Bee TV, Banner Day for Nectar, Baby Bees, and a Hive Split

In an inspired moment about twelve years ago, I killed off my television.  I terminated it with prejudice, which in that time meant giving it to my Ex.  I'm pretty sure I didn't intend it as such, but this dubious act of giving surely amounted to a subtle form of sabotage, stealthy aggression along the lines of Trojan Horses or smallpox -ridden blankets offered up in the dead of winter.

Though no TV has as yet regained entry into my household, The Natural Instinct of Humans to Watch Television has nonetheless over the years reasserted itself with inexorable force.  This is surely one of the great engines of nature, probably tied to some sequence in our DNA, one lodged in our helix at a point close to those other sequences which leave us Powerless to Resist Shopping, Bound to Drive Automobiles, Unable to Put Down the Doritos, or Prone to Corporate Employment.

Along with Chance Gardner, I like to watch.  Happily, I've channeled this instinct into various forms of bestial backyard voyeurism:  Bee TV, Chicken TV, etc.  I sit, often in the good company of other misfits, and survey the life adventures of my bees, chickens, and whatever other species see fit to present themselves in my backyard.  It's no American Idol, thank God, but I pull up a chair or cop a squat on a rock on a regular basis and watch my bees or my chickens do their thing.  It's endlessly entertaining and there are no commercials.

I think it was my durable partner in gardening and dear love Kristin who coined the term Chicken TV a number of years ago.  We added the bee channel last year.  And, inspired by wine and good company the other evening, we opened discussions about a pirate channel for goats.

For my money, Bee TV puts all the rest to shame.  HBO, History Channel, Weather Channel, etc....even PBS are but weak alternatives.  I tune in sometimes sitting at a distance with a cup of coffee, or sometimes on elbows and knees with my face a few inches from the hive door.  Yesterday, I watched a worker bee gobbing propolis into minute cracks on the front of the hive where sugar ants had been entering presumably to rob honey.  Today, no ants.

Sometimes it's high drama, soap-opera sexual tension at it's best with shiftless drones and drone larvae being chucked off the front porch of the hive by female worker bees all about business.  "We have flowers.  Our queen is beautiful and already fertile.  What do we need you for?"  When new queens hatch some springs, there's rivalry that would make Joan Collins or even Gigi from One Life To Live look like rank amateurs.

More mundanely, on warm days when nectar is flowing, activity goes crazy and the somewhat small entrances to my hives are choked with bees pushing past each other to get in with nectar and out to get more.  Their passage is complicated by rows of fanner bees who moon me as I peer into the dark entrance.  They beat their wings to circulate moist air down through the hive and out the entrance past their little backsides, all part of the drying effort by which nectar becomes honey.

Saturday was a rock star day for nectar.  Bee TV at its best.  The frenzy of entrance activity made me curious enough to actually look into the hive Saturday and again Sunday.   Sure enough, the bees had added about 5 lbs. of new honey in about 24 hours.  Amazing.

The worst habits follow you wherever you go.  Bee TV, as it happens, also travels well.  This pretty much cinches it as a real instance of the genre:  after all, when I travel for work, I see people in airports carrying mobile TV and DVD devices.  I too take my habits travelling.  Just this Sunday I took my own viewing on the road around the neighborhood.  No wires or batteries required.  In Whitey's hive, we went nosing around for baby bees and were not disappointed.  They were easily spotted curled up in the bottom of their brood cells, no bigger than a grain of rice.  His queen is alive and doing her thing.  Several bars were also nicely built out with honey, bright, clear, light first year honey that I was sorely tempted to gnosh right there with the sun coming through it for the first time ever.  Watching is enough though for this year.  With luck, those happy bees will survive and thrive and generate enough of a surplus to afford us a harmless taste.

After Whitey's, a block to the west we also stopped in to check on a neglected hive that swarmed a couple weeks ago.   We caught and used it to make a new colony elsewhere.  But, checking in I see that the old box, much to my surprise, still has a very vigorous population.  The in/out traffic at the entrance is brisk, a sure sign of a healthy colony.  Apparently, the hive split instead of just relocating.  Judging the by size of the swarm we captured and the buzz remaining in the old hive, it must have been a gigantic bee colony before the swarm.  This week we'll put the old hive to right:  fix a broken bottom board, check in the boxes, and add a couple of supers.  We'll weigh in for a moment, adding a few niceties which, if we're lucky, will in some small way further the humbling, quotidian efforts of tens of thousands of bees over the course of the year and beyond.  I know hives in this town, wild ones, that have prospered on their own for decades.  We mainly add by not taking away.

Enthusiasm aside, it's a certainty that the Nielsen people do not have us on their radar.  All of this undoubtedly falls to the very remotely quirky tails of the viewing preference distribution.  Nonetheless I was shocked a few years ago to discover, quite by accident, that we are not entirely alone in our watching habits.  At a pub one evening we were almost howling out loud about some scenes we'd viewed earlier in the day on Chicken TV (full disclosure:  the scenes in question were decidedly MA on the rating system and involved the often shocking realities of Hot Poultry Love) when our waiter drew up short from across the room, out of earshot (we were gesturing), and came over to ask, "You've got chickens too?"

Now, he's cultured fellow, a talented professional musician who though he tours nationally and even internationally, still pours beer in support of both himself and the better funded segments of our economy.  On days when I catch myself zoning out in front of a hive or maybe channel surfing between bees, chickens, and compost pile worms, and I glance down at my ruined Carharts and my dirty nails and momentarily see Urban Yokel, I remember Dan and then Dan on stage somewhere singing to thousands of people and I am reassured
that my wiring is OK after all.  Liking bees more than Fox News or Lost does not make me defective and may even be a good thing.

Try it sometime.  Turn off your other set.  Find a hive.  Tune in.  See what happens.

A Hearty Hello From Our Newest Beekeeper

I just had the pleasure of meeting Steve Woolf the other day while chasing (unsuccessfully) a swarm we intended to put in his backyard as the newest member of our little co-op.


Steve and his wife Dena and their son Bodhi live at 2723 Harris St. and he's still on the lookout for a swarm to capture!


If you find or hear of a swarm that we might grab to help him get started, please give him a ring or text message at  (415)341-6920.


    

Reading Resource Library

Interested in knowing more about your bees?

We have a small reading library on bees and beekeeping available here and from the menu toward the top of the home page of this blog.

If you have anything about bees to read and are willing to add it to this little library, please email details to me at amazonbees@gmail.com and include a little information following the example in the links above.

Happy reading and happy Spring!

Queen Sightings

Intrepid paparazzi beekeepers Dan Parker and Lise Rein ventured into their hives a couple of days ago seeking photos of celebrity queens recently sighted here in Amazon.

In this first pic, Mr. Parker is seen seeking an encounter with one of the queens, moments before her bodyguards "got all huffy and up in my grill", as Ms. Rein works the camera.

Bystanders reported that the queen stumbled drunkenly out of the VIP room of her hive, buzzing profanely, and shouted out "Nice hat, a**hole!" to Mr. Parker just before the altercation occurred.

After the incident, bee police were called to the scene and served the hive owner with a warrant to inspect the premises.

At the scene, Chief Inspector Sherry Wellborn told reporters, "Officers discovered evidence of extensive unlicensed comb and even honey production in the VIP room of the hive.  We're taking this matter very seriously."

Asked for comment, David Stucky, who identified himself only as "a friend of the larger bee community and a hive employee" said, "Hey, we're providing a legitimate service here.  We're not looking for trouble from nobody."

Swarm Meets Swarm

Yesterday evening, in circumstances I'll get to in a bit, I was set to wondering again about balance between the helpings of chaos and whatever the other stuff is called when it isn't chaos that are dished up by the universe.

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:

.

1. It's a lost cause.
2. 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.

Looking for Pollen in All the Right Places

Within about a week or so, one thing to keep an eye out for around our new hives will be bees carrying pollen into the hive from the field.  

It's easy to spot...looks like gigantic (relatively speaking) yellow or orange MC Hammer pants on the bee's rear legs.  (Insects with camp?!  Who knew?)

Pollen going in means that the queen is likely laying and that workers are feeding the pollen to young bees (brood), an important milestone in the establishment of a new hive.

Many keepers open the hive soon after starting a colony to check and see if the queen is alive and laying.  I prefer the less invasive option of watching the hive from without.  Much can be understood about what's going on inside the hive simply by observing bee behavior at the hive door.  There's a great little book on that topic (I have a copy if you're interested) called 'At the Hive Entrance' by H. Storch.

Bee Factoid of the Day:
The average honeybee produces only 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in its entire life.

Colony Check

On Monday, I did a quick check on five of the nine colonies we installed Saturday and was pleased to see good, purposeful activity in all cases.  Bees were out foraging.  Flight paths indicated pretty clearly that they'd already located good food sources.

Bee factoid of the day:
Queen bees actually make an audible sound called 'piping' which is believed to have something to do with queen-on-queen (sounds racy) challenges within the hive.  It's reported to sound something like a child's toy horn and usually comes in at about a G# tonally.

Now, if we could get one of our colonies to do an E, another a B, and a fourth a D, we'd have barbershop!