The Swarms We Caught for Mom

How You Catch One

Here is how you catch a swarm, the way my mother taught us under Ottie’s lilac.

You spread the sheet on the ground under the branch. You hold the open box right under the cluster, as close as you can get it. Then you give the branch one hard, sharp shake.

Most of the bees drop into the box in one big lump. It sounds like a handful of wet sand. The rest fly up in a roar, and you hold still and let them.

Then you set the box upside down on the sheet, with one edge propped up on a stick so there is a gap. And you watch.

If you got the queen, the bees outside will start marching in. They line up at the gap with their back ends in the air and fan their wings to call the others home. Mom showed Lacy how to see it.

“That’s them saying, she’s here, come in,” Mom said. “That’s the best sound in the world.”

Lacy got down on her hands and knees in that veil to watch them go in. She stayed there for twenty minutes. I do not think she blinked.

When nearly all of them were in, we folded the sheet up around the box and tied it with baling twine and set it in the back of my car. Ottie came out with three glasses of lemonade.

“What do I owe you?” she asked me, laughing.

“Nothing,” I said. “You just gave my mother a hive.”

Nine

The second call came four days later. A swarm in a box elder, twenty feet up, behind the implement dealer in town.

Wade climbed the ladder. Mervin held the bottom of it and told him exactly where to set his feet. Wade cut the branch with a pruning saw and lowered the whole thing down to me in a bucket on a rope, and hardly a bee was lost.

He came down that ladder grinning like a kid at Christmas. He is eighteen now. I had not seen him grin like that in two years.

The third swarm was on a Sunday. It was hanging off the corner of the gutter by the back door of the church, right after the late service, and half the congregation stood on the lawn in their good clothes to watch us take it.

The pastor said it was the best-attended thing that church had done in years. Mom held the box. Lacy shook the gutter. Nobody got stung, and the ladies brought out the leftover bars from the fellowship hall.

The fourth was in a fence post. The fifth was hanging from the mirror of a parked combine at a farm sale, and the auctioneer stopped the whole sale for twenty minutes while we got it.

By the first week of July, we had nine.

Nine swarms in one season is a lot, Mom said. It does not happen every year. It happens in a wet spring with a good bloom, when the hives in the wild trees are all strong and crowded and ready to split.

“The Lord sent us a good spring,” she said. “And a lot of nosy neighbors.”