The Agrinautica

   Geoff Downwad (72) got a shocking surprise this month while mowing the central park lawn. He's mowed the central park lawn whenever it needed it for at least fifteen years now, without incident, but this time was different. On Monday, March 7th, just after five PM, he had just begun when, driving his ride on mower under one of the bottlebrush trees, and watching the grass he was mowing not, unfortunately, the tree he was driving under, he practically hit a hanging beehive with his face!
   He was able to drive the mower to the edge of the park while receiving twenty to thirty stings from his angry pursuers. After shaking off all the bees he walked directly to the health clinic [local readers will be aware that the health clinic is literally across the street] to get checked out. Though it was after five, Dr Jared was still there and was able to immediately examine Geoff, put him on some of the monitoring equipment, and give him some antihistimines. Though Geoff initially felt alright, after a few minutes he started to feel faint, so Jared gave him an injection of adrenaline, which Geoff described as “not the most comfortable experience I’ve had Kris, I’ll tell you that!”
   Dr Jared felt Geoff should be monitored overnight, and by coincidence an ambulance happened to be right there after having brought up a patient from Apollo Bay for transfer onward to Geelong, so Geoff, now feeling pretty decent, was taken to the Geelong hospital in the ambulance, and was home the next day by lunch, feeling fine.
   Shortly after the incident, Geoff's grandchildren Michael (8) and Sienna (12) went down to the park to find the bees with their father Joe Habib.
   “I arrived and the mower was just parked, and there was a zigzag where he had cut, obviously they were chasing him” Joe reports.
   “I can’t believe how big it was!” Michael exclaimed about the bee colony.
   “It was massive, but you couldn’t see it very well because they were hidden so well in the tree” Sienna explains.

   I myself was driving home that day around 6pm, after another long day of beekeeping, on the final stretch of the Cape Otway highway, looking forward to maybe taking a nap on the couch when I got home, when my friend Joe Habib called me. His father-in-law had been attacked by bees in the park and sent to the hospital in an ambulance!? Yes of course I'd proceed directly to the park.
   I soon found myself looking at a very impressively large “exposed colony” of honeybees – that is to say, rather than in an enclosed space they had built their honeycombs hanging from a branch with only the leaves and branches as covering. I estimate by the size that it must have been there for months, and the fact that it went unnoticed is a testament to the docility of these bees – numerous Sunday markets would have happened right around them without anyone knowing there was a colony of bees there. It wasn't until Geoff Downard practically hit them with his face that they had been discovered. However, once discovered, we couldn't let the colony remain in this potentially dangerous place.
   “Do you think we should remove it now? ...or some other day?” Joe asked me. I still wanted to take a nap, I'd just wanted to go home, but I looked at the sky –overcast– and the temperature –cool–, the hour and a half or so of remaining daylight, these were actually perfect conditions to remove the colony. “Let's do it now” I said with a sigh.
   I didn’t have my beekeeping equipment with me but after a visit to my place and Joe’s we between us got together everything we’d need, including the nice “bee vacuum” Joe had made to capture bees live. We drove his white Sprinter van up to the tree so Michael and Sienna could sit in the cab and watch us and got right to work. While Joe vacuumed bees from the outside I carefully sliced off an outer layer of comb and carefully removed it while he vacuumed the bees thus exposed. The bees were docile enough that I was able to take my gloves off to take the accompanying picture. Michael and Sienna described watching the bee removal as “pretty cool” and “interesting,” and Sienna got a 27 minute video (“it took longer but I stopped and started the video a few times”) of the whole operation.
   It was very nearly dark by the time we finished. We quickly put the equipment in the back of the van and then discovered a problem we hadn’t anticipated … the kids wouldn’t let us into the cab of the van because we were covered in bees! Eventually after we got them all off of us and turned around several times so they could see to their satisfaction that we weren’t covered in bees they allowed us to get in. For added protection they had managed to pull a spare bee suit over them both. We only had to drive a short distance to the nearest suitable place to reinstall these bees (they needed to be moved far enough that they couldn’t fly “home” though so locations within town were out), next to the hives I already have behind Ripplevale. We unloaded in the dark by the headlights, once again had to remove bees and turn around until the kids approved, and we were finally able to return home.
   The kids didn’t get any stings, Joe got one sting on the ankle (“and I swelled up more than Geoff!”). Geoff got off so well due to his immediate medical attention, I for one have never heard of a bee attack in which someone got such immediate medical attention!
   I asked Michael if he was going to remove the next colony himself, he laughed and said “nah, but I’m going to be a bee man when I’m older!”
   Geoff is fine now with no lingering animosity towards bees, and everyone lived happily ever after.

   Christie felt the salty wind on her face and she was excited. She was on a pirate ship! And soon there would be a battle. The deck vibrated under her feet as the vessel motored out to one end of a large t-shaped inlet.
   "Ladies and gentlemen, could I have your attention please?" a crewmember with bushy red muttonchops was standing on the bench in the middle of the deck addressing the assembled passengers.
   "In a moment we'll shut off the engine and set sail, to do battle with those villianous rogues on the Lady Washington over there!" and he pointed at the similarly piratey looking ship at the other end of the inlet. There's not much wind today so we're probably going to have to set everything we've got..." he continued to explain something about lifejackets and introduce the crew, but Christie was too busy taking in all the exciting sights around her. Finally he finished, and the captain, a big fellow with a huge red beard that could have belonged to a dwarf in Lord of the Rings, hollered out a series of commands. As the crewmembers swarmed up the lattice-like grid of ropes that formed a ladder up the mast, the captain switched off the engine. She hadn't noticed how loud it had been until it was off, but suddenly the deck was no longer vibrating and there was just the sound of waves lapping at the side. The crisp salty wind she'd felt against her face abruptly stopped as well, and she realized she'd only felt wind because of the vessel's forward motion.
   She craned her neck back to see the sailors high above. They swiftly ascended the mast on one side and then, where the yardarms formed a t, they crossed over to the other side to loose the sails. Finally, after much running about and hauling on an overwhelming number of lines, they had all the sails set. But there was still no wind, and the boat still wasn't moving.
   Passengers looked at each other and grumbled, why aren't we moving? This is not how it looked in the pirate movies!
   "Ladies and gentlemen!" the crewmember was addressing the passengers again, "We are now prepared to travel the way most of the world was explored, at the speed of smell!" There was a moment before there was some laughing as people got the joke.
   "Now we've evidently got a little time ahead of us, so let me explain what we're going to aim to do. In the movies the ships just line up and fire away into their side, right? But the sides are the strongest part of the vessel and when you're doing that you're getting it right back from them, so what you want to do is what's called crossing the T, where you cross either in front of or behind the opposing vessel. That way you can fire your entire broadside and they can only fire the few guns they might have facing forward or aft. In addition, your shots will roll down their entire deck, having ample opportunity to hit and destroy things and thus make them sad. And if you're firing at the back of their vessel that is the very best because the stern is the weakest part and you might knock out their rudder or their captain."
   Christie looked out at the other vessel, similarly bobbing motionless with all sails set. This could take awhile.
   "Naval battles would often take hours or even days" the crewmember explained helpfully.

   The gunner, a blonde red-faced fellow introduced as "Pony," explained how he fired the four guns (two per side), which he insisted were never to be called cannons. Then the captain called out for the crew to "set stunsels!" and crewmembers ran aloft again. They pushed poles out further on the ends of the yards, increasing the length of the crossbar of the t, and then set additional sails on them, outside the main big square sails.
   Meanwhile someone pointed out that the other ship appeared to be rowing now -- they'd pushed two oars out on each side, which a crewmember referred to as sweeps, and were trying to row themselves, but given the size of the ship, the four oars weren't making much progress.
   The captain stroked his beard and looked thoughtfully at the sails while the passengers and crew began to chat with each other. A good-looking crewmember had just started to talk to Christie, with a devilish twinkle in his eye, when the captain burst out "Kirby! You and Crazy Ivan and Knuckles lower the smallboat!" and the crewmember quickly excused himself and ran off to the rowboat hanging in davits off the stern. They rowed the little rowboat to the front of their ship and threw a line up, which was secured to a post and then they tried to tow the ship, though they didn't appear to be making much more progress than the other ship.



   Presently, something splashed in the water off to the side, followed a minute later by a second splash. Curious onlookers peered at the other vessel, about a hundred yards away by now, and then they saw that on deck they had a giant slingshot. Two people held either side while a third pulled it back with the projectile. Examination of the floating projectiles revealed that it was leftover biscuits from breakfast that were being fired!
   "Rig the attack bubbles!" called out the captain in as fierce a voice as one can say such a thing. A crewmember ran aloft with a bottle and bubble-blowing utensil. From a position up on the mast, perched on a yardarm, he blew large bubbles which floated slowly towards the other vessel.
   "Pull us around to starboard!" the captain called down to the rowboat, and the sweating rowers started trying to pull the nose of the ship to the right.
   "Ahahahaha we have you now!!" a crewmember called out to the hapless other vessel, which was still pointed towards them and less able to turn with their inadequate sweeps.
   "Okay, everyone on deck, we need you all to help," the captain addressed everyone. "I need you all to run in a counter-clockwise circle around the deck." Everyone stared at him blankly. "As you run you'll be pushing the ship with your feet towards turning clockwise" he explained. "Now go!" Laughingly, everyone began to run in a circle.
   "Okay, okay, avast the running and clear the gun deck!!" the captain called out. Christie had been so caught up in the fun of the ridiculous run around the deck that she was surprised to realize they very nearly were broadside to the other ship now. The other ship was also attempting to turn, so unfortunately, it wouldn't be a clean shot down its length, but they still couldn't get all their guns to bear.
   "Kris, help Pony get all the guns on the port side," the captain ordered, and the crewmember with the muttonchops helped the gunner detach a gun carriage from where lines held it on one side and they pushed it slowly, both straining with its weight, to the other side. Then they did it with the second gun from that side until all four guns were on the side facing the other ship.
   "Fire as she bears!!"
   In rapid succession, the gunner used a stick with a smouldering piece of linen on the end to touch off the touch-hole of each gun, which caused each gun to go off with a deafening boom and cloud of sulfurous-smelling smoke.



   The other ship came around and fired its gun with a faraway bang. "That's a nice ketch!" one of their crewmembers yelled, making "ketch" sound like "catch," a crewmember near Christie made a disgusted face, and said "he makes that same joke every single day. Our ship is a ketch you see, but that's no excuse to use the same joke every single day."
   "You have tiny baggywrinkles!!" he called back to the other ship. "Those fuzzy things on the line are called baggywrinkles," he turned and explained to Christie. "They prevent chafing. You can see theirs are quite small compared to our big, manly, baggywrinkles."

   A few more shots were exchanged as well as many more obscure pun-based insults, and then it was time for the crew to scramble aloft and take the sails back down.

   As they motored back across the bay, Christie reflected that even though there hadn't been any wind and they hadn't moved fast, it had been fun seeing the creative ways the sailors came up with to try to move their ship.
   "Gunner, load one more gun!" the captain called to Pony, who was just crossing the deck with tea.
   "What, why?" he started to ask, and the captain pointed to a large ferry coming down the bay. The Puget Sound ferries dwarf the tallships, and look like giant whalefish with open mouths as they have a large cavity going from front to back, which is the car deck.
   "Maple Syrup is headed home on that ferry, and we should demonstrate a good example of crossing the T anyway." the captain said with a grin.
   "Aye aye, captain!" Pony enthusiastically responded and started reloading powder into one of the guns (they'd been returned to their original sides). Under engine power the ship easily manoeuvered to cross well in front of the unsuspecting ferry.
   "Fire as she bears!"
   Pony waited until the ferry was perfectly aligned, daylight clearly visible out the other side of the gaping mouth. "FIRE IN THE HOLE!" he called out as he touched off the gun.
   There was a boom, and swirling grey smoke, followed quickly by a hollow rumbling echo ... and then a half dozen car alarms went off. The crew and passengers cheered loudly.

***

Crossing the T bonus entry: in 2009 I wrote this hand-written entry on hand-writing which totally could have also served this topic.

Anyway, this entry is based on true events. From http://emo-snal.livejournal.com/2010/04/ through http://emo-snal.livejournal.com/2010/10/ I was a crewmember of the tallship Hawaiian Chieftain.

   The aroma of backyard barbecues hangs in the warm afternoon air. Insects, leaves, and the odd dandelion puffball drift lazily out of the shade of the sidewalk and appear to glow in the sun as they float over the quiet suburban street. In branches above the sidewalk, sparrows hop about. Dorothy, however, does not see them. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate such things --she does-- but the roots of trees have pushed up great undulations in the sidewalk, requiring attentive foot placement. Nor does she hear the birds’ twittering, because, though she’d rather not be, she’s on her phone. Low hanging leaves of a willow tree brush her head as her phone call comes to an end. She stops and lets out a deep breath, sliding the phone into her pocket. Well that didn’t go as bad as I feared she thinks to herself, readjusting her aviator sunglasses, but I guess I need to find a new roommate now.
   She becomes aware of a buzzing sound. Not the astringent whine of high tension wires, but a soft organic hum. She turns a slow three-sixty but sees only the street, peaceful front yards, settled houses, a cautious squirrel. She purses her lips to the side in puzzlement. Slowly, she turns her gaze upward. Just inches above her head, hanging from a low branch is a solid basket-ball shaped mass of honeybees. She lets out a shriek and runs down the street.

   A bee we'll call Melissa lifts off from the swarm, swoops down under the branches and then rises into the sunlight over the street. Keeping an eye out for predatory birds, she passes between two houses and banks to the left. At a particular point a few hundred yards later she swings to the right, descending to alight on the cream colored wall of a house, just below the roof pitch.

   Twenty-five days ago she'd first emerged from a brood cell, born into a dark world of crowded walkways between sheets of wax comb. The vertical thoroughfares bustled with 60,000 of her sisters, the air was filled with an intriguing concoction of musky smells, Melissa thought it was simply paradise. Her head and midsection were covered with fuzzy blonde hair, her abdomen with elegant goldenrod-and-black stripes.
   She got to work immediately, cleaning out the hexagonal wax cubby she had just emerged from, and then moving on to nearby ones. As the days went on she instinctively rotated through the various forms of employment all bees go through, from cleaner to nurse bee to wax builder. She quickly found that there was no vacant space to expand the wax combs, which drove her up the walls. She started building peanut shaped “queen cells,” which would allow the creation of new queens so the hive could send its excess population out as “swarms” to start new colonies. Other bees, noticing the same signs, built queen cells as well, and soon there were a dozen of these wax peanuts on the edges of the comb, being provisioned for queen rearing.
   She moved on in the employment cycle. Taking a turn at guard duty she ventured outside for the first time, discovering a wide airy world out there, but she rarely ventured from the knothole high on an oak tree that served as the hive’s entrance. Finally at the age of about twenty days she took flight for the first time, becoming a “field bee,” searching the neighboring yards, gardens, and parks for water, nectar, pollen, or tree resin, depending on the hive’s economic needs.

   Back in the present, an elderly woman peers out her window at the swarm of bees on a branch in the willow tree in front of her house.
   "Leroy!” she calls out to her husband in a slightly screechy voice, “Leroy! You need to do something about those darn hornets out there! They're going to bite somebody!"
   "Okay, okay," responds her husband from their lime green kitchen, without looking up from an article in the newspaper about the economic needs of the country. “I'll call the po-lice, I guess. …in a minute”

Elsewhere, Melissa climbs into the gap between the roof and the cream colored wall on the house she's landed on. Inside, there is a cavity between the outer wall and the inner drywall. It’s dry and dusty and doesn’t smell at all like home, but Melissa sees potential. She crawls along the sides, taking note of the distance. She calculates the area to contain about ten gallons of cubic space -- ideal. There’s also only a very small entrance, which bees on guard duty will appreciate. Altogether Melissa reckons it’s an excellent piece of real estate. She can picture it filled with honeycomb and bees and all the smells of home. Already there are about two dozen other scouts from her hive here, excitedly making their own inspections.

   Two days ago the first new queen emerged from her chamber. There was a tapping sound as if she were using a little hammer, and then she popped open a circular section on the end of her queen cell, opening it outward as if it were a hatch. She crawled on out, and contemplated the fragrant concoction of pheromones and other smells anxiously. Though her head and midsection looked very much like Melissa’s, her abdomen was about twice as long, tapered like a stubby carrot, a glossy orange with only a vague hint of black stripes. She’s sure to be noticed by the lads.
   The old queen (whom we'll call Queen Beeatrix) left shortly after her replacement emerged – we can imagine she waited just long enough to give her some parting advice and wish her luck-- and about a fifth of the bees left with her. A swirling whirlwind of bees, emerged from the oak tree and proceeded only a short distance, across one backyard and then another, over the house and gathered on a branch overhanging the sidewalk. They settled in a sort of ball shape, with only a few bees in contact with the branch, most of the bees hanging on to those bees or hanging on to bees that were hanging on to those bees, a monkey-chain of bees. Field bees, such as Melissa, set out to scout for a more permanent home.

   A police car has arrived and the officer is very anxiously putting caution tape around an area enclosing everything within one hundred feet of the swarm.
   Elsewhere, an exterminator is sitting in his work truck eating a burrito from the Del Taco 99 Cent Menu. His phone rings.
   “Hello? Yeah? Mhm.” He wipes some sour cream off his stubbled chin as he listens to the dispatcher. “Emergency hornet call?? Well we don’t have hornets here of course but I’ll get right over there, whatever it is. What was that address again?” he wolfs down the last of the burrito in several huge bites and starts punching "104 Emerald Street" into his GPS while still chewing. He has sour cream on his face again.

   Back on Emerald Street, Melissa has returned to the hive and begins to advertise the location she was looking at. She begins a "waggle dance," shimmying and twirling, across the surface of the swarm cluster, shaking her rump and shimmying some more, thus describing the exact location to the other bees.

   Other scouts are doing similar dances, a shimmie, shakeshake, twirl, shimmie, but most are doing the same dance as Melissa. To the bees, the dances are both practical directions and a vote, and since a majority are now running advertising campaigns for the same location, the bees prepare to move. Melissa and others begin trumpeting, making a sound like a tiny kazoo. Upon hearing the piping, all the bees of the swarm begin to warm up for flight. They decouple their wing muscles, and vibrate them “out of gear,” like a car running the engine while in neutral. The buzz of the swarm suddenly rises from a mere whisper to an energized hum.

The exterminator pulls off the freeway a few blocks away, decelerating down the offramp. He switches off the radio so he can concentrate on the directions. In the back of his truck sit a number of buckets in which he puts the honeycomb he removes from walls. "DO NOT EAT" is emblazoned upon them in big red letters, because he sprays bee colonies with a pyrethroid gas -- a synthetic version of the natural pesticide "pyrethrum" produced by chrysanthemums. The bees it doesn't kill outright spin on the ground like tops for a minute or two before dying. Any person foolish enough to eat the infected honey is recommended to immediately go to the hospital and have their stomach pumped. People still try to eat the honey out of the back of his truck though.

   The surface of the swarm is the last to heat up. As the piping bees feel the outside reach flight temperature they begin racing along the surface with their wings spread out, making sure the temperature is the same all around and everyone is on the same page.

   The exterminator truck rounds the corner and rolls down the street. It rolls to a stop just outside the fluttering yellow police tape, and the exterminator gets out of his truck. He pulls on protective white coveralls with attached mesh veil, wrapping red duct tape around his ankles to prevent bees from getting into his workboots. He searches the truck for two green rubber gloves, and after finding five lefts he finally finds another right and pulls them both on. Finally he pulls a nozzled canister out of the truck and saunters over to the low branch at the centre of the police tape circle, and looks up.
   There's nothing there except a small amount of wax the bees had attached to the branch.

   Across the street to the west, a cloud of bees is just passing between two houses. In front of the cloud, Melissa and the other scout bees dart ahead to show the way and then slow down for the cloud to catch up. A small child playing in his backyard stands and stares in awe at the cloud of bees that passes harmlessly around him. The air is filled with an all-encompassing buzz.
Arriving at their destination, Melissa and the other scout bees land around the entrance and use their wings to fan out a lemon-scented pheromone to help the rest of the swarm find their way in. Within a couple of minutes they're all safely moved into Dorothy's wall.

   Pictured above, the Bee Pope, wearing his red skullcap bestows a blessing upon one of his subjects.

   The final two days of 2012 were full of some very strange happenings out in the bee yard.

   First I was going through a hive on the 30th and noted to my self "yep there's the queen," next frame "yep there's the queen ... WAIT [cue that noise of a record going backwards or suddenly stopping or whatever causes that noise] --" there were two queens in the hive. I looked back at the notes, the hive appears to have been requeened two weeks ago. It would appear the two queens had coexisted in one small (just one box, ten frames) hive for about two weeks, weird!

   Then on the 31st I ran into a number of weird situations in a row. First, as soon as I pulled up to the trailer of hives I was going to work on that day I get out of the truck and right there on the ground is a queen going for a stroll.
   People sometimes tell me "oh I saw a queen bee the other day" and there's not a doubt in my mind they're wrong -- they saw a drone or a bumblebee, but you simply don't see queen bees outside a hive. They only leave a few times in their life, shortly after reaching adulthood, to go on mating flights. It had just been raining so it's my assumption she was out on a mating flight and got caught in the rain.
   I felt she deserved a name, and having used up all the obvious princess and queen puns on my artificial insemination queens (Queen Beeopatra, for ex), I randomly decided on Queen Vindaloo. And whichever hive I put her into would become named Vindolanda!
   So I set about looking for a hive that appeared to be queenless and have a recently hatched queen cell.

   Found a hive with numerous queen cells, some still occupied and some already hatched out. Thought I had found Vindolanda, but then I saw a queen in the process of getting "balled" -- workers will ball up around a queen they are trying to kill, which they'll do if they think they already have a queen and an unfamiliar queen shows up.
   Honestly this is ALSO something you rarely catch them in the very act of doing. I've seen it once before and asked the beekeeper I was working for what I should do about it and he said nothing -- they often try to ball a new queen but then decide she's alright and the ballers accept her before they've killed her. I'm not 100% on that beekeepers wisdom (that was the queen breeder on the farm south of Brisbane), but its my only information on that. So I let the baller bees keep on doing their thing but decided I wouldn't introduce Vindaloo into that anarchy.



   And in the very NEXT hive I encountered the pictured red-backed bee. By now, having encountered so many extremely rare situations in close succession I was getting a little bit freaked out.
   Also the weather was being rather unusual. Usually we only get passing rain squalls -- clouds dropping rain that you can see coming and if they pass overhead you get rain for 10-15 min and then the sun is out again, and even during you can see the sun elsewhere around you, but this day there was complete cloud cover and the whole sky would randomly drop rain for 10-15 min every 30-60 minutes.
   But anyway, so I thought this red backed bee was extremely odd. I got her into my hand and took a closer look and she definitely didn't have something red sticking to her -- her skin was red. What I somehow failed to notice until I looked at the photos is look, her head is totally different!! Hey eyes are way more off to the side and don't have the hairs on them that bees do. Altogether her head looks more like the head of a wasp.

   So now I'm REALLY perplexed about what that is because I know of no wasps that look that much like bees. I sent an email with links to the pictures to my friend Dr Thorp at Davis, but he specializes in CALIFORNIA native bees so he might not be the best person to sort it out but I'm sure he'll know something.

   And then I went to get in my truck and drive away ... and the battery was dead.

   Dorothy walks along a suburban sidewalk in a neighborhood full of lush overhanging trees on a nice sunny day. She carefully avoids tripping over the uneven rises in the concrete caused by roots, while talking on the phone. Her call comes to an end in the shade under a tree. Readjusting her aviator sunglasses she lets out a deep breath as she puts her phone back in her pocket. "Well that phone call went as well as it could have," she thinks to herself, feeling proud that she'd stood her ground on the issue. "But I'm going to need to either find a new roommate or a new place to live" she contemplates with concern, pursing her lips to the side in thought.
   Noticing a buzzing sound she turns a slow three-sixty but doesn't see the source. Then she looks up. Just inches from her head, hanging from a low branch, is a solid mass of bees about the size of a basketball. She lets out a shriek and runs down the street.

A swarm.

   Imagine, if you would, there is a bee crawling up your leg. Inside your pants, on your skin, up your leg. In fact, imagine there are several. There are bees on your arms, in your hair, there may be one on your nose. And the air around you is filled with bees. Angry bees. You're standing in three inches of mud, and as soon as a grizzly farmer comes down the ramp with a beehive (cursing a blue streak as he gets stung), you will run up the ramp towards where the bees are thickest, hoist up a sixty pound hive, and carry it back down the ramp to plop it in the mud next to other hives. You will get stung.

   This is how I got stung 130 times in one night last February.


   The math had added up to the bees being docile. When we picked them up while it was snowing in Redding they had been docile, and it was now probably less than 54 fahrenheit, which usually means bees aren't very active. So we didn't bother to put suits on. However we forgot to take into account that we had just jostled the bees over three miles of bumpy muddy road to get to this particular piece of farmland in the middle of California's Central Valley. We were definitely not prepared for what happened when we pulled the tarp off the trailer full of beehives. The bees angrily billowed out with a vengeance. Two farmhands ran for their lives and weren't seen again for the rest of the night.


   We had gotten a killer deal on the bees. $45 a hive right at the start of almond season. The beekeeper selling them in Redding was retiring, due to the loss of his third finger to beekeeping equipment (someone told me at convention that its less common now that most people have their boxes made by professional woodworkers rather than make them themselves, but it used to be that most of the guys at convention would be missing at least one finger!). Almond pollinating is currently the most lucrative thing to do in beekeeping -- last year we got $125 a hive simply for having our hives in Almond fields from February 1st through April 1st. So we bought 100 hives for $45 each and drove them straight to the almond staging area where we got $125 for each one. Thats how you turn $4500 into $12,500 in 8 hours. ;D

   The pass at the southern end of the Central Valley we needed to use to get home was snowed in, and the road was snowed in north of Redding, with the possibility of closures moving south of Redding, so while we were never directly in much snow, we were surrounded and potentially stranded by it.

   To coordinate between beekeepers and farmers in need of pollination, there are Bee Brokers. They seem to usually be large beekeepers themselves, who have been at it for a very long time and just have all the connections. Bee brokers get about $7 a hive (a hive broked?), and can coordinate tens to even hundreds of thousands of hives.
   It was to the bee broker's yard we (Dr Steven Theones & I) were moving our bees. When we got there the yard manager apparently hadn't been expecting us that night and was already drunk. He was a comically grizzly farmer type -- overalls, plaid longsleeved shirt, extremely bushy beard, and he had this kinda farmer drawl, he "jist tawked kin'da sl'ow."

   So like I said, we hadn't put suits on. The farmhands fled, Dr Theones & I hurriedly put suits on, and the yard manager was already drunk and mostly covered (and extremely grizzly) so he just cussed a lot. At this point, however, we were already covered in bees (in the dark bees tend to crawl A LOT), so we were putting the suits on over the bees that were already on us. Additionally, in the dark and being in a hurry it was useless to try to zip the veil on, so that major gap remained.
   One just had to work through the stings. I had bees crawling over EVERY inch of my body. ::looks dead serious:: EVERYWHERE.


   Extrapolating from the number of stingers we pulled out of my arms, legs and neck, we made a rough estimate of 130 as to the number of stings I received. The lethal dose of bee stings is said to be 10 per pound of body weight, so this would have been approximately 10% of a lethal dose for me. It felt kinda like.. having a really really bad sunburn. I could barely move for the next 24 hours (which didn't stop me from helping move a second load of bees a day later).


   If I learned anything from the experience its probably the opposite of what you'd expect. Now I know how much WORSE things could be so I DON'T bother to suit up if I'm "only" expecting a dozen or so beestings. Thats nothing.


This story eclipses my previous best stories of being unprepared for things happening at work, such as: (1) being sucked into a wave machine intake; and (2) being flushed down 200 feet of piping because someone didn't realize I was in there and turned on the water.

   Alright ladies & gentlemen, it is time to have the talk. That's right, I've been meaning for awhile now to sit down and have a serious talk with you about the birds and the bees.

   You see, last summer while I spent my time killing countless small furry animals, I learned a few things about a secret order some of us like to call Hymenoptera. What I mean to say is I'm going to tell you about the bees and the other bees now.

Honey Bees - Are actually more like orange & black than yellow and black if you think about it ... and believe me I had more than enough time to think about that. If they live in a man-made box its a hive, if they've made their own nest somewhere its a feral colony. Colonies are much more prone to diseases than hive boxes (as boxes allow them nice evenly spaces straight corridors for cleaning), and so bees thoroughly benefit from their interaction with man. And yet some fascist vegans refuse to consume honey for god knows what reason.
   In what sounds like a classic science fiction story (only, its true) some mad scientist brought 26 Tanzanian queen bees to Brazil in 1957. They subsequently escaped and have created the entire "killer bee" population that has since spread up from there to the southern reaches of the United States. They really are not at all as scary as people make them out to be, just a little more defensive than more common Italian or Hawaiian bees (who spend their time riding vespas or hula dancing, respectively).
   Incidently the difference between these bees was caused by natural selection. In Europe bees were primarily cultivated by beekeepers, so the more "userfriendly" docile ones were selectively bred. In Africa, however, sustainable apiculture (beekeeping) never constituted a significant portion of the bee population -- rather, honey was harvested by destroying hives (both by humans and animals), so the colonies that survived were the "meaner" ones. So... suck it creationists.

Hornets - Some people, especially the elderly, like to refer to any wasp-like insect from a yellow-jacket to a humming-bird as a "hornet." I really don't know where they got this idea. Hornets are an endangered species in Europe, and have never been wild on the American West Coast. So seriously shut up about them. Also, I found an amazing cinematic quality video of an epic battle between hornets & honey bees, I can't believe its for reals.

Wasps - There are two main types of wasps one finds here in California (and a number of rarer types). Unfortunately the wikipedia article on them sucks so I'm going to have to go entirely from memory here. First off, if you don't know the difference between wasps and bees (and I've found an alarming number of people don't), you are in my opinion an idiot and I'm not going to take the time to explain. The two main types of wasps here though are the Golden Umbrella Wasp (Polistes Aurelius) (which is yellow and orange), and the European Paper Wasp (Polistes Dominus), which is slightly smaller and more common than the Umbrellas. Dominus wasps have sharp construction-vehicle yellow-and-black markings. The two species act essentially the same so I'll talk about them together henceforth.
   Now wasps look fricken scary, and whereas in elementry school I used to freak out my classmates by holding honeybees in my hands, I always gave wasps a very wide birth. Well it turns out they are actually the most pacifistic of the Hymenopterids I've had experience with, and will only sting you if you assault them personally. It could see you looting its nest and killing its children and if its not on the nest it'll just say "fuck that, make love not war" and go be emo.
   Funny story time: once we got this call and the lady told our fearless leader David Mardner that every time someone rang her doorbell a wasp would come sting them in the face. Knowing that wasps are not aggressive like that, David dismissed this claim as clearly the product of hyperbolic wasp hysteria. He took the call, and arriving at the house proceeded to the door and rang the doorbell. A wasp came out of nowhere and stung him him the face.
   Turns out the wasp nest was actually in the doorbell.
   Actually getting stung by a wasp is so rare that despite being employed killing them for over a year, my coworker Jeremy had never been stung by one. He once expressed an interest in actually trying to get stung by one to know how it compared to other stings (he'd been stung by everything else already). What a nut.

Bumblebees: Now bumblebees, on the other hand, are fucking flying battlestations. Fortunately one only rarely comes across their secret lairs, and I never had a bumblebee call during the summer I worked as a bee buster. Bumblebees live in colonies of a few dozen up to maybe a hundred. To quote wikipedia "Often, mature bumblebee nests will hold fewer than 50 individuals, and may be within tunnels in the ground made by other animals, or in tussocky grass."
   Jeremy once got a bumblebee call. It was on a hillside with small bushes. At first he couldn't find it, but then he stepped on a particular shrub and heard an angry buzzing sound that rapidly got louder. Suddenly a few dozen of these angry little deathstars launched out of the ground under the bush and set upon him. Bumblebees you see, can and will both bite and sting (and not die from stinging you), and are also capable of a certain degree of burrowing/tearing (I would of said they're closely related to Carpenter Bees, but Wikipedia is telling me they're no closer related than both are to honeybees, whatever they fucking look the same except Carpenter's are all black), so they'll land on your protective bee suit and start trying to burrow/tear a hole to jam their stinger in. Also I'd imagine they must have been somewhat resistent to our +3 nerve gas attack that kills other things immediately, because otherwise Jeremy would have made quick work of them. Jeremy sustained at least one sting in this encounter and he said it hurt and swelled up in a manner exponentially worse than the other stings he'd received.

Yellow Jackets: These guys are actually pretty underrated. I would have thought they were no worse than honeybees .. wrong. We get a call for yellow jackets, we call for backup. They're smaller than honeybees, so they are better able to get into any orifice they can find in your trusty bee-suit. They bite rather than sting, which just means a single one can get you about a million times more than a single bee could. Seriously, killer bee infestation: no problem -- yellow jackets: call for backup and break out the most potent chemical weapons.
   Yellowjackets are actually a type of wasp, but they look more like skinny honeybees (that are yellow and black). Interestingly, they are carnivorous. I once saw one carting away a disembodied bee head from a destroyed honeybee colony. Morbid bastards.

Mud Daubers: Are another type of wasp. They build mud nests on the underside of eaves. Apartment complexes would pay us a 100 bucks to get rid of them, we'd show up and bat them down with our hands or a broom if out of reach. These things will not sting you, and actually, like the paper wasps discussed above, are beneficial to have around, since they eat less pleasant things like spiders, and pests that are harmful to your gardens. So we've actually talked potential customers out of having us kill wasps before (since our boss Dave actually loves insects, and the rest of us, we get paid whether or not we kill shit so no need to be malicious / waste time & chemicals).


   So yeah, now you know. I actually find wasps strangely fascinating. I had two pet dead wasps named Romulus (a Dominus) & Vortigern (an Aurelius). Hey, people have butterfly collections, and no one says thats weird. I was going to try to collect a specimen of all the rarer types of wasp, but I only came up with this plan late in the season and didn't get a chance. Also I found a dead queen bee from a kill and placed it prominently in our office with a sign identifying it as "Queen Amidala."

   In other bee related news, you may or may not recall that at Bee Busters we had decided to return to the beekeeping business. After I had left for the law mines they did indeed get their hives set up and filled with bees ... in Santiago Canyon.
   A week later, the Santiago Canyon Fire burned 28,445 acres over the course of two and a half weeks (only becoming fully contained last Friday).
   Oops.

   No one's been up there to check it out yet (the area is still closed to nonresidents I think), but the house next to them has survived so we're optimistic the bees are still there.


   In other news, my phone does this thing where it starts ringing, says private number on the caller ID, and when I answer it I hear ringing on the end as if I called someone. Once I stayed on and my friend Courtney Caruso answered as if I had called her, and there was much confusion and awkwardness regarding who called who. To avoid this awkwardness I now immediately hang up when I answer and hear ringing.
   Anyway, it did this a few times last summer, and then didn't do it again until just the other day it started doing it again. Around the middle of the day it'll happen every five minutes for awhile, and then stop until around mid-day the next day.
   Founder of the Davis College Republicans, Chris Mays, left me a voicemail after one of them, sounding confused saying "um.. I just answered the phone and.. um, apparently I called you? So, um.. I guess I wanted to say hi?"
   Maybe my phone is trying to tell me somehting, like if I answered and spoke to Chris we would go on to solve unsolved crimes or something.


   Also, the University of Puerto Rico School of Law costs about a 6th of most other law schools and has a pretty good bar passage rate (66% compared with the overall average of 46% Puerto Rican bar passage rate) ... and, of course, don't forget, that Puerto Rico IS part of the United States.
   U of Puerto Rico, a brilliant idea, or a the opposite of brilliant idea?