Murder by Death

Our spring has been decidedly blah; in much the same way that my friends in the N. Hemisphere are eagerly trying to shove summer out the door, we down south are having a hard time getting the crap cold weather to leave.  But last week, we got our first run of really gorgeous days; sunny and in the 20's/70's.  I woke up Tuesday morning just waiting for it to to get warm enough to open our back doors and the windows.  Then I looked out the window about 11am and saw this:

We had a swarm (ignore, please, the horrendous bbq cover that is long past dead).  My first concern was that our Bettys had swarmed but a few seconds with the zoom on my camera verified that the Bettys were still to'ing and fro'ing out of their hive.  After about 5 minutes, the swarm started coalescing, taking residence on my orange tree:

 

A flurry of text messages with our beekeeper and two days later (he was in Country Victoria at the time), he arrived with a rescue box, offering them a much more secure and cozy home than my little orange tree could offer.  The rescue box sat there for two days, until he came back on Saturday and he and MT scooped the stragglers up.  

But our beekeeper has the good fortune to be suffering an abundance of riches at the moment: more hives than he has placements.  So MT told him if our Bettys didn't have a problem with neighbours, we had no problem adding them to the menagerie until he found a permanent placement; we'd be happy to make it permanent here, but not if it means paying double the annual maintenance fee, something we need to clarify first.  

MT has dubbed the new hive the Beryls, and everyone seems happily settled in the 'hood.