Saving the bees

Yesterday I decided to try something new at work. I get so tired of sitting at my desk all day that instead of sitting in the lounge during my lunch break, I went for a walk around the campus. (I ate my sandwich sitting at my desk prior to that). It was a beautiful day and a walk seemed like just the thing. As I blogged last year, one of our science teachers got a grant to establish a honeybee colony for our school. It's been doing really well....so well, in fact, that the colony is growing by leaps and bounds. When I walked past the hives, I noticed a loud buzzing over my head up in the limbs of a pine tree. I looked up and saw a huge cloud of bees buzzing around up there. I don't know much about beekeeping, but I did know that that seemed odd. After lunch I saw the science teacher and told her what I had seen. She immediately said,  "Oh no! They're swarming!" and after asking me exactly where I had seen them, she rushed outside. I didn't think too much about it after that.

When I got to work this morning, there was a carton with 18 fresh eggs on my desk for me. Sometimes I buy eggs from Mrs. Howard (the beekeeper) so I emailed her to ask her how  much I owed her for them. She replied, "Not a dime. You saved the day yesterday. If you hadn't noticed the swarm and let me know we would have lost half the colony. I was able to call in another beekeeper friend of mine and we caught them and have started another box to accommodate the separate group!" Later she emailed me pictures of the swarm up in the branches of the pine tree and the friends in their gear who helped capture them. When I saw her later on in the day I thanked her for the eggs and she said it was "the very least I could do in return for you saving the bees"!

Omelets for dinner tonight! 

Good thing I decided to go for a walk yesterday!