School portraits / May Days, 2025–2026
At Potomac, 30,000 Bees Joined the May Day Send-Off
The McLean, Virginia, school crowns a retiring teacher as May Day King or Queen. In 2025 the seventh graders insisted. In 2026 an uninvited swarm joined in.
Every spring the Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, holds May Day: songs, dances around the maypole, the Obby Oss galloping through while younger students race for high fives. And each year a faculty member in their last year is crowned May Day King or Queen.
In 2025 it was Hilary Steel, who had taught art there since 1999. She told the student paper, The Current, that she had her doubts about accepting. Then some of her seventh graders asked if she was going to be May Queen, and got animated about it: "You have to be the May Queen! You have to be the May Queen!" Her response: "So I thought, okay, okay, I'll play with them."
Seventh graders, insisting. I know that voice. It is the voice in which our middle one tells me what I will be doing on Saturday.
The best part of the day, she said, was a few a cappella pieces sung by high schoolers, because she had taught so many of them and got to see them growing up.
In 2026 the retiring teachers were crowned together, as May Day Queens. About halfway through the assembly, according to the school's newsletter, a swirling swarm of honey bees flew into the quad, over the maypole, and circled the guests of honor. The school estimated 30,000 bees.
The swarm was peaceful. Students and families stayed calm, and the bees drifted to a tree and settled in a cluster on a branch. Then the school's beekeeper, a middle school science teacher named Steve Wolfe, put on his protective suit and caught the swarm in a transport box. The bees went into a new hive in the school apiary.
Thirty thousand guests who were not on the list, and nobody panicked. I have hosted children's birthday parties with eleven guests where that was not true.
The school's verdict was that the departing teachers had been given a send-off fit for royalty. It is hard to argue. The bees were, after all, already organized around a queen.
The youngest crowned my wife Queen of the Kitchen last Mother's Day, with a paper crown and a ribbon. The ceremony was interrupted by one wasp, which got in through the screen door. Four people screamed, the dog barked, and the youngest, who had been told about Potomac, stood perfectly still and said "Stay calm, it's a swarm." It was one wasp.
My wife kept the crown on through dinner.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Elizabeth Ahn: Annual May Day Celebration Honors IS Art Teacher Ms. Steel (2025) potomaccurrent.org
- Potomac Paw Prints, May7 2026 potomacschool.org
- Potomac’s apiary: learning in the natural environment potomacschool.org