On Sunday, while hiking in the eastern section of Briones Regional Park, we found a hive of wild bees in an oak tree. The bees were buzzing noisily in a cleft of the tree, just east of Diablo View Trail at the top of a steep climb. I got as close as I could to take some pictures, while Kierán warned me, “Coyote Peterson says never approach wild bees.”
We’d never seen wild bees in a natural hive before this. When we walked back along the same trail an hour later, they were gone, and I couldn’t even find the tree they’d been in again. I don’t know what agitated them in the first place, but we would never have spotted them — Kierán saw them first — if they hadn’t been flying about and making noise.
Wild bees buzzing around a hole in a gnarled oak tree off Diablo View Trail in Briones Regional Park on Sunday.
Steven E. F. Brown 