Swarm

Everyone walked on

An ordinary day in early May. I was on my way to the northern hide at Het Vinne when I saw it from the car park: something swirling in the air above the lawn by the buildings, far too much of it to be a few insects. From the car park I couldn’t tell what it was. A couple ahead of me stopped, looked up, and walked on. So it couldn’t be anything special, I thought. I went closer anyway.

A roaring cloud

Closer by it became clear. Bees, tens of thousands of them, hanging in the air , flying through eachother, and a sound that filled everything. They were settling into the hedge beside Het Vinne’s bee village, as if they had booked a room. And still people walked past. I wanted to stop them. Do you realise what you’re looking at?

Lie flat

I had never seen a swarm before, but I had grown up with one. My parents were market gardeners, and one morning a swarm passed over them in the field. They threw themselves flat on the ground. That was what a swarm meant to me. Now one hung right in front of me, and I wasn’t sure how close I could go.

Close enough

You can read it in the way they fly. They whirl around each other, loud and restless, but they never come at you. A swarm is looking for a new home, not a fight. As long as you don’t wave your arms, you’re welcome to watch. So I walked slowly across the grass, round to the far side, until I had sky and trees behind them instead of buildings.

The wrong lens

I had my 800mm with a 1.4x teleconverter, the lens for every photo in this story. But through that lens you see a handful of bees, never the size of the thing. So I put the big lens down and took out my phone. I filmed up into the sky, then down along the trees to the ground. Bees everywhere, and that roar that just wouldn’t stop.

An hour later

I left them settling into the hedge and finished my round. When I came back an hour later, a beekeeper had arrived and set a skep down beside them. Nearly the whole swarm had already moved in. A new home, found in an afternoon.

What people walked past

The phone video became a reel, and it reached more than a hundred thousand people. Most of them had never seen anything like it. It’s the sound, I think, more than the sight. The same sound people walked past that day.