aggienaut | Entries tagged with honeybees

   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.

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!!

Endnotes
   This is a sort of mini chapter of the book I'm working on, to come right after the Nigeria chapter I linked to the other day (but hey if you're gonna follow links and read it why not start at the beginning and tell me what you think of the whole thing thus far. The whole thing is about 20,000 words / 40 pages.
   This section is hot off the press so it can authentically be said to be a newly written entry for the LJI prompt. (though the basic story of Melissa was originally told in an lj entry in 2009, enteresting to compare and see how far my writing has come)
   A comical amount of time and research went in to the choice of the tree in the first paragraph being an elderberry tree, involving a lot of research in collaboration with my mom and what native tree most resembles the tree I recall and most realistically was likely. Of course it mgiht not have been a California native at all but this is my story and I ain't showcasing no non native California trees if I can help it. One of the final deciding factors was that "elderberry" is an inherently funny word, imho.
   I can't believe that as far as I can tell from perusing my tags, I seem to have never written about the infamous Goat Hill Tavern Incident, which is a shame because having read everyone's affadavits I knew a lot more at one time than I recall now. I regret that in this retelling all my coworkers seem so innocent, I think it would be better storywise for them to be a bit more ill-behaved themselves. Ii suppose its a result of the affadavits having of course emphasized how very not at fault they were. I of course don't have to stick with their version of events but I'm not sure how to spice it up.
      The "because I'm always leaving" isn't making that theme too painfully hamfisted is it? (the more subtle elements of it are me telling Tarragon I'll be around in a month paired with my later readily agreeing to do two more projects in Africa)

   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.

July 2nd, 2009 -- In the rolling golden hills of Riverside County, California, my boss parks the pick-up truck in the middle of a large square of which rows of beehives make three sides. Upon opening the door the oven-like heat of Riverside County immediately hits us. I stretch after the long car ride, but one doesn't want to look idle for more than a few seconds with my high strung boss around, so I walk to one end of the rows of beehives and start walking along the row looking at the entrances. This is the first thing I always do, a quick look at all the hives to see if any have no activity, a pile of dead bees in front, or something similarly alarming.
   A bee stings me in the hand, but I casually scrape out the stinger with my thumbnail as I continue walking. The hives are stacks of boxes painted either white or pastel blue. The blue had originally been a mistake, having bought cheap paint from the "oops" bin at the hardware store we had only found out when we were ready to paint that it was blue. We decided to go with it, and as a consequence, the bee yards now rather reemble a smurf village. Another be or two stings my on the arm as I walk along the second side. So far everything is good, all the hives are buzzing busily with no dead hives.
   Any time a bee stings you, it releases not just more of the "alarm" pheremone, but the stinger that is stuck in you like a harpoon is emitting a "sting here" pheremone. I always picture it like some scene from a war film where they've managed to mark a target for airstrike with flares. As such, the number of stings you receive tends to go up exponentially as each additional sting encourages more. As I reach the end of the second line of hives I'm hving to constantly scratch off stings, it's becoming quite a nuisance. So I decide it's time to put on some protective gear. I look towards the truck, upon which I will find the suits, but it is not there. My boss has evidentally driven down to where there's a water pump at the other corner of the property, to get water for the bees.
   No worries. I calmly start walking towards the middle of the square. Walking at a brisk pace is usually sufficient to keep the bees mainly behind you. I've never seen any research on it but anecdotal evidence and my own observations tends to indicate bees are more likely to become agitated if you lose your calm. Certainly swinging arms wildly trying to swat bees is entirely ineffective and does seem to convince surrouding bees that you truly deserve to be stung. If I were to run I might trip and hurt myself, but moreover if seen by my boss I would bring professional shame upon myself worse than any amount of bee stings. So I calmly walk to the middle of the square, while calmly but quickly scraping off what stings I do receive. When I get to the middle and my boss has not yet returned, I commence walking in a broad circle to continue to leave the bees mainly behind me.

   And then it happens.

   Something that had never happened to me before.

   You see, it turns out, bees fit perfectly inside your ear canal. Suddenly I can hear every bristly hair of a bee, as well as the papery crackle of its wings, the scrape of its six legs against the interior of my ear. And of course, I can also feel six little scrabbling legs. The sound of anything else in my right ear is suddenly obstructed as if I had water in my ear.
   My professional calm is suddenly cracked by this psycological terror. There is a bee in my head! It is traveling inward towards my brain. For a moment I'm unable to think through it being stopped by my eardrum or whatever, I just know there is a large insect in my head.. I think there's something deeply subconciously terrifying about the buzzing of angry bees. Otherwise brave people find themselves running in terror from a single bee. As a beekeeper you train yourself to overcome this gut reaction ... but when the bee is actually inside your head it's all of a sudden once again not something you've prepared yourself for.
   There wasn't enough room to get my fingers in my ear and pull the bee out. I felt helpless to remove this terror boring into my brain. I imagined it stinging me inside my ear, thus dying in there are my ear swelled up around it. That seems like something that could cause some horrific infection, possibly requiring surgery.
   Because it felt a bit like water in my ear Ii tried to do what I would do about water in my ear -- I tilted my head so that side was towards the ground and hopped up and down on one foot. The bee continued to scrabble in my ear, its hair and wings making crinkly cellophane noises in my head. It didnt' want to be there either but it couldnt' turn around, and it's six little legs gave it more than enough purchase to note be knocked out of my ear.
   After a vigorous hopping proved quite ineffective, I had to stop for a moment and try to clear my head. Clear my head of the thoughts anyway, so I could maybe proceed to clear it of physical bees. What did I know about bee behavior that could solve this problem? Other bees buzzed angrily around me but I by now didn't notice them at all. Bees usually climb upwards if they are stuck somewhere. So I resolved to do the counter-intuitive thing. I stood perfectly still and tilted my head so the bee-ear was upward. I tried to relax my jaw and other face muscles, so the muscles around my ear wouldn't be constricted. And I stood there, motionless and as relaxed as I could make myself. Bees droned around me like little warplanes. They stung my on the arms, they stung my on the cheeks. I didn't scrape them out. I didn't swat at them. I didn't clench my jaw. I closed my eyes and took deep calming breaths.
   this is like some fucked up zen exercise I thought to myself, picturing a scrawny bearded zen master telling me to be calm as bees sting me. Miraculously, I felt the bee backing itself out of me ear. up, up, and it was out! It flew off much to its own relief no doubt. I looked around, the truck was trundling back up the hill. I commenced walking in broad circles.

   All the rest of the day I could still feel those six little legs scrabbling in my ear.

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. (:

08:30 this morning: It was a bright sunny morning, already approaching the 80s as I stepped out onto my back porch. This weather would be an unmitigated cause of excitement for me except they'd slapped a state-wide fire-ban on the day so I couldn't actually do any beekeeping -- lighting the smoker counts as (and is) a fire risk. Despite this I still had a busy day ahead of me delivering honey.

   As I cut across the corner of my lawn between the back porch and garage to get some honey jars, I noticed something in the grass.

   A cluster of bees. On the ground. A suspiciously sized cluster of bees on the ground. A cluster of bees on the ground only generally happens if the queen is injured or can't fly. I happen to know a queen who is injured or can't fly. This cluster of bees is much much bigger than the literally seven retainers I found "Queen Sera" with last week, but much smaller than a typical swarm. In fact, it's about exactly the size of the amount of bees in the hive I had put her in.

   Suspicious, I lift the lid on that hive box. Sure enough a proverbial tumbleweed blows out; it's empty. It's rare for (non-African) honeybees to "abscond" (leave entirely) from a hive after they've been there longer than about three days. So this gives us actually a relatively revolutionary insight. Generally when explaining bees to people I emphasize that the queen has no role in decision making. But in this case, these bees have been here for several weeks, all except Queen Sera who has been there about three days. That means that basically as soon as they accepted her as their queen she must have somehow rallied them all with her cry of "come on girls let's get out of here!!"

   Were the workers in the hive too feckless to do anything until a queen arrived, or did she rally previously content bees to stage a walk-out? These are very intriguing questions.

   I knelt down and tried to pick through the bees with my fingers to find the queen and return her to the hive, but it was proving difficult as they were intermingled amongst the grass, and I had to go to work. I took their hive box and placed it just beside the bee pile, with the entrance just beside them, and headed off to work.

This Afternoon: I was back home in mid-afternoon to pick up some jars of honey I had in the garage. The temperature had peaked around 94 and all day people seemed to be trying to get me to agree with them that it's "really hot." No this is not "really hot" this is lovely I just wish there wasn't a fire ban so I could work.
   The bees, however, as I expected, had decided to get out of the sun and go back inside their home which had weirdly appeared beside their new location. Only a few bees remained outside and others were going in and out of the entrance on normal nectar or pollen collection flights. I opened the box and examined the two occupied frames in search of Sera.

   I endeavored to get a photograph my presently most well-known queen bee, but tt's very hard to get a good picture holding the frame with one hand, my phone in the other, unable to clearly see the screen due to sunlight and knowing my camera is very bad at focusing up close. Fortunately one photo came out well enough for her to be seen.
   For ease of identifying her in the future I attempted to place a green dot on her back (by very carefully and gently pinning her in place with one hand and making a mark with a "posca" paint pen). I didn't get a very good mark on her and she seemed irritated with me.

   "Is rebellious" my Venezuelan fiancee Cristina commented when I informed her of the goings on, which you should imagine being said in an adorable Spanish accent, and "is like me."

   I quickly put the box back together with Sera in it. Then I moved it to its former position, thinking maybe confused returning foragers would easily find it again since it's the position the hive was in until recently, but after a few minutes a lot of bees seemed thoroughly confused around the position the hive had just been so I put the box back there.

Appx 15:00 - As I pulled up to a location in some fields where I planned to shake out a swarm I had just collected I found myself shivering. Misty low clouds scudded past on a stiff cold wind. Phone says the temperature is in the sixties. Even the "hot" days here are cold!!

Right now, 20:24 - I'm going to move it back to its former location now that it's dark out.

Addendum, A Week Later: I found Sera out walking once more today (the 25th) and returned her to the hive. I've confirmed she appears to have one shorter wing and hasn't laid any eggs yet so I think it's almost certain she has failed to mate and is continuing to leave the hive to fulfill that essential lifegoal. Queens can only mate while flying, which she can't seem to do. Technically she is of no use and cold hard farmer logic would be to do her in, but to get that small group of bees she's with up to speed with a new queen would take as much work as just starting a hive without them, ie she's not holding up any resources and I've come to enjoy constantly looking in on her and observing her unusual behavior, and there's certainly value in learning about more obscure bee behavior anyway.

Current Music: Billy Idol - Rebel Yell

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!

Random Fact I learned yesterday: I apparently have been living very close to ground zero of one of the world's greatest biosecurity breaches.

Random Bee Fact I learned today: When bees go out to a location where they had previously collected nectar but find the source depleted, they do not immediately search the surrounding area for a new source, they instead return to the hive and, according to the researcher who presented on it today "do literally nothing for a few hours, I guess they're depressed or something. But then they'll get over it and go out looking for more nectar." Well there you go.

Very Interesting Bee Fact: Another presenter (I'm currently at the state beekeeping convention) was a microbiologist, who along with her colleagues has been studying the nutritional benefits of honey. And I learned something very interesting! While the overwhelming majority of honey is the simple sugars glucose and fructose, about six percent or so is made of rare complex sugars calleed oligosaccharides, and these are not digested in the stomach and upper gut and absorbed by us but rather travel down to the lower gut to feed the gut bacteria there. And in their testing it seems to have a very positive effect on good gut bacteria AND repress bad bacteria (like bacteria that cause diarrhea).
This effect is called "prebiotics," not to be confused with "probiotics" which is ingesting live bacteria; and prebiotic effects appear to be more longlasting than the popular probiotics. SO this means two things. For most of you, it is apparently quite healthy to have a tablespoon of honey in some form every day; and for me it means that if this news gets out it should really help honey sales! (:

Further Elaboration on That First One: This biosecurity breach occured in 1859 in nearby Barwon Park manor (which I have written about previously), when Mr Thomas Austin thought it would be jolly to release 24 rabbits, no doubt saying "what could go wrong?" as he did so. Within years the rabbit population was in the millions. Wikipedia notes "it was the fastest spread ever recorded of any mammal anywhere in the world."

Totally Unrelated Photo of the Day

"The Saddest Rhinoceros"
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Special thanks to

furzicle for her assistance as videographer. She braved the bees and survived mostly unscathed -- a bee pooped on her ipad. The below is the original impromptu video I made with my phone that kind of gave me the idea, but it has a much better monkey chain formation.

   "In the end, only kindness matters," this birdhouse when I first met it back in January, before I relocated it to my yard.

   And read more about the fascinating rafting behavior of red fire ants!

   Here's someone else's video of an impressive ant bridge across water. Please ignore the terrible music.

   The book I'm reading is this fascinating anthology (ant-thology???) about insects.

   And finally, here I get eaten by army ants in Nigeria. [fade to image of skeleton being crawled over by ants]

You all seem to like the bee entries... so here's two little videos from today! (:

I. The Daily Story
   Once upon a time, about 13 years ago now, I started emosnail with the credo of "every day has a story, and I intend to tell it." And back then I did update just about every single day.

   13 years later here we are at emo_snal, we've lost an i, and updates are few and far between -- typically only when something really exciting happens and sometimes not even then (I swear one of these days I'll update on the exciting conclusion of the end of the last Turkey trip), but every update is a production now, not something to whip off in twenty minutes about the day's excitement.

   I do rather miss those good ole days though, and would like to get back to finding the story in every day and examining it. I'm sure that won't get around to happening, but I'll tell you about the latest bee-ventures.

II. First, on being an insecticidal maniac
   We've finally started doing live removals, AKA "bee rescues," at work. It's all kind of ironic, because you see, we love bees, my boss and I. We are as dedicated to and as knowledgeable about the trials and tribulations of the local bee population as anyone you could find short of one of the professional bee PhDs in the ivory tower. Yes, we kill bees, a lot of bees, and we get a lot of flak for that, but that's because the feral Africanized bees of unknown hygiene that people get in their walls are really of no value to the greater bee population and damaging to the beekeeping community. But drowning in a rising tide of consumers that veritably demand it, we've begun doing live removals.

   As a lover of bees, one has to kind of harden ones heart to the kind of killing we do. It's just business, you don't think about it. I'd kill bees all day and then come home and rescue a single bee from the pool, or a coworker would ask me to squash a single bee on a window and, after killing thousands, the personal-ness of squashing an individual would still repulse me.
   There was only one call I can recall really feeling guilty over. It was a feral colony under someone's jacuzzi and after I'd pulled off their outer wall and sprayed them with gas there was still not a single bee angry or trying to sting me. They were obviously very friendly bees, which, more than provoking mere sentimentality, had me thinking "I really want to use these bees as breeding stock!!!! I want their genetics!!" They would have been of real value to the world. But alas I had already gassed them and that was right before we officially began doing live removals.

   And to go off on a little bit (more) of a tangent, all our competitors are saying they're doing live removals, and they have pictures and videos on their websites purportedly showing them doing so, but not a single picture or video of them doing beekeeping or even delivering bees to a beekeeper (you'd think at least once they'd want to take a picture of the bee yard they delivered them to, wouldn't you?). My boss even called some of them pretending to be a random person looking to buy some honey and they of course didn't have any or have a beekeeper to recommend calling, a sure sign that they are not actually in contact with any beekeepers. In conclusion, its not that we're the only ones cold-hearted enough to kill bees, we're just the only ones who are honest about what we do!!

III. In the End, Only Kindness Matters

   Last Thursday I had a call for a requested live removal of a birdhouse full of bees (which is not a terribly uncommon place for them to inhabit). First I approached them bees without any protective gear on, which is my usual tactic to ascertain just how defensive the bees are going to be. Expected results range from bees becoming angry and possibly stinging me as soon as I'm nearby, to a bee or two starting to buzz angrily (to me the difference between an angry buzz and normal buzzing is plain as day) after I've stood next to them a minute or two. From this information I know whether I'm going to need the hot uncomfortable full suit or less, and if I can permit the homeowner to watch from a distance or will have to make sure there's no one outside anywhere nearby. In the case of this birdhouse I was able to get nose to nose with the hive entrance and for as long as I stood there no bees became angry.
   The homeowner even became brave, and encouraged by my ability to remain next to the bees unmolested, they approached it, but then to demonstrate that they believed the hive was not fastened down and could be easily removed, they gently jiggled it.
   Its funny the obscure things you take for-granted, I knew these bees to be very docile, but I was mortified that she'd jiggle the hive like that! The buzzing of the hive revved up to a veritable roar. But still it wasn't an angry roar -- we watched as bees came flooding out and began to whirl around in front of it.
   "I do believe they're sending out a swarm right now!!" I exclaimed. Sure enough, I even saw a queen bee emerge from the hive, which wouldn't happen for any other reason.
   Anyway, I let that swarm settle and vacuumed it up with the low-powered live capture vacuum, which really does seem to get them with zero casualties, and I lit the smoker and smoked the birdhouse --just to cover my bases, for they hardly seemed to need it-- and was able to tape some screen over the entrances, still without a single bee getting mad, and carry it to my truck. These bees were seriously unbelievably gentle.
   I was incredibly glad to have these delightful bees alive. I called my boss and informed him I wouldn't be taking them to the company bee yard -- I was taking these ones straight to MY house! I got home and, cradling the little birdhouse full of bees in my arms, took it a short way up the hill in the backyard and placed it on a chair up there. In all the times I've gone up there to look at it I have still not seen or heard a single angry bee.

IV. The Second Swarm
   Returning from work Friday evening I found they had sent out ANOTHER swarm, which had landed on a nearby patio beam. While the swarm was very small, its still kind of amazing that this already-very-small hive has sent out two swarms since I've known it.
   Swarms are "supposed" to be very docile, but I've found most swarms in this area will sting you just for looking at them. This one however I was able to play around with, sticking my finger all the way in to the solid mass of bees and other things, without getting stung. I didn't have a beehive to put the swarm in though, and didn't want to shake them in to some random box and then again into a beehive, so I decided to wait until I had a chance to go back to work and get a hive box.
   All that evening, while I was out at the bar with my coworker/shipmate Russell and some friends that are staff at the Ocean Institute (that owns the Brig Pilgrim) I was worrying about those bees. What if they don't have enough collective body mass to stay warm all night? Should I have put them in a box so they could stay warm? When I got home at 1am I went out there and felt the outside of swarm, the outer bees felt fairly cool. But then again none were buzzing -- if they were TOO cold they would buzz to generate heat. It wasn't a terribly cold night anyway, probably upper 50s, which is a survivable body temperature for bees.
   The next morning (this morning, Saturday morning), I had to go do my volunteering thing on the boat in the morning. After lunch I rushed home to make sure the swarm was still there, it was. I went to work and got a hive box. I came home with the box and placed it under where the swarm was hanging...
   At that EXACT MOMENT I heard their buzzing rev up to full throttle. Now, I hadn't jostled them or anything, there's no way I could have triggered this. Just a crazy coincidence, that after two days of hanging there, the exact moment I put a hive under them to move them into they all took off and flew off over some neighboring shrubbery and out of sight.

   Oh well, I would have really liked to have that swarm in a hive, but I still have the original in the bird house. But I can't open up the bird house and see how they're doing in there like I could have done with bees in a hive box. Maybe they'll send out another swarm soon though...

Okay so I'm taking a creative writing class at the local community college, and I revised¹ this story, originally titled "Marching Orders" (that was the original prompt when written for LJ Idol), for class and submission to the college literary magazine.

¹ and revising an existing story is officially okay.

So I know traditionally no one is online on Sunday and not a god damn one of you commented on my last update, but I want to submit this via email tomorrow (Sunday) so if I'm gonna get feedback it needs to be now. So.. here it is:

Constructive criticism please

   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.

Notes:
yes I know, it's technically not a hive if its not in a man-made box, artistic license here.

Related
There's also this sequel to the original version
And a lot more appearances of this Dorothy here.

So I'm back working at Bee Busters. And of course as soon as I started working there I started (finally) getting calls from other places wanting me to come in for an interview. But anyway, the above is the Newport Back Bay, view from where I was standing by between calls in the morning. Pictures in this entry are all from my phone, so I apologize for the poor quality.

Scene I - The Job
   This afternoon I responded to a call about bees at an apartment building in Fullerton (NE Orange County). I arrive and find the described location to find that it appears to be bees scouting the vent, that is, investigating it as a potential place for a swarm to move in to. I'm a bit disappointed because all I can really do here, since I can't block up the vent, is spray Wasp Freeze(tm) on it, a pesticide that has an odor that is particularly repellant to all hymenopterids ... though it would probably decay in the sun within 24 hours and then there'd be nothign stopping bees from moving in.
   Two maintenance guys are looking at it with me and asking me some of the usual basic questions. Then they walk away. Moments later they're hollering. "Hey bro! Over here!!" I do my quick wasp spray treatment and go around the building to where they are. A huge buzzing noise fills the air as I come around the corner. There is a swarm in the very act of moving into a vent on that side -- probably the same swarm that had been scouting the other vent!
   I quickly set up a ladder (its like, 12 ft up), and the shopvac. I spray some hand held pesticide in the vent with the vacuum ready, and sure enough they all come flooding out right into my waiting vacuum.
   Now of course a fair number escape past the vacuum. Presently I see some grouped up near the ground the way they group around a queen. Closer examination reveals the queen is in fact there. I try to grab her but she flies off before I get there. I go back about my business but keep an eye out for her and soon I see her on the wall again. I try to grab her with the gloves on but they're too cumbersom, so I take them off and am able to grab her gently between my fingers. I put her in a ziplock bag in the cab of my truck and go back to the job.

   Then I didn't have a call after so I went to stand by from the nearby Fullerton Arboretum:

Scene II - Bees in Birdhouses
   There used to be a feral colony under a log on the hill behind my house. One day I had a call for bees in a birdhouse. It was a pretty birdhouse. It would make a good home for some bees. So instead of throwing it away I put it on top of the feral colony in the yard. Eventually the bees moved up into it.
   Last week when I came back to bee busters the truck I inherited had a birdhouse full of bees on it. The entrance was stuffed with steel wool but there was still a fair number of bees all over it. I suspected there were still a lot of live bees in it. At the end of the day I put it up on the hill next to the other one and pulled the wool out. I figured it was probably dead but maybe some future bees would move in. When I checked on it a few days later it had steady flight in and out the front, like it was totally a going affair!

Scene III - A Home For Beeatrix.
   Arriving home from work, despite rather having to go to the bathroom, the first thing I did was put a dab of honey on my finger and go outside to let the queen bee (whom we'll call Queen Beeatrix, for the sake of being whimsical) out of the bag. I put my finger in front of her and she walked up to the honey and started lapping it up hungrily. Once she'd had her fill she took a few steps away. In the below picture you can even still see the honey residue on my pointer finger.

   What now? I've tried a few experiments to see if I could keep a queen bee alive without any help from worker bees but unfortunately she usually died after 24-48 hours. Wasn't particularly feeling like trying that again right now.
   If you introduce a queen into an existing hive with a queen in it they'll "ball" around the new queen and kill her. But operating on the assumption that someone HAD gassed the new birdhouse hive, the queen could be dead. Without opening it up I can't really determine. Its kind of a wild chance, but I figured, well, she'll definitely die in any other course of action. Maybe I'll go put her in front of the hive and see if they seem intent on being sweet or mean to her.
   So I go up the hill to the hives, and put my hand with her on it right in front of the entrance. Immediately several bees walked out on to my hand and started inspecting her.

The first birdhouse has tipped over, and I figure righting it would probably upset them now. That brown thing on top/front of it is a "beard" of bees overflowing out. They'll probably swarm soon. Also this is not only a phone pic but it was awkwardly taken with my left hand, so cut me some slack ;-D

   The neighbours three rat-like little dogs came to the fence and interrupted my peaceful bee moment with frenzied yipping at me, which continued the entire time I was there. Ugh. Bees are so much more peaceful than annoying little rat-dogs.
   Anyway more bees came out and groomed her, but I was afraid maybe they were just trying to figure out who she was and would turn on her. She didn't make any movement towards the hive entrance. I sat tehre for about ten minutes, arm getting tired, still having to go to the bathroom, while the bees crawled around on my hand getting to know the queen. And the dogs yipped.
   I moved my hand so she was just outside the entrance and finally they began escorting her in.

   She's hard to make out in the above picture but she's just crossing the lip of the entrance. I hung around for another several minutes to make sure they didn't seem to become agitated or kick her right out, something they very well could do. Also contemplating how nice a peaceful bees can be -- these are not domesticated colonies. These are wild caught swarms that really have no reason to be nice to me, but I was having a nice peaceful 15 minute sit right in front of them with them using my hand as a porch. Much more pleasant creatures than those god damn yipping dogs next door d:

   (Still though, I must say, don't try this at home!)

   Then I had to go to the bathroom. But I came back one more time to make sure everything still seemed to be in order and it did. And everyone lived happily ever after. (:

When I have a bunch of very similar pictures I have the hardest time trying to figure out which is the best to use and which ones to discard. And then sometimes I'll just end up posting them all to flickr. So feel free to tell me which of these seven you think is subtly better.

In other news, after several reschedulings it my next project in Nigeria is currently on the books for April 1st-17th. On top of that it looks like we might add another project, in Egypt, by a different aid organization (ACDI/VOCA) immediately prior. So suddenly in three weeks I should be spending a month traipsing about Africa!

   "Sweetheart? Sweetheart you don't need to do this!"
   In response I hear only the ominous whir of a band-saw.
   "We can talk about this!!"
   Sweethea-- auuughh!" I feel a sharp stabbing in in my side.

   Though it feels like I've just been stabbed, I grimace and very carefully put the frame full of bees I'm holding back into the beehive. Once it's safely out of my hands I quickly scrape the stinger out of my side. The bee is still buzzing angrily about, though I can see the rupture in the end of her abdomen where she lost the stinger. As I flick the stinger to the ground, in my head I say to her "I think that was relatively unnecessary dear." She tries to sting me again, but I ignore her. "Yeah good luck with that pumpkins.'

   "Ah there you are Vindaloo! Everything is going well I see!" I am excited to find "Queen Vindaloo," with her distinctive slightly-burgundy colored back, on the second frame I've pulled out of the brood box of hive # 378 (nicknamed "Vindolanda"). It's like seeing an old friend I've been waiting all week to catch up with, and I'm very glad to see she's doing well, with many eggs in the frames I've looked at so far.

   When I'd met her a week before, on the last day of 2012, she was going for a walk in the grass near the hives. This is highly bizarre, because queen bees DON'T leave the hive except for a few mating flights in the first few days of their life, or with a swarm of bees to start a new colony.
   It had been a very bizarre day as well. Earlier I had found a hive with two queens co-existing in it, and just a few boxes later I'd find a bee with a bright red back, a very rare genetic mutation:

   Now I don't by any means name every queen bee, but every now and then it makes life more interesting to give one a name and follow up on her. I'd long since run through all the bee puns I could think of (Beeopatra, Stingerella, etc), so Vindaloo was kind of randomly pulled out of the air. My hypothesis is she was a virgin queen out on a mating flight, caught in the recent rain squall that had just passed through and thus grounded.
   So I temporarily put her in an empty powdered gatorade container and set about finding her a home.

   I found one hive that was a possibility. It clearly had been queenless, and had a bunch of queen cells lined up like missile silos preparing to launch their contents. Several queen cells already had the door thrown open (or at least a hole chewed in the end), implicating recently released queens (of which Vindaloo might be one?), and then I found a queen bee in the act of being attacked by worker bees. They do that sometimes if they think they have a queen already. Well okay, this hive is a bit of the wild west I see. Nevertheless I decided to try to introduce Vindaloo into this anarchy and see what happened.
   I placed her onto one of the frames. She looked around and took a few cautious steps ... and then a worker bee started quite rudely pulling on her leg.
   "Hey! Don't be a jerk!" I said to her in my head, with perhaps a real life glare. "Come on Vindaloo we'll find you somewhere nicer." I push her assailant away and put my finger in front of her, she climbs aboard.

   I found another much more suitable hive, with all the signs of queenlessness, some hatched queen cells, and none of the brawling "we're-in-the-middle-of-a-shoot-out" behavior of the anarchy hive.
   "Here you go, how's this one Vindy?" She cautiously took a few steps on the frame. A worker bee approached her and she cautiously backed away, but another worker came from he other side ... and started grooming her. When last I saw her she disappeared between two frames with three workers being very sweet to her. Now I just had to wait, since its best to not go through a hive in the week after a queen has been introduced so that they can get settled.

   It had been Christmas week. One of the hottest weeks of the year, and a particularly lonely time out in the fields. Even if I don't work directly with anyone, usually there's been people coming and going and working in the fields, but Christmas week no one was out there. Not out of any sentimentality for everyone's favorite mid-winter celebration that had been strangely transplanted here, but because all the crops had been harvested and new ones not planted yet. So no one was in the fields, and when I was in what passes for town around here, all the shops WERE closed for the holidays. And I'd drive past the plastic snowmen and reindeer in front of houses filled with relatives gathered for the holidays, and feel weirdly disconnected, since with no relatives here and weather I don't associate with Christmas, it felt like just another day to me.
   So it was just me and the bees out there. And I found myself talking to them more and more. Usually not out loud, that makes me feel a bit too crazy, though I'd often greet them in the morning with a vocalized "good morning bees!" And in my head I'd thank them for being patient with me when they were well behaved as I took apart their home and examined it "room by room," or I'd chastise them for being rude or saucy if they were a bit over-enthusiastic about stinging.
   "Old Greg" whom I used to have the misfortune of working with, used to gleefully exclaim to the bees things like "How do you like THAT bitches?" and "this will give you something to think about bitches!!" but that seems a bit rude to me. In my head, any bee, even if its in the very act of stinging me, is a sweetheart or a dear (though perhaps a bit impertinent) -- I try to avoid "honey" because that would just be cheesy, but sometimes it slips in.

   This week it looks like there'll be no talking to bees or anyone else for me though. "Ex-cyclone (tropical storm) Oswald" is paying a visit. It's not even 10am and we've gotten 4 inches of rain today, the main road into town is out and its not even worth looking at the narrow roads among the fields much less the mud tracks within them. As I look out my window it looks to be coming down sideways. Hope the bees are doing alright.

Current Music: Billy Joel - You Might Be Right

   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.

   A bee we'll call Gwenynen¹ is strolling through the hive when she hears a nearby commotion. A nearby bee (whom we've named Devra) is buzzing her wings and waggling about. Gwen immediately recognizes that Devra is about to regale them all with a tale about where to find blooming flowers, and joins the crowd following her story.
   First the bee turns a 360 degree circle to the right, then she proceeds in a straight line for a quarter of a second 45 degrees off of straight up the vertical honeycomb that serves as their floor. The bees following her story do so quite literally, following behind her in roughly a teardrop shaped crowd.
   Next, Devra turns another circle to the left and proceeds straight up the comb for about four seconds. Then she turns a circle to the right and proceeds horizontally along the comb for half a second. She then stops buzzing and at a casual pace proceeds to the place where she will begin her dance again. Gwen and the other bees that were following the dance only need to follow it once to store the map firmly in their memory..

¹ Which is Welsh for "honeybee"

   Leaving the hive, Gwen emerges into the sunlight from a hole near the roof pitch of a suburban house. After a quick look around she spots the sun in the sky, turns right and flies about 250 yards at an angle 45 degrees to the right of the sun, in accordance with the instructions. This takes her between some houses and over a back yard.
   Through her compound eyes you might think the world would be a barely comprehensible kaleidoscope, but of course her mind puts it all together and just as humans (usually) see one image rather than two separate ones, her mind puts together one image in which a very wide arc is all in focus. As she flies she keeps a look out not only for landmarks but for potential predators. Coming over a rooftop she spies that terrifying bird the tyrant flycatcher, a fearsome predator that will catch and devour bees in flight. Gwen quickly dives and takes several detours between houses before emerging on another street and resuming her flight, taking into account the deviations caused by her detour.
   She then turns left and flies straight towards the sun. Every second of travel in a straight line during the dance translates as about a thousand yards of flight, so Gwen travels about 4000 yards (2.27 miles) in this direction. She takes note of the landmarks she passes such as large trees or streets crossed. After about twenty minutes, Gwen knows the next turn is coming up, which she clearly remembers to be a turn to the right and a short journey at 90 degrees to the sun. Sure enough, right ahead she sees a brightly colored flower garden. In the infrared spectrum visible to Gwen, many of the flowers have a bullseye on them specially designed for bees.

   Gwen lands on several flowers, filling the basket-like hairs on her hind legs with pollen and ingesting nectar to be transported internally in her special honey-stomach. Many bees from other hives as well as from her own are also among the flowers, sometimes working side-by-side with her in the same flower. If you're feeling fanciful go ahead and imagine they exchange small talk and gossip.
   Gwen nervously eyes some golden umbrella wasps that are prowling the garden, but they are busy hunting for spiders, caterpillars and aphids -- easier prey than fast moving bees.
   With a louder buzz a bumblebee approaches a flower Gwen is in and she feels an electric shock as the larger bee makes contact with the flower -- fuzzy hair covering bumblebees does more than just make them look adorable, it also builds up a static charge as they fly which helps pollen stick to them when they make contact with a grounded flower. As she finishes with the flower the bumblebee gives it a quick spritz of pheromone, which will serve her as a sort of note to self that she's visited the flower already and won't wear off until it's about time to visit it again.
   Having gathered about 50 milligrams (half her body weight) of nectar and pollen, Gwen lifts off and gets her bearings for the flight home.

   Gwen takes note of the position of the sun, taking into account its movement across the sky (a degree every four minutes), refers to the nearby landmarks for her position in relation to where the memory map she followed to get here left her, and embarks upon her journey.
   She strikes out with the sun on her right side for a brief trip out of the flower garden yard, gaining altitude as she goes until she's just over roof level. Putting her memorized directions in reverse she turns left for the long journey back to the hive. She flies past familiar landmarks, crossing streets and dipping between rooftops.
   She flies about two miles and prepares to make the turn into the cluster of houses in which her home is located. Just in time she notices a dark silhouette above her of a giant (3 inch) dragonfly. It dives towards Gwen and she desperately dives and darts through some foliage hoping to lose the large monster. It is slowed by the obstacles but not lost. Gwen darts over a wall and banks sharply hoping to get around another corner before the green dread-beast. No such luck as it hungrily looms over the wall itself.
   Gwen desperately darts around obstacles and through leafy foliage across several yards but is unable to shake her pursuer. She kicks off the pellets of pollen on her legs to reduce her weight and tries one more mad dash through the air with the dragonfly only inches behind her. Suddenly there is an explosion of turbulence and seconds later Gwen realizes she is still alive and no longer under pursuit.
   Looking around, she sees a tyrant flycatcher perched on a nearby tree with the tail and wings of the dragonfly extruding from its beak.

(this really cool picture is not my own, comes from here)

Unfortunately, now Gwen is off the map. She looks around for landmarks and recognizes several tall trees and a distant water tower, she's still very close to home. She flies over several houses to the line of identical suburban homes of which one hosts her home colony. Unfortunately, since bees can only count to three, after dismissing the first three houses she must check the roof pitch of each one until she finds the one in which she lives. As Dorothy, the homeowner, installs a birdhouse in the backyard, oblivious to her bee housemates, Gwen enters the nest. She lost the pollen but still has some nectar to show for her trouble, and still remembers exactly how to get back to the food. Maybe she'll try again after a little rest.

Technical Notes

As many of you seem to know (for god knows people like to inform me frequently enough), an aerodynamics engineer sometime in the 30s famously noted that according to known laws of physics, bumblebees can't fly.

I came across an interesting article the other day about honeybee flight, and it addresses this interesting question:

"The problem was that the engineer was using fixed-wing calculations and not the flexible, hovering type of wing that bees have. However, there is still a serious physiological problem and that is the wings of bees move (flap) at 200-400 times a second, and this is at least 10 times the speed that muscles or nerves can operate"

   So there you have it. They still can't fly.

   Additional interesting facts: (1) there are no muscles in a bees wings; (2) bees have four wings. In fact one of the distinguishing differences between bees and insects that are not bees (such as flies which will sometimes try to look just like bees) is that bees have four wings. Each side has a hind and fore wing. These wings are normally hooked together but they can also unhook them (presumably for some useful purpose), and several diseases and parasites can cause their wings to become unhookable (so called K-wing syndrome). The oriental hornet I met in Turkey was suffering from this condition, making her two right-side wings clearly distinguishable:

   The thorax (middle section) of a honeybee is almost entirely muscles. These muscles can be used to tilt and maneuver the wings to control flight (the wings move in a swimming motion during flight), flexed to cause the wings to flap, or de-coupled from the wings and flexed simply to create heat.
   This heat creation ability is interesting because while bees as insects are technically "cold blooded," they can actually raise and maintain their own body temperature. They must be around 95f in order to fly and must keep their brood about that warm for it to stay alive, but they themselves can survive as low as around 56f and will allow themselves to drop down that low if they don't have one of the above reasons to maintain a high temperature. See also, some bees are employed as living mobile space heaters.

   As to how the wings move ten times faster than muscles and nerves can fire, the muscles put the wings into vibration "like a violin string." At 200-300 vibrations per second, it is, as you will notice, in the audible range. By so doing bees can move 50 millagrams of honey or nectar at a time, which is about half their body weight.

Quotes from "To Be Or Not to Be A Bee" (Part III), by Roger Hoopingarner, Bee Culture magazine September 2011

   So, I don't mean to alarm you, but sometimes I kill bees. On purpose. And get paid for it. I rain undeserved death upon them like some kind of vengeful old testament god, and then maybe I'll come home and save an individual bee from drowning in my pool.

   Or for example on Friday, I received a call that an irrigation box in a busy parking lot in Tustin was full of bees and had to receive a dose of fire and brimstone.
   After I'd killed several tens of thousands of them outright and reduced their city into a jumbled mess in a five gallon plastic bucket I happened to notice one particular bee a crawling on the ground. This bee, it so happens, was the queen bee (recognizable by the 50% longer abdomen). Something warmed the cockles of my cold clammy coal-like heart, and I took her carefully into my hand and took her with me when I departed (after having veritably salted the earth to ensure life did not continue at her old home).

   I went about the rest of the day with her on my hand. I'd had a previous pet queen bee named Bee-opatra but she only lived about 24 hours in human care. Queens are often shipped about and can live several days in a small cage with a number of worker bee attendants, but I'm curious how long I can keep one alive without the worker attendants.
   The naming convention I've come up with is pet worker bees I name as "honeybee" in other languages (ex: Melissa and Devra), and queen bees I name with bee pun queen names (Poke-ahontas and Beeopatra), so Kori and I decided this one should be named Queen ElizaBEEth. We've tended to shorten that to Elizabee.

   At the end of the day I fed her some honey (via a dab on the end of a finger, which she proceeded to lap up with her bee tongue). In her escape from the apocalypse I was wreaking upon her home she had somehow become completely covered in honey. She had managed to get nearly all of it off by the end of the day except some on her back where she couldn't reach and to which her left wing (or rather her left two wings, since I'm sure you're about to point out that bees by definition have four wings) had become adhered, rendering them useless. Kori brought bee care to a new level by using a droplet of water on the end of a toothpick in conjunction with a tiny corner of a tissue to wash off the remaining honey.
   Elizabee also had a pretty big gash on the side of her abdomen, which I feared would be a likely cause of mortality.

   We also prepared a bowl for her to live in, with two little chunks of the honeycomb from her hive. One of the pieces of comb I washed off (and it therefore retained water in the cells, they are designed such that water surface tension tends to keep water in them from flowing out, and we put some honey in some of its cells. The other comb we didn't wash and it already had some honey in some cells. We also placed some water in the bowl of a plastic spoon (with the handle broken off and removed). It appears she prefers the comb that wasn't washed, and prefers to either hang out on top of it or sometimes crawl under it. When I put my finger in she usually eagerly crawls onto it -- I think probably because it's nice and warm. They like to ideally keep their temperature at 95 degrees (though they can let it drop into the 60s without dying and will do so to save on their fuel bills. Though technically cold blooded they can actually generate heat by de-coupling their wing muscles and vibrating them, but I digress)

Kori spends some quality time with Elizabee.

   Elizabee has now been away from other bees for nearly 60 hours and appears to be going strong. She looked a little depressed earlier in the afternoon though. Kori thinks she might be bored or lonely without other bee-friends. So I try to take her out and let her crawl around my arm every now and then. We were also curious if she would lay eggs in the cells of the honeycomb provided, but so far she has declined. Her injury may account for her lack of egg laying as it is near her egg-laying bits (I've dissected queens under microscope at Davis and examined their egg-laying bits), though she may also have taken note that she is NOT in a beehive and there are no attendant bees to care for her eggs.
   I think I'd be hard pressed to care for bee eggs myself (they would need to be fed and eventually the cell they were laid in would need to have a wax cap put over it). To that end and as a general next stage of the experiment, I'm thinking about getting some nurse bees from another hive and introducing them into the bee bee-rarium. Worker bees spend their first few days of life doing nursing activities and caring for the queen. Ideally selecting some bees the moment they hatched would be ideal for this but that would be tedious so I might just have to settle for finding some that appear to be doing those duties and corralling them.

   With the introduction of nurse bees it would no longer be a unique "how long can a queen bee survive on direct human care" experiment, but it would still be interesting since I'd still be micromanaging a tiny hive-simulation environment. Such experiments in bee micromanagement should result in greater insights and understandings of what specifically and exactly bees need.

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The Agrinautica

Tales of a Beekeeper Errant

Entries tagged with honeybees

Waxing Eloquent

A Bee Named Melissa

Bees in Birregurra

It's all in your head.

The Queens of Isla Saona

The Rebel Queen

Queen Serendipitia

Swarm Ethics

07 of 30 - Factoids

Monkey Chains of Bees and Insect Bivouacking

Shaking bees

Rescuing Bees

House Hunting

A Day in the Life

Picture of the Day

Too Much Time With the Bees

The Final Shenanigans of 2012

The Grocery Run

Bee Flight

Queen ElizaBEEth