beekeeping

Recycling: Catching a swarm and twerkin’ honeybees

After a long and vaguely hellish winter, spring is bustin’ out all over the farm. Oddly, my beehives are all thriving and I’ve already had a swarm to capture. That’s kind of early but I’m not complaining.

Below is part of something I wrote two years ago. I’ve trimmed commentary on then-current events, but the key question remains the same: will my kids’ kids even know what a real drone is?

And I can only add my recent blinding insight: honeybees are the original twerkers.

Been a great year for the nectar flow, which started very early and is still going great guns, so much so that I woke with a start last night with the realization that I’ve got three bee hives resting on a single  horizontal plank, with an unprecedented mass of honey above. (File under “Complications Resulting from Unusual Natural Bounties.”)

Another consequence of the nectar  bounty is that hives become so strong that they swarm.  Which is really not a bad thing for the bees. But for a beekeeper, aka honey thief, you like to avoid having swarms take away half your bee population, so if you’re lucky and observant you can catch your own swarms, which I did this weekend, twice.

On Saturday, after a little set-to with my increasingly emotional 11-year-old son (another ominous trend), I stomped out of the house and wandered to the bee yard, where they were swarming for the second day in a row.

If you’ve never stood in the middle of a bee swarm, put it on your bucket list. It feels like the early stages of the apocalypse might feel, and yet it’s really just a beautiful natural thing. Basically, the bee super-organism feels it is robust enough to reproduce, so it swarms. In a first swarm, roughly half the bees (five thousand, ten perhaps) accompany the old queen and look for a new home. Upon leaving the hive they fly in mad-seeming circles, creating a cone of bees about ten yards wide and forty feet high. It is noisy and scary and exhilarating. I half expect the voice of James Earl Jones to begin booming out.

The bees in this state are about as gentle as they can be. They’ve gorged on honey prior to leaving the hive, and are merely seeking an intermediate place to settle while the scouts find a permanent location. Lucky for me, they roost on a fence post right next to the hive, the same place another swarm had chosen just yesterday (and not, say, on a branch sixty feet off the ground).

I set to putting them into a temporary hive, as I had done with Friday’s swarm.

And let me talk about the Nasonov pheremone for a brief moment. Because it means a lot to me.

When I ponder all I’ve gained in moving to the country from a house and respectably well-paid job in New York, and giving up all that goes with same — annual 401k contributions, good health insurance, paid holidays, pay! — I can now add as a compensation an intimate familiarity with the workings of the Nasonov pheremone, which  is what worker bees release to orient returning forager bees back to the colony.

When capturing swarms, beekeepers are looking for the distinctive butt-up, fanning behavior (displaying the Nasonov gland) as an indication that they have succeeded in transporting the queen from the temporary roost to the intended hive destination. To start moving the swarm I  scoop handfuls of bees into the box. One random scoop had what looked like  a virgin queen but I wasn’t entirely sure. When I laid the scoop into the box, bingo! The timbre of the buzzing changed instantly and dozens of bees suddenly stationed  themselves at the edges of the box and began the fanning action. My work was pretty much done at this point. I walked away and returned at dusk, and the hive was full. All I had to do was put the hive cover on.

It’s possible that our generation may lose bees altogether. I won’t lay out the case for bee extinction, but a few minutes of googling around, and you will at least be familiar with it. It occurs to me as I type this that our kids’ kids won’t know what a real drone is, but they will be all too familiar with the mechanized war-fighting snooping machines that are named after the least useful members of the bee family….

But that is some disturbing, dispiriting stuff, and as I have already said, today I’m not letting that sort of thing harsh my buzz.

Beez in the trap

I know the song has nothing to do with actual bees, but last night in a state of semi-delirium this was on repeat in my brain’s playlist, along with another primitive ditty of my own composition titled FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKIN BEES (that is both chorus and verse. Catchy, no?).

So it was a bad evening in the beeyard, a very bad evening. Family out of town, at the beach. I stayed home to take care of farm duties. As much as I knew I would miss them, the idea of a week to myself had its appeal.

So I played golf til nearly dusk. Ah, the life. Then coming up the driveway, saw yet another cluster of bees hanging from a bush near the hives. I really didn’t know which hive had enough bees left for such a swarm but I knew I had to keep it from flying away.

I had gotten a little cocky about my routine (this would be my fourth swarm capture over the past couple weeks). Get a box, put a sheet  under it, shake the bees into the box  and watch their behavior. The queen was there and the workers were fanning, so I commenced Phase Two, shaking the bees into a new hive.

Phase  Two. Yeah. This is where the complications set in. I had gotten in the habit of sweetening the lure of the new hive with a frame of honey that I “borrow” from an existing hive (the bees see it a little differently).

I do this in a hurry with little regard for  proper beekeeper etiquette. Without bothering to light the smoker, I pop the lid off brusquely, find a fat honey-laden frame, grab it, and replace it with an empty frame. Bang the lid back on and I’m in business.

In this instance, it was near dusk and all the bees were home, and it was drizzling steadily. The hive was absolutely full of pissy bees. And then I got the replacement frame stuck/wedged and couldn’t get the lid back on. I had to struggle to get the frame down. Meanwhile, the entire hive went on major predator alert.

I’ve dealt with this but never on such a scale. Sometimes it just happens that the bees get ornery and bang at your headgear. They usually go right for the mouth. It’s a little unsettling but that’s what the suit and hood are for. This hive was “hot” beyond my wildest imaginings. As that dismal fact was dawning on me, I discovered yet another lapse in my preparations: I was in such a hurry that I had left a couple of gaps where I zip up my smock.

Aaaaaannnndddd…. DISASTER. Suddenly I had hundreds of bees on my bonnet (a phrase for which I have new-found admiration). Dozens of them were getting inside.

I suppose I must congratulate myself for recognizing that this was the rare moment when panicking was the best play. I dropped everything and started running, fast and far, and managed to shed most of the bees clinging to and stinging the outside of my suit.

Needless to say, I couldn’t run from the ones inside, buzzing loudly and stinging me about the head, and wrists, and up my back.

When I got a couple hundred yards away from the hive I tore off my gloves and suit at full gallop and then had to deal with the bees in my hair. I ran into the house and flapped and swatted and cursed — FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKIN BEES– until I was finally pretty much rid of the bees. I had taken somewhere in the neighborhood of two dozen stings.

(This was pretty much a textbook case of how NOT to work with bees, but it could actually Have Been Worse. My decision to put on a pair of jeans  was a last-minute call, and I don’t even want to think what would have happened had I not bothered to change out of shorts and had all the bare skin of my legs exposed…..)

I did my best to scrape the stingers out, sucked down a beer, and then returned to the scene of the crime, picking up my protective clothing, ever so sheepishly, and putting it back on en route way back to the hives.

I still had to get some kind of cover on the angry hive, sitting there open in the rain, which was coming down pretty well by this point. I did it. Wasn’t pretty. (Was anyone watching?) Then I had to get the swarm hive situated, make sure most of the stragglers were filtering back in, put the hive up on cinder blocks, and cover it.

All done.  Night. Time for a couple tall WL Weller Special Reserves, and the contemplation of one’s own stupidity (and mortality). And, as this was by far the most stings I had taken at one time, to monitor myself for symptoms of anaphylactic shock.

I drifted off during the Nuggets-Lakers Game 7, and woke up a few times during the night. Still alive!

Swarms, the Nasonov pheromone, drones

We continue our inexorable “snowball heading for hell”  momentum.

First, you have MCA, George “Goober” Lindsay, AND Maurice Sendak passing on in the span of a few days.

And out there in the world, the results in Europe’s elections presage much short-term chaos and uncertainty. On the plus side of the ledger, they do indicate a slightly cheering determination on the part of Continentals to show the political/banking elites  that the people are still in charge.

No such luck over here, where American domestic partisan politics keeps getting dumber and dumberer and the narrowness of the issues being debated–in the face of the need for an overwhelming overhaul–is mind-boggling.

This is my context-establishing tweet of the week, and it comes not from our political leaders or respected mainstream media sources. No, it comes from from Dan Alpert, managing partner of a New York investment bank, and it shows just how dire the straits are in USA 2012:

In a nation of 315 million people we have 115mm full time workers and 26.7mm part time (1-34 hours) workers. Not thriving!

Does anyone expect either party to address this before the next election in a meaningful way? Or ever?

****

But I won’t allow that to harsh my buzz. (Oh, yes, I did. I did make that terrible pun.) Because, you see, the world is for shit but my bees are thriving, and sometimes that’s enough for me.

Been a great year for the nectar flow, which started very early and is still going great guns, so much so that I woke with a start last night with the realization that I’ve got three bee hives partially resting on a single  horizontal plank, with an unprecedented mass of honey above. (File under complications resulting from unusual natural bounties–along with my heifer who died from bloat caused by the insanely rich pasture this spring.)

Another consequence of the nectar  bounty is that hives become so strong that they swarm.  Which is really not a bad thing for the bees. But for a beekeeper, aka honey thief, you like to avoid having swarms take away half your bee population, so if you’re lucky and observant you can catch your own swarms, which I did this weekend, twice.

On Saturday, after a little set-to with my increasingly emotional 11-year-old son (another ominous trend), I stomped out of the house and wandered to the beeyard, where they were swarming for the second day in a row.

If you’ve never stood in the middle of a bee swarm, put it on your bucket list. It feels like the early stages of the apocalypse might feel, and yet it’s really just a beautiful natural thing. Basically, the bee super-organism feels it is robust enough to reproduce, so it swarms. In a first swarm, roughly half the bees (five thousand, ten perhaps) accompany the old queen and look for a new home. Upon leaving the hive they fly in mad-seeming circles, creating a cone of bees about ten yards wide and forty feet high. It is noisy and scary and exhilarating. I half expect the voice of James Earl Jones to begin booming out.

The bees in this state are about as gentle as they can be. They’ve gorged on honey prior to leaving the hive, and are merely seeking an intermediate place to settle while the scouts find a permanent location. Lucky for me, they roost on a fence post right next to the hive, the same place another swarm had chosen just yesterday (and not, say, on a branch sixty feet off the ground).

I set to putting them into a temporary hive, as I had done with Friday’s swarm.


And let me talk about the Nasonov pheremone for a brief moment. Because it means a lot to me.

When I ponder all I’ve gained in moving to the country from a house and respectably well-paid job in New York, and giving up all that goes with same — annual 401k contributions, good health insurance, paid holidays, pay! — I can now add as a compensation an intimate familiarity with the workings of the Nasonov pheremone, which  is what worker bees release to orient returning forager bees back to the colony.

When capturing swarms, beekeepers are looking for the distinctive butt-up, fanning behavior (displaying the Nasonov gland) as an indication that they have succeeded in transporting the queen from the temporary roost to the intended hive destination. To start moving the swarm I  scoop handfuls of bees into the box. One random scoop had what looked like  a virgin queen but I wasn’t entirely sure. When I laid the scoop into the box, bingo! The timbre of the buzzing changed instantly and dozens of bees suddenly stationed  themselves at the edges of the box and began the fanning action. My work was pretty much done at this point. I walked away and returned at dusk, and the hive was full. All I had to do was put the hive cover on.

It’s possible that our generation may lose bees altogether. I won’t lay out the case for bee extinction, but a few minutes of googling around, and you will at least be familiar with it. It occurs to me as I type this that our kids’ kids won’t know what a real drone is, but they will be all too familiar with the mechanized war-fighting snooping machines that are named after the least useful members of the bee family. On that subject, I highly recommend reading Marcy Wheeler’s response to Drunken Predator’s fascinating essay on Oppenheimers and Orwells.

But that is some disturbing, dispiriting stuff, and as I have already said, today I’m not letting that sort of thing harsh my buzz.

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