A Swarm in May

Original fiction written for Revision Library; no external source reproduced.

Zainab stood at the garden gate, one hand gripping the top bar, and stared at the dark, humming shape that had gathered on the low branch of the apple tree. It looked, she thought, like a strange fruit that had never grown there before, heavy and restless, murmuring to itself in the warm May sunshine.

Her uncle Femi came round the side of the shed, unhurried, carrying a wide wicker basket and wearing a veiled hat pushed back off his face. "There she is," he said, more to the tree than to Zainab. "A swarm in May is worth a load of hay, my grandmother used to say. It means a swarm this early in the year is a real prize, worth catching if you can."

Zainab took a step back. "Are they angry?"

"Not angry. Homeless," Femi said. "The old queen's left the hive with about half her workers to find a new house, and until the scouts find one, they'll cluster together like this to keep her safe and warm. Ten, maybe fifteen thousand bees, all crowded onto that one branch."

Zainab studied the cluster more closely. Up close, it did not look like a single restless blob at all; it looked like thousands of separate bodies, clinging leg to leg, wing to wing, quivering very slightly as though the whole shape were breathing.

"Won't they just fly off if we touch them?" she asked.

"They might," Femi admitted, "if we're clumsy. But bees far from their hive, with nothing to defend, are usually gentle. It's the ones guarding a hive full of honey you want to be careful of." He held out a second veiled hat. "Put this on, and keep your movements slow. Bees read panic long before they read anything else."

Zainab pulled the hat down over her plaits, her heart thudding somewhere near her throat. Femi positioned the basket, called a skep, just beneath the branch, upside down, and passed her a soft-bristled brush.

"One firm, steady stroke," he said. "Downwards, into the skep. Like brushing crumbs off a table, not swatting a fly."

Zainab hesitated, then swept the brush along the branch in one smooth motion. A soft, deep hum rose up as the cluster shifted and dropped, most of it tumbling neatly into the skep below. A scattering of bees lifted into the air and circled, confused, before settling back towards the basket.

"Now we wait," Femi said, setting the skep gently on the grass, opening downwards, propped on a small stone so stray bees could crawl underneath. "If the queen's in there, the others will follow her scent inside within the hour."

They sat some distance away on an upturned crate, watching the loose bees drift back towards the skep in twos and threes. Femi explained that a single queen could lay up to two thousand eggs in a day when the hive was thriving, and that the bees fanning their wings at the skep's entrance were not resting, but working, driving cool air in to help the queen settle.

"How do you know if she's actually inside?" Zainab asked.

"Listen," Femi said.

She listened. At first she heard only the ordinary drone of bees coming and going. Then, slowly, the pitch of the hum around the skep seemed to deepen and steady, less scattered, more like a single, low note being held. Femi smiled.

"That's contentment, that hum. When the queen's found, the whole swarm calms down together, like a room full of people finally sitting down to eat."

By early evening, the skep sat still and quiet, and Femi carried it, right way up now, into the empty hive at the bottom of the garden, tipping its new occupants gently onto a frame inside. Zainab watched them stream downward in the fading light, no longer a frightening dark mass but a steady, purposeful crowd, each bee finding its place.

Walking back to the house, she thought about how frightened she had been at the gate only a few hours earlier, and how ordinary it all seemed now. "Will they stay this time?" she asked.

"If we've done it right." Femi glanced back at the hive, already quieter than before. "Bees don't stay because you trap them, Zainab. They stay because you've given them a reason to."