Bee-cycling

Many, indeed, are the joys of beekeeping which I've wanted to share with you. For those of you with delicate spirits, please accept my warning that this one might be kindof gross.

This post is about things that eat honeybees, and why I am happy about this. Perhaps some background is necessary?

Honeybees (at least the ones that are alive today) are not native to North America, though they have been here either about 400 years (if you believe a Virginia colony ship's manifest from 1621) or maybe 500 (if you believe that the Spanish brought them to Mexico, and that the genetic traces being found out west by UDel's Dr. Debbie Delaney are the proof).

In the pro-pollinator community, some folks get a little sniffy about honeybees, raising an eyebrow at their foreign origins. Since no narrative I know of places human origin on this continent, I find this mildly amusing. Perhaps we pollinator advocates don't belong here, either?

Anyway, ever since my very first summer, I've seen European Giant Hornets, rogue jumping spiders, praying mantises, and the odd guilty-looking mockingbird hanging around the hives, and have been glad to meet them. Everything that lives depends on a network of other living things, and must die in its turn. Honeybee bodies in useless piles would do little for local ecology.

Which brings us to my bathtub. There's a skylight over the tub, and about 18 inches beyond the edge which you can see in the picture is the Wilde hive. Two feet or so to the left is the Twain hive. In season, about 4,000 bees a day die up there (have cheer: this year they are reproducing at least as fast).

We have problems with that skylight: it expands in the heat faster than the roof does, and little openings are created around the edges. For awhile, bees got into the bathroom on a regular basis, and I had to chase them around and put them back outside. But lately, it has just been bee parts.

This is a fairly normal afternoon view of the tub. The close up above illustrates a number of things learned from this summer. The first is that bee heads and legs are apparently not good eating. The second is that the heads float pretty well.

What haven't I been able to learn? The name and nature of the creature who is eating the rest of the bee bodies. When up on the roof, I can just about see a little pile of bee bits in a corner of the skylight, and I do suspect a spider, but I have never seen the culprit either grab a bee or shove a bee bit over the edge.

It is probably not ants, because they tend to tromp around continuously and seem rather oblivious to observation, while this critter is crafty. I also don't think that this animal is a hunter, because I have never observed anything other than the usual hornets or yellowjackets messing with my bees directly. Also, there are very few bee corpses on the roof this year.

I teach new beekeepers that everywhere any creature lives is a habitat, and even human-centered places like cities count. Watching my bees integrate in yet another way with the cycle of life hereabouts, I'm truly grateful that the living things around me present daily proof of life beginning and ending and munching and flying and peering over the skylight into my people-centric world.

No Such Thing as a Solitary Bee

Ok, so the truth is that there are lots of solitary bees, but they are not the honeybees that have lived and worked beside people for millennia. Why mention this? Because here in my no-longer-secret hometown, my picture is on the front of an article about beekeeping. I'm glad I'm in a veil, because I would never have had the opportunity to even open a hive without the help and friendship and wisdom of many others, and perhaps a few can be imagined in my place instead.
Some of them are beekeepers who are ready to tell others all about it, others enjoy a more private relationship with their bees, but it is a rare beekeeper indeed who does not rely on his or her connection to the rest of our community.
I like to tell people new to beekeeping that there is no such thing as a solo honeybee: a bee on its own is simply doomed. The dependencies are deep and complex: all the bees depend on the one indispensable Queen who is their mother, but she is the most helpless bee of all. The workers, who make the whole hive run, have nowhere to live and no food for the future without the existence of thousands of sisters back home who build and clean and guard and feed all day. Those lazy, fuzzy, funny drone boys cannot even feed themselves when their sisters close the doors to them.
And so many of us have opened our lives to them, some of us because we want to connect with our food supply, others to save the bees who are so essential to our agriculture, some for the love of honey, and some for the love of the green world around us.
Whether we planned on it or not, one of the windows that the bees seem always to open looks out on a world of natural miracles and wonder. And worries and responsibilities and joy as we try to help them thrive in a world that seems just packed full of challenges and threats and flowery opportunities.
Newspaper articles appearing now will perhaps make many more thousands of people aware of the bees on my roof and in yards and in flowers all over this city. My own personal hives have never been so exposed, and I hope I have not done wrong by them in sharing them with you. We live in a world that is full of fear, and I can certainly understand why something so unknown and seemingly out of place could cause concern. But we are in so much more danger without ties to the world and each other, without a community to turn to and ties that reach all the way into the world of bugs, plants, and critters.
I cannot tell you how good it feels to have a relationship that links me to a world of flowers and sunshine.

Bees in High Clover

The nectar flow ended here between two and three weeks ago, though we still have many flowers in gardens doing their best to keep the girls busy. One thing I have been taught to look for, but which has eluded me in the three beekeeping Springs before this one, is a secondary nectar flow from white clover.

Beekeepers tend to be unpopular neighbors in the suburbs: we like many of the broadleaf weeds, like dandelions and clover, that mar the upper middle class ideal of plushy green turf. In the city we aren't so picky about our greens, glad to have the photosynthesis that nature can push between the cracks. This photo shows a bee working a plentiful bloom of white clover that was all over the historic cemetery where I walk my dogs.

Often, a lack of rain or too much early summer heat dries up the clover: you can see some browned-out blooms in this photo (another fine example of cell phone photography!) So clover is an unreliable source, from opportunistic places, wiped out too easily by excess sun, a shortage of rain, or an enthusiasm for Roundup.

Interestingly, the bees were not working the purple clover at all. At a state beekeepers' lecture, I remember hearing that the purple ones are only good during their second year. Hmmm. Well why were there no second year blooms around?

Sadly but predictably, just today it appears that the mowers came to the cemetery, and wiped out at least an acre of bobbing white heads of clover. Well, it is mostly a cemetery, not a dog park and nature lab. Besides, there are still many millions of plants all around the neighborhood, though not where I could so easily visit with them. The picture at right shows one of many stands of Russian Sage that are already delivering the goods to the bees, and they are likely to keep doing so right through August.

This year the lavender is very bloom-y here in the neighborhood as well. I wonder if this year's honey will have additional sharp sweetness from the clover, and some extra floral dimension from the lavender. Hey, I like it just fine in its basic Tulip Poplar, Black Locust, and Basswood formulation, but life always rolls out a new angle.

Nature Loves a Bee

OK, looking at this image, what is the reaction you expect? Horror? outrage? Morbid curiousity? Would you be terribly disillusioned if what I told you instead was "How cool is that?!"

Beyond the fact that you really should respect any bug that can turn its head and look you in the eye, both this type of mantis (Tenodera Sinensis) and the honeybee are not natives of North America. But they have both made their homes here, and nature continues on in her colorful, red-in-tooth-and-claw way. This hive is actually at MaryEllen's house, and she has a picture of a more succesful mantis, with a disappointed-seeming bee clutched in her claws. And so it goes: all living things take, all living things give, all living things pass...the tapestry of life weaves another row.

MaryEllen and I were supposed to be labelling the honey we pulled for the Mill apiary, but it was sunny outside, and you can see what really happened. In less than two weeks, we will have a presentation session there. The harvest was not huge this year: once again, we pulled the boxes in August, and then the weather (drought) caused the bees to burn through more of their stores than we bargained for.

I think we will have a few dozen jars in maybe 5 sizes for the Mill store, pretty good for hives started from packages this Spring. My hives were started on drawn comb, which was my rationale for harvesting at all. Once again, we will see how well our bets were placed. I can tell you this: we did not place enough labels on jars today!

Pollination Redux

Every flower is an invitation, people. Perfectly respectable plants swallow up a bunch of energy, generate a bud and a bloom, and then bang out an explosion of color and scent and pollen and nectar. There has to be an important reason to go to this much effort, to divert this many resources from the business of photosynthesizing and growing, and wouldn't you just know that it has to be sex?

I'm being bombastic here, but it's caused by just a bit of (non- reproductive) frustration. With the impact that Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has had on the news in this country, and the opportunity it has given to truly show people the most important part of the honeybee-human relationship, I'm still having trouble explaining pollination to kids. It's basically the way in which plants get the male bit (pollen on the stamens) over to the female bit (the ovaries in the pistils), hopefully on a different plant. They overproduce the pollen to guarantee coverage and offer a protein food, they produce nectar THEY DON'T EVEN USE down near the bottom to get the dusty bees to go where the action is. This picture shows the act in progress at the right, and the fruit of the deed at the left.

Flowers truly are miracles: tell me, if the only kind of intelligence is the human kind, how did every plant that sets a seed come to (successfully) open up its reproductive process to third-party participation? I don't mean to say that plants are out there secretly hedging foreign currency markets, but that our ways of gathering and leveraging knowledge are based on the space we live in. The fish in the pond out front are smart in finny ways, my dogs are good at sniffing and stealing, and people excel at thinking about themselves.

But if you do somehow find yourself thinking about flowers, you can easily see the wonderful shopping experience they represent for the bees. Every one is attempting to cut the deal that gets the pollination done. Some, like apple trees, are hard bargainers: each bloom is pip-squeaky about how much nectar and pollen it doles out, but there are tons of flowers, all nearby, and not much else going at the time. The honeybee in my back yard, in the picture up there, is just about drunk as a skunk in a puddle of nectar on the bottom of THAT bloom. The deal is probably like this: "I know you have lots of places to go, and things to do, but I will fill you up in one swell stop, and invite you to root around ALOT by offering tons of nectar and pollen. Unfortunately, I am only open mornings, so I need to get you here right away (so I will make a huge, bright flower)." You know all those seeds inside a pumpkin? Each one required a pollen grain delivery, so you can see that the plant wants that bee in there a long time, rolling around.

So each plant develops its marketing strategy of size, color, smell, rewards, and even configuration to attract the right kind of pollination. Some even concoct little landing strips that you can see in UV light: they kind of point at the good stuff. So next time you walk in a garden, or a flowery field, experience the sales pitch. A whiff of wonderful scent turns your head one way, a glorious bloom makes your head tilt right, a carpet of color draws your eye down. It reminds me of walking in markets in the Middle East, where vendors and merchants call to you, invite you to dicker, and serve you a cup of sweet tea.

But don't try to deal with the corn. The wind-pollinated crops, like grasses, don't even try. They just shake their tassles in a self-satisfied way.

5 then 4 then 7 then 6

It has been a while, so grab a drink and a comfy chair. I'll try to keep this interesting (not, as I told someone recently, "and then they did this, and then I did that, after which they did this, causing me to decide to do the other...") because it has been another interesting and challenging year. Yet, things are changing— including how I'm handling the honeybees — and it is by turns mind-opening and a bit frightening to see what stays and what goes as we travel along this life together. But there is not much poetry in playing catch-up here, and I promise to do better later.

If there is a way to make this a short story, it is in the title of this post: last year ended with 5 hives, and 2007 started with only 4, when the mill hive died. For one reason or another (winning a package of bees at the club holiday party, deciding it made no sense to keep just one hive at the historic mill) by the end of April I had 7 hives in three locations. The monastery hives had trouble, though, and I had to fight to keep them alive, ending up uniting one of the struggling hives with the bodacious packaged bees (who just took off like crazy! Rock on girls!). So that makes six hives, all buzzing along quite nicely now, with almost no thanks due to me. It's a bit overwhelming, and I have been forced to take up a different kind of relationship with the bees: less "personal" if you will, but more respectful of them.

Excuses, Excuses

I have a lot to tell you even so, and therefore there are lots of small pictures on the left: if you click them they will pop up to the larger shots you might be used to here. This first one shows you one thing that has taken up alot of the past two months: assembling woodenware. The stuff at left is just the last batch of over 10 boxes (and associated frames) that joined our inventory this year. In previous years, I bought completely assembled hive parts, paying the extra money and banking the time. However, last year I read an article that said honeybees do better when given pure beeswax frames, and you can't get those shipped to you. Also, I felt a bit like a fraudulent beekeeping mentor when newbees ask me how to put their hives together, and I have been basically clueless.

Which brings me to my next great excuse for prolonged absence: I've been out trying to give what guidance I can to even newer beekeepers! The picture at left is my friend Jane in her apiary. I've been out there a couple of times (mostly because she worries too much!) and she has helped out at the mill, too. But I have also helped two new beekeepers set up at the Monastery (Joe and Joseph, with 2 and one hives respectively) and had a look into the hives of Bill, Andrea, and Jill. Mostly, new beekeepers just need a more experienced set of eyes to say "that's drone brood" or "this is a 3-day old egg) or "there's your queen" while they educate their own visual databanks. Sometimes there is an issue (like a crowded brood chamber) so I show them a few easy steps to sort things out. It's the kind of help I needed and got, and it is my duty to get out there myself.

Excuse number three boils down to even more doings in the world of humans, rather than bees, though it is the girls' fault to some extent. This picture shows my non-beekeeper cousin holding a frame of monastery bees (note this people: NO GLOVES!) We were on the road together for a week, celebrating her completion of another year of college on her way to becoming the teacher we all wish we had. She also helped me out with a surprisingly stressful commitment to volunteer in three different capacities (am I a moron, or what?) at the bicentennial of a historic site where I walk my dogs. This is the same place where we had the yellowjacket adventure last year, so the bees are really responsible for my rise to prominence (and exhaustion :-) ) over there.

Which brings me to the last figleaf of this post, but it is one to which you new beekeepers might want to pay attention: if you start looking out for bees and flowers, you are not very far off from butterflies and bats, and maybe snapping turtles and birds and ladybugs. Just after I began keeping honeybees, the world suddenly seemed to contain astoundingly more flowers and smells. This year, the yard seems to contain a remarkable selection of butterflies, birds, and native plants (which might have been simple weeds just a couple of years ago). When you open a door in your life, it's amazing the company you start to keep.

The Roof Bees

But you are probably more interested in bees than excuses, so perhaps you would like to know what is happening up on the roof. After losing the mill bees to mite-borne illness (or so I think today: ask me again in a few months...) I decided to get serious about Spring varroa mite treatment. Around here, the weather does not cooperate with the methods I like the best: I won't use the neurotoxin pesticides, and the essential oil and formic acid treatments have exacting temperature requirements. The roof bees were most similar to the colony that died in terms of persistent mite loads and the type of treatment they received last year, so I was VERY worried. I did not want to use oxalic acid again, and the confectioner's sugar treatment (more on that below) would result in a layer of frosting on my roof.

My solution was this: formic acid pads —"Mite Away II," in fact. As treatments go, it is pretty convenient and non-toxic. The temperature has to stay above 50 degrees F, and below 79 degrees F (at least during the first week), though. Around here, Spring is a bumpy time, and nights in the 50s quickly turn into days in the 80s. The pads have to be on for 21 days, and you have to get them out of there before the honey flow (in other words, May) so you can see that timing is everything. The heavy dose of formic acid which is release in the first week also hurts uncapped brood, which can put a hole in the workforce just before the honey flow here. The pads went on April 26 and came off on May 17. I've never tried a Spring mite treatment before, and truly hope this will make a major contribution to the health of the girls this season. They need every break they can get.

With apologies for the smear on the lens, here is the latest rooftop plot twist. These are supercedure cells in Wilde, my crazy Carniolan tribe. There were also THREE capped queen cells in the swarm position at the same time. We found them just as my cousin and I had to leave for our trip, so the next morning in the car, I sat there wondering whether they had left, and whether the formic acid treatment gave them a better chance of surviving if they did set up shop on their own. MaryEllen told me that the swarming impulse was considerably muted during the honeyflow, so maybe they would not go at all. As of today, it appears that they did not go. Perhaps they superceded, though their mom (a supercedure queen herself) is doing a great job.

The workers may have blamed her for the brood break that came with the formic, or they may have called it all off later. I am not sure, but I can tell you that there are three medium supers of honey on that colony, and probably 60,000 bees, so it is nonetheless a good year so far.

But what about Twain, you might ask? That hive superceded last year, too, and is still standing. The colony has fewer bees and less honey than Wilde, but it is definitely happy and strong. I was just in there today, giving another honey super to them. Even though most beekeepers here think that the main nectar flow is over, we have lots of linden trees planted along the streets, bursting with blooms. I hope that they will continue collecting actively for at least another week. While in the hive, I saw the darkest honey ever: tulip poplar, probably. There was no evidence of swarm cells, and lots of new eggs. While not as dramatic as the Carnies, Twain's Italian honeybees are buzzing along just fine.

The Monastery Bees

The Franciscan bees have presented the biggest scare and largest challenge of the year, so far. Sometime in late Winter, both queens became drone layers, and I had to pull all sorts of drone brood and requeen. Unfortunately, the Minnesota Hygienic queens that were available so early turned out to have problems. MaryEllen had several, none of which worked out, and one of mine ended up dying at my hand.

When the package bees I won arrived, I installed them in a nuc box at the Monastery as well. You can see the box at the left, with another upside down nuc box on top (to function as a feeder box). Those bees took off at once, with the queen laying wall-to-wall and happy bees flying to and fro all day long.

For several weeks, I went to the Monastery to monitor how the Minnesota queens were doing, from being released through initial laying. The queen in the Doug colony (furthest right in all of these pictures) came online relatively well, but the MaryEllen-the-Hive queen produced just a very few brood cells, then would stop, then would start, and I could never find eggs. For a month, I would go every few days, planning that "today is the day" I would kill the weak queen and unite the remaining bees with the nuc. You can see from this picture that the package had grown so big that they had been expanded into a full hive body. Then, in the next picture, you can see that they actually grew larger than MaryEllen-the-Hive.

Finally, I opened up the colony, and found that wax moths had started to breed, and that the bees had been too weak to fight them off. The time had come, as much as I hated to kill a poor, innocent creature who had earned no blame. To let her live, all her children would die, and a hive that could give life to thousands of wild plants (and the creatures that depend on them) would cease to exist. It was my responsibility, and I did it, but I wish she had not seemed so terrified and confused. It was not her fault.

But let me try to explain what I saw. Here's a shot of a really great brood pattern. Do you see how there are very few open cells? The edges of the frame hold nectar and pollen for the nurse bees to use in taking care of the brood. The queen began laying in the center of this frame, and little by little, cell by cell, spiraled outward, laying. The cells in the middle will hatch first: some of the empties near the edges may actually be brood that has not been capped yet. The queen will come back later and lay again in these cells, once they are cleaned and ready to go again.

This is a not-so-great pattern. If you click on this picture, you will get a bigger-than-normal photo, an attempt to show you something which is a little hard to see. This is a medium frame, but it is not even filled out top-to-bottom. There are more empties than filled holes. Finally, do you see the queen cups on the bottom? These workers know that they need a new mom, and are trying to get one. The cups are actually in a swarm position, but the hive is so low on population that there is no way they will swarm. I think they are just trying to get a new queen any way they can, and they are not succeeding.

So in early May I united the nuc and MaryEllen-the-Hive, and they seem to be doing really well now. I still need to watch Doug, because that hive still has a hygienic queen, the last among all the queens that MaryEllen and I installed from that shipment that still appears to be reigning over a hive. Therefore, there is reason to worry that she will peter out. But so far, so good.

You might wonder why I am not talking about varroa treatments at the Monastery, and you would be a smartie if you did. The reason that I did not do a Spring treatment is this: the drone laying and drone larvae removal was one massive IPM-style varroa treatment. The mites are attracted to drone larvae preferentially, and when you remove the boys, you generally whallop the varroa population. Also, requeening caused a big disruption in the hives' brood cycles, also depressing the varroa population. Therefore, I am holding off until Fall, trying not to interfere too much in these very messed-with hives.

The Historic Mill Bees

In a way, I've saved the simplest, most rewarding story for last. Here is the Mill apiary, with 4 hives and a nuc (the small colony with a red strap around it). MaryEllen-the-Beekeeper is having her swarmiest year ever, so she keeps having to stash a nuc of captured wanderers at the Mill while she plans her next move. Since last year, a big old tree that overshadowed the apiary had to be removed (or it would fall down) and you can see me in the background in front of our new privacy fence. The extra sunlight seems to have done wonders for the girls, because we are all doing really well so far.

Here are my two colonies. I am trying to replace all the green boxes with white to get away from the stripey look and to keep better track of my gear inventory, but you see how it is. These two big colonies were actually started from packages just two months ago, and they took off like a rocket. The packages were installed onto comb that the girls who died left behind, somethig that worried me. But there is no evidence of disease so far, and a general vibe of health and happiness seems to spread from those boxes. There were three medium supers of not-yet-capped honey on each hive when I visited a couple of days ago, really wonderful for colonies started from packages this year!

This is just a gratuitous art shot of bees through the inner cover on the day I replaced it with a screened cover (for better ventilation and heat reduction). I just love to look at them.

And also a bit unnecessarily, here is a picture of some mill nurse bees taking care of new eggs. It is more important to see eggs than to track down the queen, and these hives have made it very easy for me this year. They have grown fabulously and happily, and I just hope to stay ahead of them in meeting their needs, including varroa management. The mites killed their predecessors, and I want to do better this year.

After going to a state beekeeping meeting where the role of all kinds of chemicals was a concern in the recent Colony Collapse Disorder crisis, I became convinced that I should try a completely non-toxic, non-chemical approach to control at the Mill. Here you see two cups of confectioners' sugar ladled onto the screened top of a hive.

By brushing the powdered sugar into the hive, I can cause the varroa mites to lose their footing and fall off the bees. The powdered sugar literally clogs up the little hooks and hairs they use to grab bees, and the motes fall down to the waiting ants. The bees can actually eat any extra sugar, and the grooming behavior they use to remove it also helps in mite control.

The only problem with this treatment is that it needs to be repeated regularly and many many times besides. I know a beekeeper who used this treatment exclusively, and nonetheless lost her bees. Therefore, I need to watch for any signs of an infestation, and have another plan just in case one erupts. I have formic pads set aside as a fall treatment even now, but my jury is out on what to do if an infestation erupts during hot weather.

It can actually be a little entertaining to apply this treatment. The bees change their buzz as soon as you drop the sugar, and they begin flying around in a somewhat disoriented fashion, looking like little ghost bees. Here's a whitened bee lifting her nasanoff gland, followed by another grooming herself on a fencepost. Notice the little white spot she left when she landed!

The bees probably do not see so well with sugar in their eyes, and in the left picture you can see a bee that drifted into the hive next door during the mere 10 minutes between when I opened the first one and then the second to apply the treatment. The right picture shows a hapless bee that has been captured by a "Daring Jumping Spider," kind of a cool looking beastie itself. I know this may sound odd or wrong to you, but I am actually glad to see the bees become a part of ALL portions of the cycle of life where they are located. Honeybees are not native to North America, but if they can slip into an integrated role in a balanced ecology, they can provide tremendous benefit. I am sorry to kill bees, but not sorry to see life be succeeded by death and renewed life in the natural order of things.

Finally, while there I actually saw one of the Mill queens cruising around, measuring a cell, and laying an egg. Unfortunately, I smeared my lens again, so this is the best I could do. It was a treat to see an utterly unbothered queen, healthily going about her regal business, supporting a family that is doing well.

I Believe in Living Sunlight

Today I checked my hives after days of hard wind and rain. A honeybee pulled out a young, deformed worker, and dropped her a few yards away. The sick bee moved a little, but had no hope to live. Her sister took no time for pity. I did, but couldn't know whether a short tap from my toe would end her misery or shorten her only moment of sunshine. So it is with bees.

I'm a hobbyist beekeeper, but my companions are a theme of my days. I speak to youth groups, summer camps, and festivals about the miracle and importance of honeybees — how they can plug a jaded urbanite into a world of sun, rain, and blossom. Kids and adults respond with wonder. The bees are the living embodiment of sunshine, dependent on plants and their blooms to flourish, a need which is returned by the wild plants — as well as crops — that depend on pollinators for another generation of seeds and flowers.

In the city, I live like a yuppie but think like a farmer. I know the temperatures of the past 6 months and the forecast for this week. I know how much rain we've had, and how much we need. Since the bees arrived, I've smelled the blanket of sweetness that the linden trees lay down in June. Have these been extra-fragrant years, or did I just never notice before?

The bees are Tinkerbell vegetarians, less than 1 inch long and hanging from borrowed-looking wings. You can see gold sunshine through their bodies, as if the sweetness of honey starts inside. Being a ham-handed mammal pawing through the delicate home of 50,000 bees has underscored the clumsy truth about power: it's impossible not to kill or injure on the way to staving off disease and starvation. I'm wrong from time to time about how to fight those foes. Size and strength are no help in fixing my mistakes, made by clumsy fingers 20 times the size of any bee, by limits on what I can see and understand about their lives.

Bees live in a tight family communities, something many of us crave. Workers that stow honey in May will never meet the December sisters who eat it. Yet the bees are ruthless: the ill are cast out, and the old try to die outside the hive. They can't change how they live, even with the new illnesses and parasites that humans brought. Paradoxically, they need us more, since they can't survive alone. We need them more, too, as other pollinators disappear with their habitats.

Living with honeybees, I see the life force of sunlight streaming through our lives, in sweetness and danger. I don't know if the bees and I are within the cascade of warmth, or if it is in us. But I know we are together just the same, and our very different worlds will have their stories written in the same light.

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An explanation for this essay:

One of the public radio networks in the United States regularly runs a segment called "This I Believe," where listeners can contribute a personal statement of belief. The program hopes to get people thinking and talking about faith and belief, during these times when we are all so likely to tear each other apart over these subjects. Friends have suggested, from time to time, that the honeybees are an appropriate subject for such an essay from me, and I resisted until now. I've learned as much about what I don't believe as about where my faith resides, you see.

So I uploaded this essay, "500 words or less," and realize that it's a poor fit. Like a beekeeper with a particular way of looking after the hives, these folks have a unique project and a specific method in mind, and I did not follow the directions. But I am glad I did it, anyway.

Maybe the best part is this: after your no-more-than-500-word submission, they give you 800 words to reflect upon the exercise of writing your belief statement! This, my friends, may seem silly — but it is actually quite cool. This is what I wrote:

This is not the first time I have written about bees: they seem to provide the doorway to a deeper understanding of how to be a unique, living being in a nonetheless teeming world. I go back again and again to learn what I really think and feel and sometimes to change my mind.

Politically, I am a biased person, but the bees actually make me confront some of the principles I hold for convenience and comfort, rather than for the sake of truth. It splits apart the relationship with truth and false faith, where you cleave to a belief for reasons other than thinking that the force of life within you really supports it.

"This I Believe" was a necessary activity for me because it made me confront so many things about power and responsibility and limitations and life and death in this little community where my role is so important but not omnipotent. I cannot love the bees without accepting their brutality, I cannot understand the cruelty without the beauty. How else can a person understand themselves?

Blue Signs of Spring

With apologies for the crummy, telephone - photographed image, here's a plant that I think the bees go to, blooming profusely in my neighborhood. No honeybees were here quite yet, but it's a glorious day and, and hope blooms, too. I believe this is "henbit" and that it *is* a bee plant, though I cannot check it just now. My husband and I are on the road again, this time to Israel. I hope to find some Galilee bees, and to see who is flying in the Negev.

In case you were wondering, it seems like the search queries that bring people here now are evenly split between "bee death" and "bee feeding," and I hope you all find what you need here. There are at least two "new" disorders this year, "colony collapse disorder" and a virulent nosema (bee dystentery) but I do not deal with them here, because I have not seen them myself. I can tell you an insight a more conservative beekeeper told me though, a kind of wisdom about this time of year in this type of climate.

The bees truly rely upon numbers, population numbers, to make their worlds work, and rightsizing the number of bees to tne environment they inhabit is a major bee proccupation. What do I mean by this? I mean that it takes a large number of bees to exercise control over the inside of hive -- to make sure everyone gets fed, that the temperature is warm enough, that disease and dirt are eliminated quickly, that new brood is covered, that the queen is tended, and so on. If the bees are in too much space, they may be overwhelmed with work. If they are in too little, they don't have enough resources to support them all or have enough room to get their work done.

But right now, too low a population is the threat. If there is enough family in there, they can stay warm, they can balance their hive tasks among workers, they can avoid frenzy, exhaustion, and disease. There is less stress, there is less disease.

This same beekeeper told me how, a year ago, he found three dwindling colonies in temperatures that were far too cold. He took those colonies, only three or four frames of bees a piece at that point, and popped them (queens and all) into one hive box. Two months later, in much warmer days, he opened up the hive to find all the bees in there, as well as all three queens. To the honeybees, the numbers were everything in the game to survive: joining forces, all the queens laying, god only knows what kind of pheromonal cocktail animating the place. Normally, the queens would hunt and kill each other until only one remains. In this case, perhaps the workers kept them apart. So much for "one hive, one queen" By season's end, it was a normal hive, but not a very strong one. They had all been through too much, and cracked foundations make unsteady buildings.

As the weather warms, some beekeepers make see piles of dead bees like this near the entrance to the hive. This is right after a cold cold time, and the bees have a lot of dead sisters to get out of the hive all of a sudden. They usually carry their sisters farther away, but in this case they have to push 'em out quick. This is frightening to find, but not unusual. I hate to show you this picture, but the numbers of people worried about be death make me think you need to see it. I have been in this hive, and monitored its progress over a few more good days, and the death has not continued at least up to now). They are still in there, taking sugar.

Outside my hive that died, the signs of death went on for quite awhile, and much less dramatically. There were few bees around at all when it life ended there. So please baby your bees, feed them fondant and sugar, and look forward to Spring. I hope we al find the flowers that make us hum.

Gratuitous Bee Picture

It has been a while since you got to look at a bee picture, so here you go. The year is definitely coming to a close, and my job mostly is to feed sugar syrup and take mite counts.

These bees were hanging out in the Twain feeder, licking their sweet-loving chops because they had eaten all their 2:1 sugar syrup (3 gallons!) and were about to get some more.

The girls over in Wilde are not taking their syrup, though. Ugh. I want them to suck it up because it contains a treatment for Nosema (a disease bees sometimes get in the winter because they cannot poop when temps are below 50 degrees F, and they therefore "hold it"), and also it's really really hard to clean out such a full feeder if they let it get moldy. Imagine a big shallow box full almost to the brim with sticky stinky old sugar water. Ugh again.

The Wilde colony is actually better off for winter stores, and some beekeepers don't even treat for Nosema around here (we have lots of winter days that break 50 degrees F at some point). Finally, the National Weather Service predicts another mild (or at least average) winter, so the main concern is the mess, I guess.

Finally, since we are approaching the cold days, I thought it would be a good idea to catch a glimpse of those golden bees. I'll soon be missing them, and I also like to go back through old photos sometimes, and think about how so many bees have come and gone. The idea that the light bounced off these few and made an longer human impression seems like just another kind of honey.

Beewaves

During week after week of idyllic Spring days, humans may exult, but bees are more practical. They seek out water, and they bring it home. Even so, it makes a bit of unexpected magic.

The force of their wing beats makes beautiful and fleeting ripples on the water's surface, a delightful surprise. Bees have to work hard to fly, and they look a bit like they are hanging from borrowed wings sometimes when they do.

If you click on the picture, you can download an 18 MB, one minute Quicktime movie of honeybees over the bird bath. At 11 and 28 seconds, and again right near the end, you can see ripples where no bee touched the water. Try to imagine jewel-like sunshine and a steadier camera hand, and maybe you can be there, too.

Beespotting

If the bees were ready to swarm, they would have done it today, so I kept an eye on them. Instead of waving goodbye to a cloud of departing residents, however, I got to supervise a glorious working day for many hundreds of busy honeybees.

I sat on the roof near the hives, trying to see what they were bringing in. They have been thronging the birdbath and the planters, so some of the more wobbly arriving flights were probably packing H₂O. Others had their panniers packed with bright yellow pollen: most likely maple, since you can now see buds on the trees, even from the ground.

Then it hit me, last year it had seemed a shame that I had no picture, or real idea where to take pictures, of where the bees were working each day. Therefore, I focused as best I could on incoming and outgoing bees, trying to see where they were headed or coming from. This is not easy! The bees tend to fly out of the front of the hive, spiral around higher and higher, almost beyond sight, and then take off like a shot in their desired direction. It almost seems as if they blink out of existence.

But some were headed right past me and down, past the bird bath, to something else nearby. I grabbed the camera, headed down the twisty staircase, and out in the alley behind the house, pursuing a generally bee-ish course.

And it turns out that the bees had found this rosemary bush, gloriously in bloom, in the yard of a neighbor who does not like me much. Honeybees on the job are notoriously difficult to photograph, and I was afraid to go in this yard, so I leaned on the fence, propped up the camera, and crossed the fingers that weren't pressing the shutter. Within a set of some 20 nearly random shots, the first picture above and the last one below managed to show happy honeybees in their first Spring blooms.

This officially marks the beginning of the season where my poor dogs will have to wait as I poke my head into every bush during their walks, looking for the girls. It's time to root for even temperatures and nighttime rains, for abundant nectar and gentle winds. It's time to realize that it's way too soon for these things, but to feel them tantalizingly just ahead.

A Gift of Bees

Today my honey gave me a gift of bees, though they are a bunch of buzzers that I will never actually see, and I love it! Click the pic for details...

Heifer International gives families throughout the developing world animals and know-how for sustaining themselves, their communities, and the environment. It is extremely cool: you can donate a hive of bees, or a trio of bunnies, or a quackful of ducks, and the world is a bit better off. Everyone who receives such a gift is required to pass it on to another family.

Therefore, this is a perfect Valentine's gift! I have received the gift of honeybees and love in my own life, and hopefully that sunshine has already reached somebody else.