Cindy brought me a cup of coffee last Tuesday morning. I took a
big swig. Oh, that first taste of coffee in the morning.
It was kind of a heavenly moment. Early morning. Three packages of
bees. Fresh coffee.
It didn’t have a heavenly end, but what does?
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| In 2006, David had lots of bee experience, yet they remained mysterious. We were just starting to battle Colony Collapse Disorder. David never got a chance to get his bees going when we moved to Houston County. |
I had set up my bee hives carefully, put in new foundation on the
frames, filled the feeders with syrup to tide the critters over till the
flowers sprout.
The bees had arrived the night before in three-pound boxes,
roughly 10,000 bees per box. They formed a cone-like shape over a queen bee,
who had already mated at her California home.
I opened the first package, removed the queen in her mini-cage,
and covered the opening of the box so the other bees wouldn’t follow. The next
sequence was to take out the little piece of cork that keeps the queen in her
cage, replace it with some crystallized honey, hang her cage between two
frames, staple it in place, dump the bees on top of her, put back three frames
that had been removed, put the feeder on top, and put on the hive cover.
The other bees will free the queen by eating the honey, then
she’ll get busy laying thousands of eggs. And the bee hive will begin in
earnest in good old Brownsville, Minnesota. That’s by the book, although bees
can’t read.
I carefully removed the cork as the queen turned tiny circles in
her cage. She was anxious to go about her business. I plugged the hole with
honey, hung her between frames, and picked up the box of bees. I was just about
to shake them into the hive when the queen came out to greet me. The honey plug
had fallen out! She stayed for a split second. If a bee could thumb her nose,
that’s what she was doing. Then she flew away, followed by a few choice words
from me. (They were about me, not her.)
I put the cover back on the package of bees. I would have to find
a new queen somehow, which is not always an easy thing to do.
On to the second package. This time I stuffed the hole of the
queen cage with a good, solid glob of honey. I placed her cage between the
frames and decided not to staple it in place. I was in a hurry. I knocked the
package of bees onto the top of the frames. That dislodged the queen cage. Darn
it, it is supposed to hang between the frames! Now it was on the bottom of the
hive, covered with bees. And did that dislodge the honey? Was she free? I
quickly put the rest of the frames in the box, hoping I would not see another
queen wave goodbye. I put on the feeder and the cover. Maybe all was OK.
The third package was textbook. Hung the queen, kept a finger over
the honey plug, stapled her cage in place so it wouldn’t fall, dumped on her
couriers, put on the feeder and hive cover.
It took three tries but I finally got it right. That’s life for me.
Three phone calls and four hours later, I had located a new queen.
Only cost me $15. Not a bad price. I put her in the package with her new family
that evening, so they could get used to each other. Bees will kill a queen if
they don’t get used to her first. The next night she and the others went into
their new home lickety-split. I was an expert by this point.
Bees are interesting creatures. They
have a set of instincts
that can humble us humans. They’ll find pollen and seal it up into cells of
“bee bread.” When an egg hatches in three days, special nursemaids will eat the
bee bread, convert it into food, and feed the larva for six days. Then they seal
the cell. The larva transforms into a pupa, and in 12 days an adult bee chews
her way out of the cell. They live a total of six weeks.
They’ll care for their queen, feed and groom her non-stop so she
can lay up to 1,000 eggs a day. If they get tired of that queen, they have the
ability to create a new queen by feeding larva special food they make called
royal jelly.
They make propolis to seal and waterproof their hives. They use
their wings and water to air condition a hive.
And best of all, they’ll gather nectar from flowers and blossoms
and the fruits of Duane Thomford’s hard farming work. They’ll use their wings
to evaporate the water in the nectar, then enzymes will change the nectar into
honey. They’ll seal the honey into cells using beeswax, which comes from glands
on the underside of the worker bee’s abdomen
Pretty amazing. Only bees can do it. We can put a man on the moon
but we can’t make honey. Got to like that.
I’ll just stand back and watch, give them more frames when they
need them, and try not to make too many more mistakes.
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