Follow the swarm in our Elementary season 3, episode 23 recap as Sherlock and Joan investigate the deaths of 100 million bees.

It is common for a procedural to call on other episodes of the series as a kind of Easter egg reward for loyal viewers, but tonight’s penultimate episode relied on that route a bit too much.

Gregson, Holmes, and Watson open the episode by putting away a man who arranged a flashmob to cover the public stabbing of his boss. Seemingly unconnected to the episode in anyway, the case does two things. One, it reminds viewers that Gregson is actively involved in the cases that come across the Major Crimes desk. Two, it calls back to a season 2 episode, “All in the Family,” where another seemingly unconnected case involving a theft via prosthetic leg, opened the episode. That episode led to a shakeup in the NYPD hierarchy. This time is no different.

The A story, and the murder that pulls the attention of Holmes is solved in the first 20 minutes of the episode. Everett Keck, an employee of the USDA studying bees in the tri-state area, was murdered when someone slipped an egg carton laced with cyanid into his smoker, killing not only Everett, but an apiary full of bees. It is only a hop, skip, and a small jump to find the true killer, but first Sherlock takes a meeting with Agrinex.

The company produces a pesticide that Sherlock believes is responsible for the rise in colony collapse disorder. While the executives are grateful to Holmes for solving two murders within their organization and putting away a murderer on their payroll, they are less than thrilled to sit and have him throw around accusations. They were aware that Keck’s research pointed fingers at Agrinex, but deemed him a harmless seminary school drop out and had documents in place to counter anything his research found.

Though this Easter egg was a dead end, it gave Sherlock a crumb that would come in handy later. Even without Agrinex’s immediate help he solves the murder two hours later. Darrell Jarvis’ bees were killed after Everett inspected them and the evidence was sitting in his garbage bin. Easy, right? Not quite. Jarvis’ claims that Keck was responsible for killing his hives led to an investigation, but the motive behind Everett’s actions was another mystery. The USDA was looking into Everett’s work, but the investigation came to a stop when the lead investigator, Barnes, suffered a heart attack that left him with permanent brain damage.

Holmes looks into Barnes’ heart attack and realizes that at the time of the attack he suffered multiple bee stings which masked a needle injection. Sherlock tests his theory by purposefully giving himself beestings. Barnes was attacked in his home and left to die from a lethal combination of potassium and chlorine.

This led Sherlock, or rather Harlan, to crunch the colony collapse disorder numbers for the northeast. The rise in bee deaths by mite infestation corresponded to the sites that Keck visited during his surveys which means that colony collapse disorder was not on the rise, but rather a human was purposefully adding to these facts. While Keck was in CT, however, Barnes was injected with the poison.

Here is where the investigation goes a bit off the rails. Sutton Foster, our guest star for the week, becomes their next target as she hosts a summit with her husband for researchers looking for funding that had dried up in recent years. The attendees include a member of a royal family from the United Arab Emirates who is an active beekeeper. This turns into a kidnapping, where his security guard starts to sell off his former employers valuable goods once he is gone, and ultimately leads them right back to Tara Parker (Foster) and her husband.

It was an odd direction to push focus, but it did bring in Bell and Gregson to the case which is an important reminder of Gregson’s B story. His promotion offering would take him out of the 11th and make him Deputy Chief. This is major, but Gregson is not about to leave his department in the wrong hands and has Joan look into his replacement without the aid of Sherlock. (Who figures out what she is doing in less than an hour after the proposal.) This change is not only big for Gregson, but also Holmes’ and Watson’s role in the department. A new leader may not think so highly of keeping consulting detectives on her cases.

Gregson turns down the offer choosing to stick with his guys and detectives. When he turns it down though, it becomes apparent that this promotion was more of a push to get Gregson out of the 11th. Someone wants him at another desk, but it is not clear why.

The bee problem wraps up when Tara Parker and her husband are brought back into questioning, Here, it is revealed that she and the kidnapped royalty had a bit of a flirtatious relationship online. Her pictures, with blonde hair and revealing clothing do not elicit a reaction from either party, yet something about the one in the graduation cap and gown gives away her connection to Everett Keck. His academic degrees afforded him a scarlet collar for theology, one that Keck earned and Parker did not.

Her husband folds on her and the case and Sherlock and Watson’s time is done. Small rewards all over the place, but the case of the week was not quite as thrilling. There is a trend in Elementary to throw a million points of misdirection at a viewer at once. That is fine, they should not be so distracting that a viewer walks away not knowing exactly what happened.

Next week’s finale will step up its game and focus on a matter closer to Sherlock’s heart than bee deaths — Alfredo’s sudden disappearance.

Watch the Elementary season 3 finale, “A Controlled Decent,” Thursday, May 14 at 10:00 p.m. ET on CBS.