My next door neighbour has a swarm of honey bees on his property. I think this happens when the colony wants to establish a new hive. I have never seen so many bees together in my life. Most of them are huddled together in the swarm, but there were quite a number of them flying around this afternoon as well. They took no notice of us watching and did not seem to be at all aggressive.
27th Street 
That is an absolutely amazing photo! It’s very heartening to see a healthy colony of bees. You live in a magical place.
FANTASTIC photo and KILLER comment Salvelina! I hope to have my indoor plexi-hive up an running within a year. Thanks for both.
You are right, bees do swarm when they want to make a new colony. I have had some experience with this as we have had several swarms gather in our backyard over the years. There would likely be over 1,000,000 bees in the swarm in the photo. The good news is that when they swarm they became quite docile. They dont stay in one place for long and will periodically move while they search for a new place to set up a colony. If they make you nervous the thing to do is to quick contact a local beekeeper. Healthy honeybees are worth money and most beekeepers will drop everything and race over to try to capture the swarm. If you ever get a chance to watch the capture process you should do it because it is fascinating. What the beekeeper has to do is to grab the queen bee and there is only 1 of those. The last one we had in the backyard fortunately gathered on a branch near the outer edge of a tree. Beekeeper and wife arrived to scoop them up. Wife got into a full beekeeper uniform with head net gloves and the works. The beekeeper wore shorts and a short sleeve T-shirt. He said that if a bee gets up under the cuff of your sleeve or under your collar it will sting you. But if you dont wear anything that will get him tangled up it is very unlikely you will get stung. I half suspect the bees know who they are dealing with as well. I have watched this guy deliver a load of full bee hives in a pick up truck. The bees dont like being bounced around in a truck so when he (still dressed in shorts and a T) grabs a hive box and sets it on the ground a very large number of them come out to see what the commotion is. I can tell you that is pretty scary. He will have hundreds landing on him. When he gets done unloading there will be 100,000 or so crawling around the bed of the truck and he sorta sweeps them out onto the ground with his arm. His wife says he gets stung 20+ times whenever he moves bees but the stings dont bother him. Part of the poison a bee injects into you though id adrenaline and she says that after that many stings there is no way to sleep that night. The capture process that I have seen was wife climbed up a ladder with a big plastic box and she held it under the swarm. The beekeeper got a very long pole and shook the branch to dislodge the bees and they fell into the box. He says if the queen lands in the box the bees will stay with her. If he misses the queen then the bees simply leave and there is no good way to prevent that. The bees without the queen are of no value anyways. A swarm like the one in the picture will weigh maybe 40 pounds. I got to heft the last swarm captured in our backyard. The whole process is quite interesting.