Sergeyich recaptures his escaped swarm

Sergeyich recaptures his escaped swarm through patient observation and improvised beekeeping: finding the bees clustered on a wild pear tree, he dampens their wings, sweeps them into a swarm trap, and tips them back into their hive. The episode turns his knowledge of bees into urgent action, but the swarm’s unexplained departure and the grey tinge he notices afterward leave the rescue shadowed by uncertainty.

The Empty Hive and the Search

At daybreak Sergeyich goes to the officially inspected hive and is alarmed to find no bees at its entrance. He lifts the roof and peers into a silent, empty interior, then listens around the apiary. A bee passes his face, and buzzing leads him away from the hive toward a wild pear tree, closer to Akhtem’s hives than to his own. There, a familiar chorus confirms that the missing bees are gathered around the trunk.

Finding them does not solve the problem. The swarm is about two metres above the ground, and Sergeyich has neither a ladder nor a swarm trap immediately to hand. He knows he must act before the bees fly off, but their departure itself seems strange: in the circumstances he expects, some bees would usually remain in the hive, and a swarm would ordinarily leave when a colony had grown too crowded. This one, he thinks, had room. The episode establishes both his knowledge of ordinary bee behaviour and the gap between that knowledge and what has happened.

Improvised Recovery

Sergeyich breaks into a shed by using a leg of an iron tripod as a lever against the rings on the door. Inside, he finds what the rescue requires: a ladder, a spray bottle, and a round swarm trap with a lid. He also takes a long-handled dustpan, turning a household implement into a way of gathering the bees without having to catch them by hand.

He fills the spray bottle with water and mists the swarm from below. The droplets weigh down the bees’ wings, quieting the buzz and reducing the chance that they will fly away while he works. Sergeyich keeps spraying until the bottle is empty; only then does he lean the ladder against the tree and climb two rungs, holding the trap between his stomach and the trunk as he sweeps the bees into it.

The collection happens in stages. Two large clusters fall into the trap, while just under a hundred bees remain on the tree. They crawl down into the trap themselves, apparently unwilling to be separated from the swarm and its queen. Sergeyich raises the trap to help them, waits for the last bees to descend, covers them with its lightweight, cloth-lined lid, and carries the catch back to the vacant hive.

Return, Doubt, and Meaning

Sergeyich estimates that the swarm weighs no more than three kilograms. He carefully tips the bees into their home, where their wet wings make them plop down heavily. The physical recovery is complete, but the event does not restore his confidence that he understands what happened: as he bends over the bees before replacing the roof, he notices that they look a little greyish and wonders whether the water has merely changed their appearance. The account leaves that observation unresolved rather than confirming a cause.

The episode draws its force from the difference between care and control. Sergeyich can read the hive, recognize danger, and improvise a precise rescue, yet he cannot explain why the bees left. Elsewhere, he insists that bees must keep their hives at thirty-seven degrees and remain active through winter; he also regards their gathering of nectar and pollen as their central interest, while treating their internal social arrangements as their own affair. Here that practical respect becomes visible in his attention to the swarm’s movements, his effort not to lose it, and his patience as the last bees follow the others into the trap.

Sergeyich often watches the bees as if their lives could illuminate human society, sometimes finding nature’s order more intelligible than people’s. But the escaped swarm resists becoming a simple lesson: the beekeeper can recover the bees without knowing what drove them away. Their flight and uncertain colour keep them present as living creatures with behaviour he observes but cannot fully command, not merely as a metaphor for human choices.