying all around me. Their buzzing grew more intense until it was a whining roar. I was surrounded by a swirling mass of thousands of bees, which came together in the air right in front of me, and took off out of the tree. That sure took a weight off my shoulders. 

I watched the swarm sail across the garden, over the shop and the woodshed and over the pond. The last I saw of those bees as they headed over the trees, they looked like a floating, ever-diminishing smudge against the clear blue sky until they finally disappeared over the mountain.