The Agrinautica

   In the popular imagination, I imagine, "honeycomb" is a gooey dripping amber chunk of honey with, somewhere inside it the hexagonal framework of the beeswax supporting it. In actual fact it rarely looks like this.
   When first built wax comb is a crisp bone-white, one often sees it like this where bees have nested briefly out in the open on a branch. Sometimes they've only been there 48 hours before finding a new home but they've already build a few bright white blades of comb. Older comb that has been used to store honey is a creamy yellow and when full up of honey they seal the honey in with a snow-white layer of capping.
   Bees use comb for two distinct purposes (mainly), there, the honey storage, but there's also "brood comb" where they raise new bees. Here in the core of the hive they ley eggs, which develop from little pieces of rice into larvae, which look like grubs, only cutely -- they do not creep around though but stay snug in their cell like you in a sleeping bag in a tent on a cold night. And then after six days the nurse bees put a cap over the cell and the young bee pupates in its cell, spinning a silk cocoon around itself (you don't think of bees making cocoons around themselves now do you). This brood comb is distinct from the honey comb, the cappings over the brood is not snowy white like the honey but a pleasing light brown in the youngest brood. Shortly it becomes a cinnomen red-brown and eventually, after a few years, a dark mohagony brown of dark chocolate. Along with this chocolatey color it is by this point no longer crisp and angular but thick with rounded edges. If you were to try to cut it with a knife you'd find it is also thick but yielding, again like chocolate, but also filled with the cellophane-like crinkling remnants of bee silk. And it's delicious like chocolate -- no not to you or I but to the "small hive beetle" (which looks like the lady bug's evil alter ego, all black), and the wax moth, whom we'll come back around to so stick a pin in it.

   Where does beeswax come from, I hear you crying out into the void on many a dark night (in your tent). Young bees extrude it from four glands on the underside of their abdomen, they then detach these and mold them into the wax comb they is being built. Interestingly, it does not begin with the famous hexagons but begins with circles that then become hexagons through I suppose the morphological pressures pushing and pulling their walls.

   Beeswax mainly consists of esters and saturated and unsaturated fatty acids -- WAIT WAIT I see your eyes glazing over, and let me tell you right now I haven't the faintest idea what an ester is either, but what I can tell you is beeswax readily absorbs most chemicals it comes in contact with, especially oils. As a result of this, old dark comb is full of all kinds of chemical build up from things the bees have brought into the hive. Debris including from the bees own cute little dirty feet as they come in from outside, gets absorbed into the beeswax (leading to a build up of a high amount of "proteinacious material" (read, delicious to moths and beetles, they be licking their lips just reading this), as well as the silk cocoon lining (silk is almost entirely protein). As a result of this build up, especially the latter one, the actual size of the inside of the cell gets progressively smaller, which causes the bees developing in the cells to be smaller, in one experiment bees emerging from 7 year old comb were only 55% as big as bees developing in fresh comb, and many other experiments how smaller bees are less productive. Ii imagine if they could talk they'd have really high pitched voices they'd be extremely self conscious about.
   But let's get back to those wax moths for a moment, that find this old comb so delicious. Galleria of the galleriini They generally aren't present when there's a lot of bees, but if a hive has become empty of bees or nearly so is when they run riot. Their fat white grubs will burrow through that chocolatey old comb, rendering it into the sticky cobwebbing like the devil's cotton candy. Then the grumbs spin clusters of cocoons that have the consistency of styrofoam. Finally the emerge as drab and dim-witting moths that flutter about ineffectually but somehow find their way into more hives eventually. Many a beginning beekeeper has opened a hive to find its just been reduced to grey webbing and packing peanuts (would that be the peanut galleria). Experienced beekeepers learn this fate is easily avoided but still generally harbor a vindictive grudge against wax moths (I told you to stick a pin in them didn't I?)
   We tend to lose track of the Old Ways, of how things were Before Us. What happens when people aren't manually rotating out old combs after all? Well, before we were keeping bees in boxes they tended to live in tree hollows. Established feral (naturally occurring) hives only live about six years (probably not a coincidence that that's about the point at which the comb becomes particularly too old), then the hive fails. The population dwindles away. A greater or lesser wax moth flutters drunkenly in for better or worse, and lays its nigh microscopic eggs all over, which soon become dozens and dozens of fat squirming grubs turning the wax into so much unsettlingly-sticky fluff, which they leave behind when they themselves go fluttering out to find more mischief. Now there's a cavity space full of fluff, which some mice or squirrels find make a snug home, until their activities have used up all the cursed cotton and left an empty cavity space ... perfect for reoccupation by a new swarm of bees. The natural cycle.
   The man-managed cycle, meanwhile, requires that these old frames be painstakingly cleaned of the old comb. The old wax is either cut, melted or blasted with a pressure washer, to remove the comb from the wooden frame. This old wax weighs 5 times as much as new comb, precisely because it is now 80% stuff other than beeswax ("slumgum" its called), so even melting it down can feel unrewarding considering one is mostly getting this waste material. And then one needs to rewire the frames and put now straight pieces of "foundation" wax in them to guide the bees. Bees can obviously build on their own but with no guides they might not necessarily build straight enough on the frames.
   So we know what we need to do, what we should do, as a good beekeeper, right? Change out those frames. But a few years ago I came up with a rather unorthodox solution. I do rotate those old frames out of the brood area to the honey boxes wherefrom they will be removed from the hive at harvest. But then, as they're sitting empty in storage in the shed waiting for the hives to be ready to receive them, ripe for nibbling my wax moths ...I, well, I don't mean to scandalize you but, well, I let them. Just a nibble. Going through them about once a month is frequent enough to catch the wax moth larvae having turned just a few square inches of the comb into hell-floof, which I remove. And those squirming grubs I pluck them out and toss them to the waiting magpies who come with heart shapes in their eyes. Repeated every so often until the whole core of the comb has been removed, I'm left with a frame with just a border of old comb, empty in the middle, not needing to be rewired. I haven't wasted any time mucking around but now have a frame I can put into a hive, and the bees will use the remaining edges as a guide to build the requisite straight comb.
   The resultant comb will have swirls of dark chocolate brown whirled with the golden french vanilla coloured brand new comb like an ice cream of buzzing bees, or, perhaps, as I gaze fondly at it, I might say like a purring calico cat.

   In Theory on Monday I'd take the train to Albury, 7.5 hours, and then drive from there to Euston (5.5 hours), and that would be that. Not so simple it turns out.

   In the morning (6:11am!) I found googlemaps directing me not to my local train station but bus stop. I don't know how it knows when the train has been replaced by a bus (or "coach" as they call it to sound more classy) but all one can do is trust google maps implicitly. So road the train-replacement-bus about forty min to an hour in to Waurn Ponds on the outskirts of Geelong, where we were all able to transfer on to a train. Train from there to Melbourne's Southern Cross station (1 hour, 25 min). Had about 40 minutes there (8:45 - 9:26) which was perfect for grabbing a hot cheese-and-ham croissant at a station cafe for breakfast. Then train another hour and a half north to the town of Seymour (10:56). It seemed like half the train's occupants got out here, but a lot of them must have been ending their journey there because only two v-line (train company) coaches were boarding passengers for onward journeys, and the Albury bound (pronounced Aubrey) bus was less than a third full, one person per row-side. Two hours on this bus headed east north east to Albury.

   I thought I'd be popping in to the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) office there to get oriented/inducted/whatever but clarifying it via email I was informed I was just to go to the car rental place there to pick up a car. Which, being as Albury is a substantial distance the wrong direction from my final destination I thought the whole reason I was coming here was because it was the closest DPI office to me. Anyway, walked from the train station to the downtown area to have lunch at a Vietnamese place. Seemed like a nice town, weather was pleasantly in the 20s/70s c/f. Car rental place was 3.1 km out of town, I didn't feel like walking it, for one thing that would add time I couldn't afford to add on to an already long journey. Uber didn't come up with anything so had to call a yellow taxi. The journey up to this point had cost me $18 in train fares, this taxi cost me $23. Hopefully I'll be reimbursed -- the DPI had said they couldn't cover my travel outside of NSW but Albury was in state so..
   Taxi driver was an immigrant from Pakistan (15 years ago). It's funny, being a fellow immigrant, I always get a happy feeling of comraderie from fellow immigrants whereever they're from. We're a secret club.

   Got the rental car, and then it was a 5.5 hour drive from there west to the final destination of Euston, through small towns and small rural highways. I was surprised by how few other cars were on the road, even passing through the small towns the streets seemed deserted. Sun set. I was afraid of hitting kangaroos but didn't see any, just a fox that cheekily crossed the road just in front of me.

   Arrived at the hotel at 20:24 -- 14 hours after setting out! I've been on plenty of 14 hour flights, people act like thats a shocking and miserable amount of time to be on a flight -- I can tell you 14 hours on a flight is sheer paradise compared to 14 hours of coach-train-coach-taxi-car.

The hotel here is gaudy like a casino, and indeed has a section off the spacious restaurant portion full of slot machines (it is after all the "Euston Club Resort," though we're staying in the "Euston Club Motel" section).

Checked in to my room and then returned to the restaurant as i was by now very overdue for dinner. Kitchen was closed of course but there was a very decent large meat pie on a warming rack i was able to get -- but not before being sternly chastised for wearing a hat. I don't know if it's a literal law that hats can't be worn in "clubs" or this is just a piece of etiquette Australians feel very strongly about but, while i don't think it's enforced in pubs or restaurants, anything that quantifies as any sort of "club" will remind you to take your hat off in a tone dripping with poisonous disdain.

And my "schooner" (half pint?) of (alcoholic) ginger beer cost $13 (roo bucks), which i felt was a bit high!

And that was my Monday. Having called and texted our team leader with no success in attempting to find out what we were doing the next day or when and where to meet, I went to bed without having any idea what was in store the next day.

Monday, June 26th, Day 53 - The trainees were coming from that far away place where the inauguration had been, which was at least four hours away. We expected them in the early afternoon but apparently their bus broke down ("their lorry got spoiled") and they ended up not arriving until late late like 8 or 9pm. I mostly sat at the dais working on my computer. You see my hotel doesn't have wifi ... well it DOES have wifi, I can see the god damn network and the signal is strong but all the staff profess no knowledge of it, when asked they say vaguely a guy is coming soon to fix the wifi. I think just none of them know the password and can't be bothered to figure it out. This hotel is a bizarre surreal place, in the early evening when lights would be on in occupied rooms there's often no other room with lights on or maybe one. On a boomin night there might be three others. And its a big fancy hotel. Anyway I digress, since it doesn't have wifi but if I stay in the training hall I can use the wifi server my support people have I wantede to stay there. Plus my hotel has an uncomfortable little desk but sitting at the lecture hall dais is comfortable and the kind of office I could get used to.
   So that was Monday.



Tuesday, June 27th, Day 54 - Started relatively early in the morning with the lectures. The original plan was to go to the field in the morning this day but we rearranged it because I didn't think it would be practical to have the field visit first before anything else at all. They'd be like "brood? whats brood? Drone? Whats a drone?"
   This group seems to be the youngest yet, I think there's at least half a dozen that look under 16 even (most are still around 20ish I think). This morning they were very quiet, often having no questions at all after a section, though by now I'm finding that's relatively normal before we've had a field visit to loosen people up. Once or twice when I called for volunteers ("okay who can point to the drone in this picture") no one volunteered even after a minute or two, which has never happened before. In this case it's not a matter of being worried about going to fast --we've already lost Monday and Sam wants to finish Thursday morning so we're trying to cram what was originally a week long program into essentially two days now-- but just about people being engaged in the material.

   In the afternoon we had a field visit, to the farm school just outside of town where we had gone on Friday. "Mr Odonku," the president of the regional beekeeping association, seems to oversee these hives and they're well tended. As mentioned last week, he both already is very knowledgeable and never contradicts me, in fact immediately taking up and repeating things I vaguely suspect he's only just hearing from me for the first time, which I appreciate!
   We had a very productive afternoon, he really helps me as we try to cycle through letting every trainee get a chance of hands on in the hive, and helping them along. And the trainees for their part, they seemed if anything more engaged than previous groups, they were really into it.
   We also had an unusually useful experience in that we were able to split a hive, which we had done last week, but also! There's checks you need to do a week later on a split hive, and having split one last week, this week we could not only split a hive but do the week-later check as well.
   There was a bit of a mystery because the one side of the split had a capped queen cell, which should take 8 days, or maybe a minumum of six, but this is four days later. So its good the hive has a queen cell but it shouldn't be so far advanced in so short a time. I can't remember if it was there last week but it must have been? This is where it helps to have a log book.

   That evening I sat on the steps in the breezeway for awhile in the evening, tooling aorund on my phone which is all I'd have done in my room anyway. Technically I was waiting for one of the guys (ie Williams or Sam) to take me in a yellow-yellow back to my hotel -- it's only about 100m literally, but there's no sidewalk on the road and it does seem a bit dangerous ... though I could probably manage to take a yellow-yellow myself. But as I said it was nice out and I had no particular reason to hurry back to the hotel. I could hear the laughter and ruckus of the trainees running around the halls of the hostel buildings and thought to myself how much fun they were probably having, young people on a rare multi day trip to another town. Probably having a great time, making memories, misbehaving. I fondly recalled my college conference days and wondered when I got so old.



Wednesday, June 28th, Day 55 - Another relatively early start on the lecturing. As predicted they're more engaged now that they've had that field visit. And another field visit in the afternoon this day. This time we were at the other place we'd gone to last week -- where the hives were located in thick jungley brush, they had been notably badly tempered bees. And the owner, "FM" had been a bit overenthusiastic about doing everything himself. So let's see how this visit goes hey. "FM" btw, last week I didn't know what he looked like outside of the bee suit, I have since learned he's actually an stocky grey haired older man.
   As usual we divided into two groups, the first group suited up and we headed into the bush to the hives. Start working on the first hive, and even though I began the process, knocking on the topbars to find the one to open and opening the few, and then handed the hive tool to a trainee to pull one out, as soon as the trainee had taken the topbar out FM took it from him. I could see he really wanted to harvest it, it was entirely uncapped honey, but I had already announced it as uripe unsuitable for harvesting so he reluctantly put it back and then took out the next comb, which was capped, and harvested it. As he reached for the next one I said "please let a trainee do it" but he ignored or didn't hear me and took the next topbar himself and harvested it. As he reached for the next one I said more emphatically "LET . A . TRAINEE . DO . IT" and he used his knife to separate the topbar, let the topbar lift it, and then took it from her. Which is about what he'd done last week. He went through that charade with one or two other trainees before giving up the pretense and doing it all himself while everyone watched.
   Then this group of trainees trudged back to the village, while FM, a friend of his and myself stayed by the hives. He went to go prepare the area around the next hive we'd look at, cutting back the brush with his machete, and I wasn't paying much attention until I heard some loud thumping -- he was thwacking right against the hive. And then he roughly lifted the lid without any smoke jsut to I guess see how many bees were in there. Then he picked up an empty hive, roughly dumped it on top of the occupied hive, using the latter as a table, and proceeded to bang around with it cleaning it of the wax moths that had infected it. It was at this moment that I completely checked myself out I think. He had been inconsiderate of the trainees in not giving them opportunities to be involved, him roughly abusing the hive now was a further act of inconsiderateness, stirring the bees up thoroughly! No wonder the bees here had been remarkably badly tempered last week, lord knows what he had done to them before we arrived!! And, I try not to be sentimental about bees, but that kind of rough abusive attitude towards the bees themselves does also piss me off.
   Then the next group of trainees arrived. Fm immediately took off the lid from another hive that was there that was empty and began lifting the topbars. It was full of comb but empty of bees, and he started roughly cutting the wax out and throwing it on the ground. I would recommend leaving the wax in there to attract future bees and give them a head start, and definitely not just discarding it onto the ground, but he was getting into it with gusto and I was already kind of in a state of having proverbially thrown up my hands.
   Someone asked him why the bees had absconded from this hive and he said he didn't know, he hadn't checked on them in a year (my training emphasizes you should inspect your hives no less than once a month)
   Then he opened the one occupied hive in this place (he has a lot more hives around, though I don't know how many are occupied, but I mean in this immediate little corner there were two that had absconded and one still occupied). He didn't even give me the chance to start, tapping hard along the topbars with his large knife ("cutlass" as they call it here), as it happens the bees in this case had made their brood nest in the middle rather than in the end as usual. So where he'd normally be inclined to start at the back end and harvest all the honey and stop at the brood, he ended up having to lift all the brood frames as he went through looking for honey. Which he did roughly and quickly, laying two down on hte neighboring hive to make space. I was mostly standing back but feeling like I should try to participate and seeing this as clearly wrong I stepped forward and asked why they were laid out like that, pointing out that bees were getting crushed, but I didn't get a clear answer from him. I could see some of the trainees looking a bit confused, that they'd been looking forward to participating like yesterday but today they were just watchign this guy roughly hurrying through the hive. This hive didn't end up having any honey to harvest and FM put it back together, no one else from this second group having had a chance to participate.
   As we walked back to the the village I was fuming. What a god damn waste of everyone's god damn time. I don't know why FM had volunteered to be involved if he didn't intend to let anyone else participate and didn't seem particularly interested in learning anything new himself. Maybe he thought he'd be showing off how great a beekeeper he is. Well I wasn't impressed. As we walked back I searched my mind for what kind of diplomatically nice thing I could say about the field visit and I really couldn't think of anything.

   On the bus on the way back to town the women in the back were clapping and singing for a significant portion so that was nice at least, cheered me up a little bit.



   Even though it was 18:00 when we got back to the training center we went back to the lecture hall to cover some more topics so that we can finish tomorrow as soon as possible. Normally I always begin after a field visit by recapping it, both having the trainees recap it, then giving my recap, and then taking questions. And I really couldn't think of anything nice and diplomatic to say about it, not only had FM pissed me off but if I was going to honestly talk about it I'd be saying not to do a lot of the things he had done -- but he's an older and presumably respected member of the local beekeeping community and I don't want to cause drama. So instead I just began the lecture with absolutely no mention of the field visit.
   I did get one subtle dig in, we actually covered two topics, honey harvesting and wax processingly, and when I said that because wax is valuable you shouldn't, if you have an empty hive, cut out all the combs and just throw them on the ground, making more or less the exact motions FM had done while doing so, I think there were some knowing smiles.

   Anyway, that was the last field visit of the project. Tomorrow we wrap up with this group and return to Accra, and Friday, after nearly two months in Africa I depart. It's bittersweet. I'm ready for Western food and the Next Thing (USA for the first time in four years!)but I'll be sad this is over -- being paid to do development is what I've always dreamed to do, as long as I'm here doing this I'm literally living the dream. But now it must end at least for the foreseeable future



Bonus: here's the trainees singing during a brief break in lecture to get their blood flowing again.

   Yesterday in the morning we discussed the previous day's adventure, and proper personal protective equipment and then how to hygenically harvest and process honey. And then we went out to some hives again!
   This time we were just going to look at some hives "to give people some rest from yesterday." So we didn't take the bee suits or anything. We drove a few miles north of the town of Walewale, the countryside was mostly little clusters of buildings and what looked like hand tilled agricultural land. It had rained heavily the night before so there were some inundated areas. We pulled to the side of the road and got out. We being a pickup truck and a small minibus. We got out and started cheerfully walking along the trail between fields and through the occasional thicket of trees. After maybe half a mile we came to a place where we had to go through a bit of ankle deep standing water and mud to get to the other side of a low point in the trail. I've always had a bit of a horror of standing water in Africa on account of the African parasites I've heard of so I hope I'm alright.
   Just on the other side of that people were gathering under some large trees, and they pointed to where there were three beehives under some other trees just across the short paddock of yam mounds. I proceeded over there with some others and we were looking at the hives, not touching them or particularly closely, but after only a few minutes the bees began to sting us. The others fled. I walked around to take a photo of the hives from another angle and then began to walk away. Ahead I saw teh group begin to flee in every direction, and more and more bees were attacking me (I was by now by far teh closest person to the hives). Soon my face was covered with stinging bees, I took my glasses off so I wouldn't knock them off while wiping bees from around my eyes, and began to run -- which is a big deal, I almost never ever run from bees it's extremely undignified, but please understand I was covered with angry stinging African bees at this point.
   After running maybe about 200 meters I seemed to be bee free. No one else was in sight and I had run the opposite direction from the return to the cars. I saw a trail leading to the road from here though and followed that. Fortunately I had a bottle of water because it was quite hot and I was still going as fast as I could so that I could rejoin everyone before they started to wonder where I was. Also this whole time I have my backpack on my back with my laptop and stuff in it.
   Finally returned via the road to our starting point, where peopel were already gathered. No one quite knew if everyone as back yet, nor did anyone know exactly how many people we had had. But it didn't look like everyone and in particular I didnt' see our two photographers, so I headed back up to the Front.
   Arriving by where the trail crossed through the muddy water I could see tehre were still a few people on the far side. That place was too close to the angry bees to be used but some people were crossing at another point further away. I went over there, crossing more yam fields and a mud bring wall to find in this place the water was deeper and muddier, and while several had crossed successfully there, there were still three people including the two photographers on the far side who didn't seem game to cross there. Some of the people at this location were calling encouragement to them to come. I set off to cross the mud to join them on the far side, the people who had been calling encouragement now urged me to please don't go, its dangerous there's deep spots, but I felt determined to lead the people on the other side out the other way I had used. The mud sucked my flipflops right off, though I was able to recover and carry them. Again, recall, I have my backpack on with the laptop in it, which seemed funny at the time as I slogged through this deep mud in the African bush.
   Finally reached the other side, and the now four of us over there went across the yam paddocks on the other side to go around to the road and rejoin everyone over there.
   Finally everyone was accounted for and back at the trailhead. I had received many many stings on the head and face, about which some people were concerned, but I've been stung by so many bees in my life that being practically immune to bee stings is sort of my superpower, I experienced no swelling or undue discomfort.
   Then the beekeepers returned to their hostels and Arne and I returned to our guest house to conduct some ongoing research we've been conducting on Ghanaian beer. We'd sampled "Club," and "Star," before, and this day we tried "ABC" and "Gulder." Interim findings are that Club is best, followed by Gulder. I think there may still be one or two more to try though.


Photographers Samuel and Nadia return to the trailhead

   Lessons taken from the include having an accurate count of the number of participants on any outing, and always having at least the "blue smock" bee veils which are very compact and easy to stuff in a backpack. Also they're starting to convince me that their bees really are even meaner than African bees I've worked with before, and it may indeed be a danger to others to open the hives during the day unless they're really far from anywhere.

Monday, March 5th, 2012 – I pull the handbreak, and the pickup sways back on its wheels by some beehives. I step out into the warm sunny air. From this location just on the east side of the mountains that divide Orange County from Riverside County, California, the view as far as I can see is mostly rolling chaparral-covered hills. Beyond the nearby orange groves, only a few distant buildings and glimpses of a highway between some hills distinguish the rugged landscape from how it must have looked when only the native Payómkawichum people lived here. Closer at hand the gentle breeze rustles the leaves of orange groves around the bee site, and from the entrances at the base of twenty stacks of white boxes, bees busily pour in and out. I immediately notice a dark mass on a shrubby elderberry tree just beside the beehives.
   I walk over to it and confirm that it’s a solid mass of bees – a swarm that has issued from one of the beehives. These bees are looking to establish a new colony somewhere and will rest on that branch until the scouts find a suitable location and they all will then move there. I’ll deal with this when I finish with the rest of the beehives.
   I pull on my white coveralls, light the smoker and get to work. I smoke each hive, take off the lid, look at a few frames in each box and then take it off to look at the box under it. It’s eighty degrees, cool for late winter in Riverside, but one always sweats in the confines of a bee suit, and worst of all one can’t drink through the veil.
   Beekeeping is, at its heart, inspecting beehives and seeing what’s going on, what the bees are trying to do or having trouble with, and how you can help them. You can’t make the bees do anything they don’t want to do, all you can do is help them. You can, however, go in with your expectations, such as at this time of year I expect to be adding additional boxes (“supers”) and taking various actions to deter swarming, and indeed that is what I’m mostly doing. As a hobbyist one can take half an hour to analyze a hive and properly appreciate the complex functioning of the bee society, but on a commercial scale one has hives to get through, and I aim to get through each hive in about six minutes.
   I rest for a moment halfway through, drenched with sweat. Was I really teaching beekeeping in Africa a month ago? It seems like a dream now. Will I ever get back? Is this my life? There’s not much time for introspection, back to work.
   When I’ve finally finished the hives I place an empty beehive under the swarm of bees, with its lid off, and give the branch a brisk shake. The clump of bees falls onto the hive, and within moments most of them have climbed down into the frames. I give them a few more minutes for most of the bees up in the air to figure out where their companions are and enter the hive, then I place the lid on it, tighten the strap, place the hive on the truck, and depart. I drive a quarter mile to the main road, get out and quickly take off the bee suit, and then resume my drive, winding up and through the mountains on the Ortega Highway, back into Orange County to one of the small bee sites closer to home –an empty lot tucked in amongst the suburbs– where I place the new hive.

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 – I happen to be stopping by the same bee yard again to put more supers on, and as expected there’s a very small cluster of “residual” bees where the swarm had been.
   When I finish my work I go look at the residual bees. Even if I hadn’t taken the rest of the swarm, the swarm would have moved on while leaving behind some scouts that were out when it left. These residual bees will then wait, and wait, and wait, for a swarm that will never return. It occurs to me to take one of these bees that is programmed to sit tight forever with me to see how it will live out its life. I place my hand by the small cluster and one of the bees climbs aboard.
   I drive home with the bee on my hand. She walks around slowly, not enough to cause any trouble steering the truck. I decide to name her Melissa, which is Greek for honeybee. All that evening at home she stays on my hand while I make dinner and go about my evening. I put her down to wash my hands but she seems to become agitated until I pick her up again. I feed her a drop of honey for dinner.
   I call Tarragon, she’s still on the ship, they’ve drifted further up away up the northern California coast, but she’ll be finished with this gig next month.
   “And I’ll come back down to be with you unless you’ll be off traveling again” she says a bit saucily.
   “Haha of course I’ll be here” I laugh.
   The bee wanders my hand as we talk.
   When I turn out most of the lights to watch a movie on netflix Melissa settles down – bees are used to the dark of the hive, though I worry she’s lonely, they’re not accustomed to being alone. I place her in a cup with a coaster on top while I sleep.

   The next day I take her with me, I’m working in the office. I let her crawl around the desk while I work at the computer with the “don’t panic” sticker. A solitary residual bee actually makes a great office pet it turns out, as she would slowly wanders the desk and only every now and then would I have to give her a lift back to the middle when she wandered too far off to the side. At one point she is adorably hopping from key to key on the keyboard.
   Around 4:30, while Melissa happened to be on my hand, Jeremy came into the office from the back, looking serious, and informed us
   “Dave lost the law suit guys.”

Flashback to two years earlier:
September 13th, 2010, Costa Mesa, California – “Hey! Don’t fucking change the channel!” the fat bouncer bellows at Jeremy from across the roomful of sticky tables of the Goat’s Hole Saloon.
   “No one else was watching it I just wanted to put the game on man” Jeremy protests.
   “Look wise guy you’ll fucking I fucking y in my fucking bar okay??” the bouncer growls while charging across the sawdust-strewn floor like a grossly overweight bull.
   “Okay jesus chill man chill” Jeremy holds up his hands as the bouncer angrily changes the TV back to his preferred station.
   “You know what, just get the fuck out of my bar wiseguy” the bouncer yanks Jeremy bodily out of his chair by the collar and begins to push him violently towards the door as he protests.
   “Hey, hey! What’s going on?” Jeremy’s coworkers, who had been at the bar, notice and jump up.
   “Hey, what the fuck man what are you doing to my employee?” Dave, our boss, finally manages to get in front of the bouncer at the doorway.
   “I’m kicking you all the fuck out get out and stay out” yells the bouncer giving Dave a shove.
   “Hey asshole hey what the fuck cool it asshole” Dave regains his footing and gets in the bouncer’s face. He’s got nothing on the bouncer’s weight but stands a head taller than him.
   Dave has failed to notice the bouncer produce a small heavy mag-light from his pocket, and so it catched him by surprise when it’s swung at his face. As Dave goes down the bouncer continues hitting him in the face, blood splatters the concrete. Bob, another of Dave’s employees, leaps in to ineffectually intervene – the bouncer is just too big. Finally the bouncer feels satisfied and withdraws back into the bar leaving Dave to be rushed to the hospital by his employees, where a metal plate had to be inserted into his face to hold it all together.
   Or so I’ve pieced together. I was not there because I'm always leaving. At the time I was at sea somewhere off the coast of Washington State, just coming on deck for watch. And one of our passengers is awake, standing on deck looking at the stars. It’s hard to recognize her in the dark all bundled up but I see long dark hair. She turns on my approach and I recognize the large eyes and hawaiian features as a passenger I haven’t had a chance to talk to yet but I remember her very distinct name,
   “Hi, Tarragon is it?”

...

   “Dave lost the lawsuit”
   We stare at Jeremy in disbelief.
“You’re pulling our leg.” Jeremy is always pulling pranks, and I thought Dave had an open and shut case for gross negligence against the bar – they hired a man with prior violent criminal offenses as a bouncer and gave him no training, any reasonable person could anticipate this could lead to the bouncer injuring guests, and the cctv footage had all been mysteriously “lost,” which jury instructions specify means it should be assumed it would have favored the the party that didn’t lose the footage. So for a minute or so the office manager and I stare at Jeremy and try various forms of “you’re not serious” on him.
   At the moment it dawns on me that he is, in fact, serious, Melissa, who had meanwhile climbed up to my neck, stings me.
   Now this is a serious moment, so I ignore the sting in my neck while we ask Jeremy a few more questions, until finally he notices or can no longer ignore that I seem to have a bee with its back-end embedded in my neck.
   “Um, I think your bee stung you?” he ventures.
   “Ah, yes, she did.” I carefully pluck Melissa from my neck, using my fingernail to try pry her out to minimize damage and examine her. She seems very agitated, but has no visible injury. Often when a bee stings someone the stinger tears out of her so badly that she’s massively hemorrhaging her yellow bodily fluids and dies in seconds, but perhaps it broke off sideways in my careful removal.
   Keeping Melissa had been an experiment in keeping a residual bee alive, but this development opens up a new potential inquiry into bee psychology. It is often asked if bees know they will die if they sting someone, and if so, what will a bee do if it doesn’t die after stinging someone?
   It is also often asked if bees can sense how we’re feeling, and this is hardly a scientific study, but I believe it was my sudden change of mood which freaked Melissa out and caused her to sting.
   Once I have ascertained Melissa isn’t dying I remove the stinger from my neck and resume working. Melissa gradually calms down and resumes walking around the desk, perhaps just a bit more excitedly than before.
   As I’m walking to my car a short time later to go home, she actually takes off and flies around me twice before landing back on my shoulder. I’ve never seen her fly before.

   Just as I get to the car she takes off again, once more flies around me, and then flies off into the sunset. I wait around for a few more minutes but she doesn’t come back.
   I’m a bit sad to lose her, but this has been an extremely interesting insight into bee psychology. As a beekeeper one learns how bees in mass behave but rarely gets any look at the psychology of a bee as an individual. My theory is that while her previous “mission” had been to hold tight and wait, forever, the act of stinging erased that mission, and left her free to seek her fortune, so to speak.

Thursday, March 8th, 2012 – I’m back out at another bee site in Riverside, going through hives in the sunny heat, back at the daily grind. My phone rings. I yank the glove off my hand to answer the phone It’s The Organization.
   “Hi Kris, would you like to do another project in Nigeria next month?” the recruiter asks in a sweet southern lilt (the US HQ is in Little Rock Arkansas).
   “Yes, definitely!” I respond immediately.
   “And there’s another project in Ethiopia, you could do them back to back while you’re over there, if that’s not too much…”
   “No, yes, I would love to do both!”
   After discussing the details a bit more the phone call ends, she’ll email me the scopes of work and other documents to get it rolling. I had thought maybe if I was lucky in another year I’d get another project, but here are two more immediately!!

FIND THE QUEEN:


   A beehive is a stack of boxes. Technically the ones above the bottom ones are called "supers" because they go above the bottom one but I think that's dumb and just call them all boxes. See picture below. My hives generally have a "queen excluder" which keeps the queen in the lower two boxes so she doesn't put brood (larvae and pupae) in the "honey super" above. The queen excluder (abbreviated as QX) is the metal bars you see in the above picture, workers can fit through them but queens cannot.

   When opening the hive one first takes the lid and places it upside down on the ground. Then one inspects the frames in the top box. Then one places that box on the lid, flips the QX over as one places it on top of that box. One does this so if the queen happens to be on the QX she'll stay on the correct side of it. I've always said I've never actually found the queen on the QX but there's a right way and wrong way to do everything.

   The first thing I noticed about hive S-7 "Isla Saona" yesterday was that there were two frames of brood above the QX. Okay I probably accidentally got the queen above the QX. But then after I've finshed the first box and flipped the QX I find brood in the second box. Okay probably the QX is broken. The width difference can be so subtle one can't see that it's broken with the naked eye. I go through the bottom two boxes and count 12 frames of brood but don't find the queen. Queens are hard to find, it's easy to not find the queen, and if I don't absolutely need her I don't stress about it as long as I know she's there (usually evidenced by eggs, which last three days before hatching).

   I flip the QX back onto the top of hte second box. Before putting the top box back on I look at it again for the queen but don't find her there. Then I look at the QX and there she is. Long and dark like a limousine, with a little green spot I had placed on her previously (but only a little one because I've been having trouble with my marking pen). As I'm standing there admiring her fondly suddenly I see A SECOND QUEEN! What!


Hive D-39 today

   There is of course "only one queen in a beehive." Conventional beekeeper wisdom is that actually you can have a laying queen with her no-longer-laying retired mother, or if you have three or more boxes and restrict one queen to the bottom box and one to the top box it might work. But in this case I think they were clearly both laying ... 14 frames of brood is more than any other hive I have, it probably took two.
   While it might be tempting just to see if this hive would continue to operate with two queens, as I watched them a few workers seemed to be chastising the queen with the green dot. So I removed her and placed her in an empty gatorade powder container I keep for that purpose.

   I placed her in the second nuc hive on my porch (which has become queenless). I think I'll make sure she's laying and then install her in my neighbor's queenless hive.


A photo of a different queen from today. They're just so beautiful. (:

Last Monday happened to be a rare nice spring day following a week of cold rain, followed by cold rainy days ever since. But Monday was nice, so I got as much work done in the bee-yards as I could and then in the evening, I set a chair at the far end of my yard where it would get sunlight for the longest before the sun disappears behind the house. The apple tree under which I set my chair is still mostly bare though beautiful blossoms have burst out on a few specific branches. Behind the chair my lavendar plants are looking nice and lush with an abundance of purple flowers.
   The book I began reading carried the dauntingly dull sounding title of "Scientific Queen-Rearing." Published by "GM Doolittle" in 1889, it's still regarded as one of the best guides on the subject. I was pleased to find that despite the title it is written in a pleasantly meandering style, as he puts it himself in the preface "as if I had taken the reader by the arm, from time to time, and strolled about the apiary and shop in the time of queen-rearing, and chatted in a familiar way on the subjects suggested as we passed along." and "my style, I fear, is often like my bee-yard, which in looks is irregular, while it attempts something useful. I never could be pinned down to systemic work. I always did like to work at the bees near a gooseberry-bush, full of ripe, luscious fruit, or under a harvest apple-tree, where an occasional rest could be enjoyed, eating the applies which lay so temptingly about."
   Presently, as I sat in the pleasant evening air I began to grow sleepy despite the engaging book. My mind began to drift towards the pondering of obscure philosophical paradoxes, so I decided to walk into the house and make some Russian caravan tea and return. So I finished the chapter I was on and got up and made my way towards the house.

   Halfway across the yard I noticed about eight bees close together on the grass. I knelt down to examine them as this seemed unwarranted. There are no flowers in the grass, it's far enough away from the one beehive in the yard for them to have no reason to be walking here, but here they were. This was just a mild perplexity until I realized one of the bees had the distinctive long abdomen of a queen.
   One does not encounter queens randomly outside of hives. It simply does not happen. A queen does not simply decide to go for a walk. Queens leave hives for only one of two reasons: (1) they are with a migratory swarm of bees (of which "8 bees" is several thousand bees short); or (2) they are on a mating flight, during which I do not believe they stop and rest anywhere, and are not accompanied by any worker bees.

   "You won't read that in a book!" was a favorite phrase of a beekeeper I once knew, and I have found that eventually one will encounter bees breaking every rule you think you know if you keep at it long enough.

   I reached down to pick her up, she was very quick-moving and evasive, which leads me to believe she is very young, but I was able to get her into my cupped hand. My only hypothesis for this whole situation is that she was on a mating flight and became tired and crashed in my yard to walk a bit, and the other seven worker bees joined her just because workers are always attracted to a queen.

   Now that I have a lost queen in my hand what do I do with her? As I look up at my porch I see the two hives I had set up as "nuc boxes" (short for "nucleus") there, for the express purpose of rearing queens. The white boxes are up on the edge of the porch like the cliff-face edifices of Petra, Both were already outfitted with about 1500-2000 worker bees, a very minimal amount. Usually one blows smoke on bees to calm them before opening a hive but I had a queen in one hand and no smoker about, but such a minimal number of bees will permit an examination if one is very polite to them. I thought the larval queen I had given the first of these nucs hadn't successfully emerged but on this inspection I found a single white little bee egg deposited in the center of each cell, clear evidence a queen has set up shop.
   The second nuc appeared to have no queen. Normally when introducing a queen one inserts her in a little plastic mesh capsule like a spaceship's escape pod. Recognizing that a queen doesn't smell like THEIR queen the bees otherwise will likely kill the newly introduced queen. But again here I was with a queen in one hand with no escape pods. But this box had been queenless for some time already so I hoped optimistically they would accept her based on having been queenless so long, dropped her in and quickly put the lid on before she could fly out.

   This whole situation was beyond strange. Not only is a queen reduced to walking on the grass in a random location in of itself extremely unlikely, but of all places to land, to do so directly between a beekeeper in the act of reading about queen rearing and the queenless hive he's prepared to receive a new queen is such a preposterously serendipitous circumstance that were this a work of fiction I would never propose such an utterly implausible situation.

   I then made my tea and returned thoughtfully to my seat.


A queen I found outside a hive some years ago, in this case it was just beside a hive I had been inspecting and it's certain she had accidentally fallen or fluttered from a frame as I held it and landed on the wheel of my truck a few feet away.

Tuesday morning I couldn't wait to find out if Queen Serendipitia had successfully joined the colony. Still in my pajamas I rushed outside and urgently looked to see if there was a dead queen laying on her side just outside the hive's entrance. There was not. Apologizing to the bees for the cold I lifted the lid and removed a frame of bees. No eggs or queen. I removed the second, still nothing. It takes a few days for a queen to start laying, but with this few bees I should easily find her herself. Then I looked down through the hive at the hive floor, and there she was, apparently having an argument with a worker.
   I thought about putting her in a cage now that I had more time to prepare, but if they were going to kill her they'd have done it by now.


Wednesday, today: I tried to resist the urge to open the nuc box, I shouldn't disturb them every single day. But it's so easy with these nuc boxes, not having to light a smoker or suit up, and I was dying of curiosity. No dead queen outside. I opened the hive box and removed a frame and... there she was, placidly moving among the bees on the frame exactly the way a queen should.

   I'm very curious to see how she'll do. That I found her walking on the ground doesn't bode terribly well, what if she didn't succeed in getting properly mated and therefore can't lay very many eggs? Fortunately she's right on my porch so I can very easily check up on her! Though I'll tryyyyy to resist doing so every single day.


Related: a story about another bee I got to know as an individual: Melissa

A rose in my front yard


   I tend not to post unless I have a lot to say, but I need to get out of that habit, smaller entries are much easier to digest after all. (:


   So swarming season has begun. That's when beehives reproduce by sending out a "swarm" of 5-10,000 bees, that land on a branch or overhanging roof while they look for a new home, prompting people to call around for local beekeepers whilst exclaiming "you won't believe this!!!!"

   In California because Africanized bees swarm so much and are hard to deal with, the phones of anyone people can get ahold of about this ring off the hook during the season -- at Bee Busters we'd get 30 calls a day! And people would be shocked to learn that no one would take them for free -- but there was just a burdensomely large number of them.


   Over here it is quite different. I absolutely want every swarm I can get my hands on. It actually presents some interesting ethical issues. I am happy to come get the bees for free, I am happy to have the bees. If I were to buy an equivalent amount of bees it would cost me around $130-$140 (AUD, so like $100US). If I know a friend or neighbor wants bees I am happy to give them the bees even though it means I'm forgoing a thing thats worth $130 to me that may be legitimately mine once I've taken possession of it. Interesting they've discovered some Roman law tablets specifying who owns a swarm of bees under what conditions. But I'm happy to give them away just because, I guess, my having them at all is a "gift to me from society" and me passing them on to someone else is just me "paying it forward" on that. I would not pass the bees along for free to another commercial beekeeper but to individuals I know yes. Individuals I don't know I'm more undecided about -- I do have one woman who called me asking for bees and she's neither a friend nor a neighbor and I think I might sell her a swarm ... but it still feels shiesty selling something I received for free earlier in the day.

   Neighbors often insist on paying me, which again I feel like, these bees were free to me. How would the people forwarding me the calls or inviting me to come take their bees feel if they knew I was turning around and selling them at a substantial profit?

   But I've come up with a solution! After one neighbor particularly put the "come on let me give you something for this" on me it hit me. "You can make a $20 donation to Bee Aid International if you'd like?" And since then I've suggested that to others who wanted to compensate me and they are only too happy to. I feel like this conveniently solves all the problems. I'm not personally profiting, they're feeling like they gave something back, the people calling me to take their bees are in essence making a donation themselves of the bees, and Bee Aid International which has really had a lot of trouble garnering any donations at all finally has a small donation stream.



The hive in my backyard

   I really enjoy stopping by to look at my neighbor's hives. When I stopped in at my across-the-street neighbors the other day they were in the garden having a glass of champagne each because he had just sold the business he's retiring from and they insisted I join them for a glass. It was a wonderful sunny day.

   Friday and this morning were cold and rainy. It was nearly freezing last night. Another neighbor called me today saying he thought the swarm he had newly boxed on Thursday was dying from cold and asked if he could warm it up. "Sure, like wrap a blanket around it?" I asked
   "I was thinking like take it in the house"
   "Ahahaha I don't think anyone would think of that here" I said "but that's what they do in Ethiopia in winter! Absolutely go for it!" He's closing up the entrance of course. But its too cold for them to be out foraging so the bees won't be missing anything for it.



Also I've officially broken out the grill for the season! Sadly I was out of saeurkraut today (I'd been famously working through a 5 pound jar of it), and that small amount of mustard was the last of that too. Guess I need to go to the store soon!

Here's a thing. I posted this to instagram and facebook and didn't really think anyone would be interested but a lot of people were. This is an example of how I take notes on beehives I inspect. There's templates out there that take up a whole page for each line there, but I don't have time or space for such shenanigans.

The first number is the hive number. Once upon a time in Days of Yore the hives would have been in order such that after 101 you'd have 102 and 103 etc, but as they get moved around they end up in all sorts of order. Hive 111 is named Ithaca but that doesn't make it into the notes.


A note about names. At first it seemed embarrassingly whimsical to name hives, but I find it actually really serves a practical purpose. The bees are distributed in locations (called apiaries by the pedantic and "bee yards," by us in the industry), which I've "named" A through P. I usually name at least one beehive at every location, with a name that begins with the name of the bee yard, so there's Athens, and Byzantium, Corinth, Delphi, Ephesus, Fangorn.... I might not know offhand where bee yard O is, but then I remember beehive Olympia and I can picture that exact beehive and where it is. Or vice versa I'm about to to make a note in my logbook and I'm wondering what bee yard this is, then I look over at beehive Mantua and remember oh yes this is M.


After the beehive number, there is a pictogram of the number of boxes currently on the beehive, then the first number is frames of bees -- since the bees tend to cluster together there'll be frames covered in bees and frames that just have a few. I'm using eight frame boxes so every 8 is a full box. I believe a frame of bees is about 1500 bees. The second number is frames of "brood," that is, developing bee larvae. I think this is possibly the most important number as it tells you how their future population outlook is. The third number is the frames of honey, which, as you can see by its presence as the fifth piece of information, I don't really dwell on. Because bees almost invariably partially fill a number of frames at once this isn't a number of filled frames so much as an aggregate -- if there's eight frames that are 20% full the number will probably be 1 or 2 (I try to resist putting in numbers like 1.5).

The last number is the queen. The O with a dot in it means a marked queen. The O with a line and little w means I just marked her with a white dot. The 3 means I didn't see the queen but I saw eggs, which means I know she was there at least three days ago, since that's how long an egg stays an egg. If the youngest thing I saw was a larvae I'd write a 4, 5, or 6 depending on its size, and if all I saw was the capped-over brood containing pupae I'd write a 21 meaning all I know is the queen was there within 21 days.

The queen marking color varies by year. Last year was white, this year is yellow. The one I marked white was because it was a queen from last year.


Most commercial beekeepers re-queen either once every two years or, increasingly, every year, since the queen's productivity goes down after the first year or two. "How do you replace the queen?" a friend asked after I posted this. Well. First you find the existing queen. Then you crush her head between your forefingers. Then you toss her over your left shoulder into the bushes behind you. Do NOT be like Ole GregA and leave her in the hive for the other bees to find, that is idiocy. Then you either insert a new queen in a queen cage and release her three days later or insert an unhatched queen cell.

Personally I think if a queen is still laying it seems a waste to just destroy her, so I like to do things like put the redundant queen in a new hive with a very small number of bees to see if she can start a new longshot hive.


But more importantly, instead of just automatically sight-unseen deciding to replace all my queens I make the decision on a case by case basis. In the case of the three hives inspected here, 9 or 10 frames of brood is just fine at this time of year so even though these are last year's queens I see absolutely no reason to replace them. However the one with 3 frames of brood you'll notice "RQ" written next to, which means it's earmarked to be requeened.



A marked queen on capped brood comb.