Honey bees are vital to the fertilization of our orchards and crops. Be glad when you see the bee boxes in fields! Be glad for beekeepers. There is a beekeeper at a farm less than a mile from us, as the crow flies. I buy their honey from time to time and it is very tasty. And one day some came to visit!
Several years ago I was lunging my mare, Irish, in the round pen when suddenly my eyes focused on something beyond her… like a black cloud passing over the pasture coming towards us. I watched this cloud get closer and closer and, by the time I realized it was a mass of bees, it was hovering right over Irish! I had never seen anything like it! Of course, I got Irish the heck out of there! I ran and found Bob but by the time he got there, this “cloud” of bees was now a “ball” of bees, “hanging” on a tree limb by the round pen. The tree was a young Ash so it was quite a sight to see this thick, massive elongated ball of bees hanging precariously (we thought) on a thin tree branch!
Now, what? How do we find someone to collect them? Calling a store that sells beekeeping paraphernalia led us to names and phone numbers of two men who do this sort of thing. They kept their own bees and gladly – for free – removed hives. 
We made contact and they were happy to come but could not till later in the day as they were at the opposite end of the county collecting a huge hive from an old barn that was being demolished. Our bees were small potatoes but they wanted them and, besides, the bees would find a place to build a hive and we surely didn’t want it to be in our barn.
So, these guys showed up and started the process of collecting these bees. They put the hive box down under the tree with the lid off. Then one guy got up on a short ladder next to the ball of bees…had on coveralls but no hood (!). He took hold of the branch, raised it a bit then jerked it downward hard. This caused most of the bees to drop into the box! Knowing the queen was one of them, he proceeded to use the smoke lantern. I learned that day that the purpose of the smoke was not to keep the bees away from him but to kill the scent of the queen bee. As long as her scent was on the tree, the remaining bees would not go into the hive box.
Once he was successful in getting all the bees off the tree branch into the hive box, he put the lid back on but left the box there until evening. This was to allow time for the scouts to return. And, get this, a few of the bees stayed on the outside of the hive box as it was their job was to send out messages to the scouts until all were safely “home”.
Of course, we asked the why of this event.
A queen becomes a queen purely from eating royal jelly, which is a very rich substance that is excreted from worker bees’ heads. It is the worker bees that select a larva to be the next queen and start feeding it the royal jelly. When the new queen is born, there is either a fight to the death (literally) or the old queen will fly away…and those worker bees loyal to her fly with her to build a new colony. Hence, our ball of bees! Nature is sooooo cool!