the curious incident of bees and lemongrass

We continued throughly inspecting the hives and as Agape, Joshua and I were sorting through a langstroth, we noticed the bees were flying strangely and starting gather in the bush behind us. It reminded me of the similar ordeal with the baby swarm. They even started to cluster the smoker. By the time we finished closing the hive up and walked away, Agape became a giggling bee goddess with the ladies flocking all over the front pocket of her bee jacket. Kwao came to her rescue by pulling out the dried lemongrass that Agape had stashed for smoker fuel and smoking them out. Lemongrass seems to be as intoxicating for bees as catnip is for cats!

Afterwards, I caught some bees floating around in the kitchen and put a dab of honey on the kitchen table so we could look at the bees through a loupe that I brought along. (A loupe is used to view film negatives before exposing and developing. It's basically a 10x magnifying glass). The amount of detail in the bee is quite outstanding!