Leading the swarm.

She was just one bee among twenty thousand others. The nest in a wooden box had been getting overfull with nectar being turned into honey at night as the water was evaporated from it by the beating of wings. Not just honey taking up the space though as the queen had been laying so many eggs, over a thousand a day, eggs that turned into larvae that the young nurse bees, too young to fly yet would feed until it was time to cover over their cells with wax. There they would wait till twenty one days after the egg was deposited at the bottom of the cell before emerging as an adult bee.

This particular bee had emerged over two weeks ago and had been foraging for both nectar and pollen for several days. Now however she was leaving the nest along with thousands of her sisters and the queen while those left behind would raise a new queen. The air was full of bees flying in every direction in what to a human would appear complete chaos, yet out of that chaos emanated order as the queen came to rest near the end of a tree branch. One by one more bees came to rest around her forming a large mass of bees with those designated as scouts on the outside.

Almost as soon as the last bees joined the throng, she was off, looking for a new home. None of them had had to do this before, all having emerged within the nest after the previous queen had left, indeed only the queen was older than a few weeks having been fed her diet of royal jelly which turned her into a queen rather than a worker.

Her direction was to the East and soon she found the woods where she investigated the trees on the Southern and Eastern sides of the plantation. She didn't bother with the young trees, growing tall and thin as they competed for light, rather she looked at the old trees with rotting areas and cavities within them before settling on one which had a small hole about sixteen feet above the ground and lots of space inside.

Sure of herself she flew back and landing on the surface of the mass of her sisters, carefully measured her angles and seven times repeated a circular route, wiggling her rear portions each time she started a circuit.

Five of her sisters, noting that the number of times she had completed the circuit set of to check out the potential new home, using polarised light they matched her angles to fly in the correct direction. They soon found the tree, an old oak that had been left for sentimental reasons, too much rotten wood for it to be any use for timber and having spent some time inside the high up cavity flew back to perform their own dances.

There was never any doubt, none of the original prospectors had performed more than four circuits of their dance and the five had all done sever or eight circuits before another twenty of the sisters left to do the same. Once these returned and reported their findings, almost as one the branch was vacated and a black cloud of bees made the trip of three quarters of a mile just as the bee keeper arrived with a skep, hoping to catch the swarm.