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On the corner of my balcony sits a decent-sized clay plant pot, big enough to be useful but not so big you can't move it by hand, holding an ugly artificial palm tree thing, one of the things the previous owners left behind for us. (They left a few inexplicable things behind, most of which we threw out immediately.) I haven't gotten around to tossing the ugly artificial palm tree thing because I was going to keep the clay pot and maybe plant something in it.

This weekend, while doing some renovations, we dragged the potted palm out of the corner of the balcony so we could toss the detritus of our old kitchen down to the sidewalk, and out of the planter pot erupted some bees!

Ok, only about 4 bees. They did their bee thing and bumbled around, circling the area between us and their plastic potted palm. When it became clear that we weren't about to be attacked by swarms of angry bees, we dragged the potted plant back into the corner where the bees expected their home to be and worked about two feet farther along the balcony railing.

I looked more closely at the plastic palm's substrate when the bees seemed a little calmer and saw a couple of them crawling over what would be dirt if the plant were real. I heard the palm buzzing, too, from time to time as we worked, as if they were having a discussion under the plastic roots about all this crashing and banging and moving of their home.

I have no idea how long that beehive has been there. I think I remember seeing the occasional lone bee cruising around our balcony last summer - but I thought it was just lost, since as I can only make plants live when they're planted in the ground and have room for their roots and access to rainfall.

How big can a hive be, when it's housed in a planter pot about a foot high and a foot across that's filled up with a plastic palm tree root ball?

I'm kind of reluctant to throw out the palm now, since there's a little colony living there. I'm not planning to take up beekeeping or anything, but I still find "owning" a hive kind of cool :-)

Maybe I'll just leave it alone and take pictures of the bees occasionally. I expect it's fairly easy for a tiny colony of bees to survive the winter here, given that it might snow for 5 days out of the entire winter, and the flowers start coming back sometime in February.

Balcony Beehive