This is my 'God as Chow Line Monkey' version of How Things Are.
There are, of course, much better versions out there...versions I heartily recommend, especially if it means you stop reading this now in order to make room for them in your day. Best of all, you don't even have to resort to anything that requires a concordance for intelligibility.
The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe noted at some length simply that 'Things Fall Apart'. Tolstoy had an only slightly less pessimistic view about the probabilities for harmony/discord which he popped right out with in the first lines of Anna Karenina, "All happy families are happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Taken together, these observations basically come to:
.
- It's a lost cause.
- You can screw it up in a lot more ways than you can make it right.
So, back to our story, the setting for which is roughly as follows. It's yesterday about 4:45pm. I've got a meeting at 5:30 about a compost project and another at 7pm with a neighborhood group. Despite this, I'm still working on things that occasionally result in ways to pay the mortgage when my phone rings and a voice I've never heard before spits out all of the following in about 5 seconds:
"Hi, my name is Nate and I've seen your garden and your bees and there are bees in my yard too but they were here when we got here and now they all just came out of the hive in a cloud and have landed on the fence in big clod which is huge and I'm wondering what do I do?"
Nate's sounding like an advance man for Achebe's book tour, what with 40,000 or so bees doing their unpredictable thing near his hot tub and all.
"I live about a block from you," he adds helpfully.
I look outside and notice that it's starting to rain.
Now, bee swarms are basically the winged embodiment of that very fine and wiggly line between things working and things falling apart. Bees swarm naturally as part of their life cycle, mainly for reproductive reasons. This reproductive facet should offer a clue for those of us acquainted with the orderliness which normally surrounds reproductive pursuits, especially in Springtime and most especially after beer in Springtime.
On the one hand, you have to figure that getting thirty or forty thousand bees to do anything at one time represents a miraculous feat of organization, at least from the bees' perspective. But, to most people, it's pure chaos.
Visually, a bee swarm manifests as a moving, 3-D fractal, perfectly expressing the teetering cosmic amble between organization and randomness. The bees rise into the air from the hive, variously forming a dispersed and then gathered cloud which darkens and shifts, but clearly shows itself to be tethered to an invisible center which is the queen and her hopeful but mostly hapless drone consorts. In almost all cases, the swarm will quickly find a nearby resting spot such as a tree limb, the eave of a building, or Nate's fence. After a rest, they'll rise again and set out full of purpose for another destination that they've also not yet identified.
If you're a beekeeper, swarms basically split the line the same way. When one of your hives swarms, it's a drag. Your helping of chaos is invariably served when you're busy doing something else (see above), and may well result in the loss of the hive. On the other hand, swarm season (usually in May or early June) represents a great opportunity to capture swarms and use them to start new colonies, which of course then potentially recapitulate the swarm drama the next season.
So, back to the Chow Line. Rain is coming. I've just hung up on Nate. And I realize that I don't even have a completed hive box to put the swarm into if I catch them, much less a place to put the hive that I don't have. Possibilities for failure abound. Things are normal.
What happened next was all accident (again, see above), but this morning a narrative suggests itself which I thought worth some consideration. Here's the sequence of events.
I literally shout over to my neighbor Loren who is mostly minding his own business, "Hey, how would you like some bees and what are you doing right now?" Then I call my friend and co-beekeeper Erik (who also has to be at the 7pm meeting) and say to him, "Up for a little adventure?". Erik calls our mutual friend Dan, another beekeeper, with the same query. We humans rise up in our own little cloud to swarm with the unruly bees down the block.
Faster than you can visit a flower, we get the rest of a new hive put together, site it in Loren's backyard, gather our gear and show up at Nate's place where he and several friends spontaneously join our numbers, contributing a big cardboard box and a roll of tape to the effort.
At Nate's we sugar the bees up to calm them and then gently brush them into the box, trying as best we can to get the large mass centers of the clump where the queen is likely to be. The whole operation takes about 10 minutes. We mist the bees in the box once more with sugar water and then shut it with a little tape and then make ourselves a weird little parade back down the block to Loren's place: me in bee gear holding a big buzzing box, Erik with a couple of spray bottles, a dustpan, and a brush. I'm wearing coveralls and big rubber boots to match my amazing bee hat. Erik, a poet of customarily urbane appearance and demeanor, is sporting a puffy coat buttoned up to the neck, making him look more than a bit like Kenny from Southpark. It's a little surprising that we are not arrested en route, but it's only a short walk.
At Loren's he's done a masterful job of setting up. We we dump the bees into the prepared hive, put the top on, and block the entrance loosely with a couple of handfuls of grass to prevent the bees from bailing on us precipitously. We shake hands and split up again to go and chase our meetings, eat dinner, and whatnot. The bees have a new home. Loren now has bees. Erik got stung twice. I've got things to think about. I hope Dan has got something out of it too. Nate is looking more relaxed. The sky opens.
Queen bees lay on the order of a thousand eggs per day. The 40,000 or so bees in a colony, each of which produces only a tiny fraction of a teaspoon of honey in its entire life, conspire to produce as much as 100lbs of honey each year. As many as a hundred bee visits to a single blossom are required to pollinate some food plants. Swarms like the one we caught yesterday commonly contain many virgin queens who will ultimately duke it out for the solitary privilege of working in the dark interior of the hive until they die, all in the service of their colony. Erik and Dan and Loren and Nate and I snatched a hive, dinners, and couple of meetings out from under a rainstorm on a moment's notice.
It is, of course, still a lost cause and the opportunities for failure are legion, but numbers matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment