You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

A PACKAGE OF BEES

The phone rang. I rolled over in bed, looking for the clock. It was midnight. I let it ring and settled back into my pillow. It continued to ring. It was the spring of 1970, when telephones rang until the caller hung up. “Why won’t they hang up?” I thought. “Possibly it is an emergency. Maybe my mom.” I reached for the receiver. A man’s voice responded to my groggy “hello”. “Is this Tod Lundy?” he asked. “Yes.” “Did you order a package of honey bees?” “Yes.” “This is the U.S. Post Office in Lawrence. Your bees are here, and they are getting out of their package. Will you please come get them?” “It’s midnight.” I protested. “Doesn’t matter. We will open the post office for you.” “OK, I will come.” “Come to the loading dock in back,” the man responded and hung up.

I dressed and went to the refrigerator to take the spray bottle of sugar syrup, which I had prepared for the packaged arrival. This syrup is a simple sugar solution: half water, half sugar. I also took beekeeper’s gloves.

As I drove across Lawrence, Kansas, to the post office, I rehearsed the process for collecting my first package of honey bees. I thought of my admiration for honey bees, for their social structure. Each individual worker has a sequence of roles that they perform faithfully until, after a short life of 4 to 6 weeks, they die. Also, I must admit that, at that time, the idea of having 20,000 females working for me, was appealing.

I drove around to the back of the post office and entered from the rear loading dock into a room with long tables and postal workers bent over them sorting mail. Some of them glanced up as I entered, spray bottle in hand. A man, anticipating my arrival, led me to a table that was at the opposite end of the long room from the other postal workers. Upon it sat a wooden box, a little larger than a shoe box. Two sides of the box were screened. There were only those two screens between me and 10,000 loudly buzzing, apparently agitated, and hungry honey bees. A few stray bees were flying around the outside of the box, giving the appearance that they were escaping. Rather than escaping, they were bees that had stayed with the box, near their queen, through the several-days journey from Georgia. The postal worker stood back, intently watching me. I sprayed the sugar syrup on the screened sides of the box. The two of us watched in amazement as the bees suddenly became quiet, as thousands tiny tongues lapped the sugar syrup from the screens. I picked up the box and left the post office with the stray bees flying close behind.

I had prepared a hive for the arrival of the package of bees. It was mounted through a window opening and against the screen of our ground-floor living room. I had cut a rectangular hole in the back of the hive and through the window screen. It would seem that the bees could fly freely into our house. However, over the screen, and attached to the hive, I had mounted a plexiglass viewing box. In this way, we could sit in our living room and observe the inner workings of a honey bee colony.

Before releasing the bees into the hive, I checked to see if the queen had been liberated from confinement in her separate queen cage, which was suspended inside the box of bees. She had been separated from the 3 pounds of workers during shipment so that the workers would have time to become attached to her unique pheromones and adopt her as their queen. If she had been shipped in with the foreign worker bees, the workers would have killed her. She was no longer confined to her separate cell. She and the hungry workers had eaten the candy plug in the queen’s cage, liberating her. The package had an opening covered by a thin piece of plywood. I loosened the plywood and placed the box into the hive between frames of honeycomb foundation and a special frame containing syrup. The last step was to lift the plywood panel off the package and quickly cover the hive. After the bees were safely in the hive, I went back to bed while the bees explored their new home.

This arrangement of a honey bee hive in your home was a source of many enjoyable interactions with friends. We would recline on our six-foot-long bean bag couch and were captivated by the activities of the colony, which could be observed in the viewing box. On one occasion, a friend brought the children from his daycare to see honey bees. The little kids gathered on that big red bag of Styrofoam pellets and watched in amazement the inside activities of a beehive. It was an especially educational occasion, because as the children watched, a bee performed the “waggle dance” on the plexiglass. When they noticed it, I explained how it was telling the other bees where they could find flowers.

A WILD COLONY

When I retired from Kaiser and moved to Astoria in 2006, I took two empty hives with me. I purchased two packages of bees for those hives. Over the subsequent years I captured swarms and assembled more hives, until at one point, Carole and I were maintaining four colonies of bees. However, beekeeping was becoming increasingly difficult. Mites and herbicides were taking a toll on hives. When my last colony of honey bees died I gave decided to quit. I sold all my hives but one. I was not quite ready to give up on honey bees completely. I had hoped that a swarm would find my empty hive and take up residence. None did. Or at least no honey bees did. Last summer, a queen miniature yellow jacket found my hive and established her colony inside it. At the end of the summer, they vacated, leaving the hive empty again.

I did not want to keep bees in the way I had before, with frequent hive examinations and medicating them when mites were found in a futile attempt to keep them healthy. The thing I dreamed of was that there was somehow a swarm of honey bees that could survive without human intervention. I knew of such a colony of feral Italian honeybees that had taken residence in a hollow tree in the forest on the hillside above our Astoria home. It had survived for several years, buzzing back to life every spring. It was a defiant exhibition that a feral Italian honey bee colony could survive without human support. They needed no beekeeper and no medication. They also did not suffer the yearly pillage of their honey. I planned that if a swarm moved into my empty hive, I would not disturb them with medication, and I would not take their honey. Thus leaving them as wild honey bees in a man-made hive. I was disappointed that after five Summers, no swarms took up residence in my hive.

In the afternoon of a day in the third week of June 2025, Carole came home from one of her daily walks in the woods. She approached me at my desk with an excited expression. She held her phone out and showed me a video of the honeybee tree. It was a busy scene with bees industriously coming and going. A good sign that the bees had survived another winter. I thought, “That’s nice.” She then took her phone back, changed the image, and handed it to me a second time. I expected a second video of the honeybee tree, but instead, to my delight, the video was of a swarm of honey bees dangling from a low branch of a maple tree. I jumped up from my chair, exclaiming, “Let’s go get it!” However, there was not enough time left in the day to prepare for the delicate task of successfully capturing a swarm of honey bees. My concern was that if we waited until the morning, the swarm might have flown away. We decided to take that chance and go for it the following morning.

I set about organizing our swarm-capturing gear. I prepared sugar syrup and found a spray bottle to apply it. I collected bee bonnets and apiary gloves, and hand pruner. The last item would need was my bee basket, which is a large woven reed basket with a lid that my son brought home from Kenya. The basket has the shape of an onion. It is large enough that you could drop a basketball into it. It is the perfect shape and size to handle a large swarm of bees and has done so, on several occasions.

While collecting my gear, I was thinking about how a swarm of honey bees occurs. Swarming is the means by which honey bees reproduce colonies. The process starts in early spring when the queen bee resumes laying eggs after a Winter hiatus. As the population of the hive builds. The workers extrude a few longer cells in which new queens are nurtured. A new queen will emerge at about the same time that the hive has become overcrowded. Soon afterward, the old queen and roughly half the workers in the hive leave to form a new colony. When a swarm emerges from the hive, it usually lights on a tree or other nearby object. This is called a bivouac. From here, scout bees fly off to find a suitable location for the swarm to build their nest. The swarm will stay in their bivouac for one to four days before flying off to their new hive location. Each of the bees in the swarm would have filled up on honey before leaving the parent hive. This honey is intended to sustain them through the process of finding a hive location and building sufficient comb to raise the next generation of workers. It is a situation with many risks for the swarm’s survival. A suitable location is one that provides shelter from winter weather. It must also have adequate space in it to build comb for honey and pollen, as well as brood cells to maintain the colony population. Food storage must be adequate to survive the winter. Such places are rare in the forest. If the scouts don’t find a hollow tree or other protected space, bees will build their comb on a tree branch. Such colonies are certain to be destroyed the following winter. This swarm looked small in the photo. If so, it would be unlikely to survive even if it were to find a suitable location. There appeared to be fewer bees, in this swarm, than one receives when purchasing a three-pound package of bees. It would require support, in the form of frequent feeding of syrup, for it to survive. Honey bees live about 4 to 6 weeks in the summer. Most of the bees in the swarm were probably halfway through their life cycle. It takes time for them to build a brood comb and 21 days to incubate the colony’s first offspring. There would be barely enough time to build comb, and raise more bees, before most of the bees in the original swarm had died. If this were to occur, there would be no workers to attend the brood, and the colony would die out.

The thing that made this swarm especially attractive to me is that it emerged from the feral colony in the honeybee tree. That colony had demonstrated its capacity to survive without human intervention. This was the best possible swarm for my intention of leaving them as a wild honeybee colony in a man-made hive.

Carole’s photograph had shown the swarm was dangling on a small branch of a maple tree on the hillside above a blackberry patch. If the swarm was too high for me to spray with syrup on it, there was little chance of capturing it. The syrup is sprayed on the swarm before doing anything else. The sugar syrup makes their wings sticky, so they can’t fly. It also feeds them as they lick it off one another. Once, I had tried to capture a swarm without first spraying it with syrup. By the time I had cut the branch, upon which the swarm had clustered, the air was filled with honey bees, and I was left holding a bare stick.

I was worried about this and the many other things that could go wrong as we loaded our gear into my truck and drove to the parking lot at the trail-head leading to the swarm. We picked up our gear and started the half-mile hike to the place Carole had photographed the swarm. As we walked, we encountered another couple who asked, “What are you doing with all those tools?” We explained, and she exclaimed, “Honey bees swarm?” Being intrigued, they tagged along to watch.

Eventually, we reached a place along the trail from which I could see the swarm. It was still there. It was 200 feet ahead of us and only 30 feet from the honey bee tree. I called out, “They are still there!” I felt a sudden combination of relief and excitement. My mind was filled with the realization that we may really have a genuinely feral bee colony to occupy my vacant hive.

Not knowing what to expect, the other couple stood back a safe distance. I set to work quickly using hand pruners to cut a path through the blackberry brambles to the swarm. I was pleased to see that the ground under the blackberries did not fall away as steeply as I had feared. The swarm was just within my reach to spray it with syrup. I was so excited that I neglected to take the precaution of putting on my bee bonnet or gloves. I took the spray bottle of sugar syrup and gingerly approached the swarm. I gently sprayed puffs of syrup on it. With each puff, the bee cluster would swell as if alerted to danger and then settle down to quietly licking the syrup. I sprayed the entire swarm. The swarm was almost mine; however, I could not reach high enough to cut the branch above the swarm. The swarm clung to a small branch off a larger limb. By walking a few steps up the hill, I could reach the end of the larger limb. I grasped the limb and pulled it down. This lowered the branch with the swarm just enough that I could reach it. I worked my way hand over hand, holding the limb down until I reached the branch with the swarm. It was now low enough that I could take hold of the branch above the swarm with my left hand. With my right hand, I took my pruners from my hip pocket and cut the branch with the swarm from the limb of the tree. The limb sprang up. I held the swarm steady. I carefully carried it up the blackberry path to and place where the open bee basket and Carole waited. We gave a sigh of relief as I lowered the swarm into the basket. None of the bees flew away, and I had not stung. Before closing the basket, Carole carried it over to show the couple, who by this time had approached more closely. Concerned that bees would fly out, I put the lid on the basket, securing our swarm for the trip to its new home. We packed our gear for the hike out. I carried the basket of bees like a trophy bearer in front of the parade of Carole and the other couple who helped her carry our gear back to the parking lot.

It was a short drive to the location of my abandoned hive. We took the hive apart and cleaned out the yellow jacket nest from the previous summer. I installed fresh frames with foundation and a syrup feeder, leaving a gap in the center of the hive where three frames would usually go. I then removed the lid from the bee basket, inverted it over the gap in the hive, and shook the honey bees and stick from the basket into the gap and covered the hive. Many bees remained in the basket. So I placed the open basket with the remaining bees in front of the hive, hoping that they would follow the scent of their queen and go into the hive. I returned that evening to check. They were all inside. The big risk now would be that they would not like the accommodations, reform their swarm, and fly away.

The bees did not leave. Over each of the following weeks, I refilled the feeder. When six weeks had passed, it was time to open the hive, replace the three missing frames, and check to see if the queen was laying eggs. I had expected them to build out cells on the frames with foundation that I had provided, but instead, When I lifted the inner cover it was much heavier than expected. As I raised it above the hive, I could see why. Having only known the wild hive environment, these bees had built natural honeycomb in the space intended for three frames. They built three rows of honeycomb, which reassembled the comb that would have occupied that space had the three frames been there. The primary difference was that they were hanging from the inner cover rather than from the frames. This would have been a big problem if I intended to service the hive in the future. But since it was to be a hive of feral bees, they welcome to build their comb in any way that suited them.

We could see that this comb contained brood, so we knew that the queen had survived the swarm capture and transplanting process. She was busy laying eggs. I trust that the workers will catch on to the efficiency of using the frames with foundation once they have filled all the spaces in the hive where natural comb can be built. We closed the hive, satisfied that they were going to stay.

Over the summer, I continued to provide them with syrup in hopes that the colony would survive. I tracked their prospects by observing how quickly they consumed each quart of syrup. Then, in July, their use of syrup suddenly decreased. I became concerned that the hive was failing. In an effort to track the population of the hive, I used the timer on my cell phone to mark 60 seconds during which I counted the number of bees returning to the hive. At first, I counted fewer than 20 bees returning. Over the weeks that followed, this number gradually increased. Three months later, that number had risen to over forty bees returning per minute. I could be confident that, after a shaky start, this colony would survive. It is rewarding to know that a self-sufficient feral Italian honey bee colony is humming in my backyard. This is especially gratifying, believing that if we hadn’t captured it and fed it syrup through the summer, this unique swarm would probably not have survived.