Tag: beekeeping

Helping Hands

~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

A few years ago, at a beekeeper’s meeting, we had a medical emergency in which a speaker from out-of-town fainted. We had to call the ambulance. Turns out, it was an issue with low blood sugar, but at the time we didn’t know exactly what was happening. Luckily, there were several doctors and nurses in attendance who rushed to the speaker’s aid and cared for him until the ambulance arrived. While waiting, it took several minutes for us to track down a sugary substance to help him get his blood sugar back up—yes, in a room full of beekeepers no one had any honey. That got me thinking how important it is to know where emergency items are located in our meeting spaces. First aid kits, fire extinguishers, and defibrillators do no good if we can’t find them fast.  Even something as simple as a piece of candy could save a life, at least if we can find it in time. The whole event reminded me that sometimes in life we’ve got to depend on the benevolence of strangers.

Depending on others doesn’t always come easy, especially for self-reliant types. Personally, I relish my farming and beekeeping pursuits because they do provide alone time—just me, myself, and the machinations of my mind. Granted, there may be nothing more dangerous than an idealist farmer who is the throes of agrarian reverie. Even Thoreau himself, the prophet of self-reliance, accidentally started a major forest fire, and in so doing, he depended on the townspeople of Concord to extinguish the blaze. It was definitely a blow to his ego, and afterwards some townsfolk bestowed him with the moniker “the fool who burnt down the woods.” It happens to the best of us.

Unlike Thoreau, who was merely trying to cook lentils on his campfire, I started a conflagration with the intended purpose of burning the vegetation in a field ditch that was encroaching on my line of bee hives. Over the years, the vegetation rooted in the ditch had expanded and grown unruly with antagonistic plants: briars, wild blackberry canes, poison ivy, etc. I dare not bush hog the ditch for fear of puncturing a tractor tire due to the spikes protruded from the wild Bradford pear trees. So I waited for a bright fall morning, dropped a match and watched as a wall of flames arose and traveled down the ditch, like a sizzling spark flowing down a line of gunpowder. Eventually, with the help of a major wind guest, my quaint little ditch fire detonated itself at the end of the ditch into a small grass fire, racing down the roadside.

Between the time concerned neighbors called 911 and the fire department arrived, my wife’s grandpa Lowry, who had been watching the proceedings from afar, jumped on a tractor, pursued the fire down the roadside, and smothered it with the repeated downward pressure of the front-end loader.

“Nothing to see here,” I assured the fire fighters a few minutes later when they arrived sirens blazing, but it was good to know they were there if I needed them. No man is an island.

A Divine Beekeeping Comedy

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

Joining the ranks of the treacherous is a milestone for beekeepers. Most people begin beekeeping to help save the bees and do not treasure the idea of one day leading a rebellion to dethrone a queen. Regicide, or “requeening” as we beekeepers call it, is not something we beekeepers take lightly, but sometimes it must be done–and sometimes it will be done, as if by divine accident. Had the title not already been taken erroneously by Dante for a decidedly unfunny work of so-called literature, a “Divine Comedy” would have been an apt title for the story of my first accidental regicide. 

The story begins, as most beekeeping stories begin, on a stifling day inside a cotton bee jacket. How the queen got inside my bee jacket is a matter of no debate–she just scurried up my wrist. I was not trying to kill her; I was merely trying to mark her–to place a little blue dot on her with a paint pen–to make her easier to locate during future hive inspections. 

How to correctly mark a queen.

The ability to mark queens swiftly and adroitly is a skill I’ve always admired in other beekeepers. Now I’m a lot more proficient at handling and marking queens, but in those days I was neither swift nor adroit and usually began any marking attempt with a pep talk to psych myself up. 

Plucking the queen off the frame, when she is surrounded by thousands of her daughters, all of whom have stingers, can intimidate even the bravest of fingers. Personally, I have never considered any of my fingers particularly brave–and sometimes they seem openly mutinous in their desire to tremble and disobey my orders. After several failed attempts to pluck the queen off the frame, her royal highness scurried into hiding within the teeming masses of her offspring. Eventually, I did indeed relocate and corner her. From the corner of a bee frame, I managed to dislodge her and corral her into my hand, which then presented a new dilemma: how to relocate her from the palm of my enclosed hand to the more restrictive space between my finger and thumb without her flying away. 

While I was preparing another pep talk, the queen managed to escape my loosely held fist and scurry up my wrist to seek cover in the sleeve of my beekeeping jacket. I tried to contort my arm in such a manner that I could peer into my sleeve to pinpoint her proximate location, which was made difficult because my veil shaded the view into the already shadowy tunnel, so mostly I had to rely on my arm hairs to detect and track her evasive movements. Generally, fiascos like this are not something they prepare you for in beginning bee school.

Thus, I had to use my own instincts and wherewithal to solve the problem of the queen bee rounding my elbow. I believe my underlying strategy was sound, albeit the execution of the strategy was a bit clumsy. I decided to disrobe inside the cab of my small pickup truck. I hoped the cab would provide a secondary enclosure in case the queen decided to take flight once outside of the confines of my clothing. Trying to peel off a sweaty bee jacket in the cramped quarters of a small four-cylinder pickup truck is a challenge in and of itself, but without the use of of my dominant right hand and arm, which I temporarily disabled because the queen felt like she tickling my right tricep, I likely resembled a lunatic struggling to escape from a straight jacket. 

Once I was finally free of the garment, I began a thorough search for the queen in the folds and pockets of my bee jacket, but to no avail. I expanded my search to the long crevice of the bench seat; I then twisted myself into a pretzel to search under the seat; I then folded myself into a quesadilla to search behind the seat. The queen was nowhere to be found. At this point, I began to wonder if I actually was a lunatic and had been suffering from a heat-induced hallucination. 

The queen had simply disappeared. For many years the whole ordeal remained a mystery in my mind, on par with the great mysteries of disappearing ships and vanishing planes in the Bermuda Triangle. It wasn’t until many years later, when a fuse went out in my truck, did I finally solve the mystery. Inside the little fusebox, under my dash, was the shriveled and seemingly mummified corpse of a queen bee. Somehow she had managed to crawl up and into the electronics behind the dash where she must have followed the wiring to the fusebox and crawled through an empty fuse placeholder into her tomb. 

Every time I change a fuse, I now pay respects and remember my first accidental regicide. 

R.I.P. Queen Bee

Bee Friends with Benefits

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

It’s amazing how fast Thomas can make a friend. His method is pretty direct:
“Hey, what’s your name?”
“Addie,” responds a little girl.
“Want to play?”
Instantly, Addie and Thomas are chasing each other. Occasionally, they pause for brief respites on the platform of the sliding board, where they chat about their favorite toys. They talk with a casual familiarity that implies they’ve known each other for twenty years, though they’ve only known each other for ten minutes. Plus, Thomas has only lived for four years, and I suspect Addie is a little younger.

I don’t think Thomas is a playground playboy in any regard because I’ve watched other kids use the same technique. In fact, it seems standard on the playground. A kid approaches another, names are exchanged, play commences, and soon they’re swapping toy stories until a parent announces it’s time to go. Then simple “byes” are exchanged, as if something extraordinary hadn’t just happened.

But it is extraordinary—at least if you’re an adult. Making friends is hard—or at least adults make it hard by overcomplicating things. Case in point: Thomas (who can’t read) seems innately more proficient at making friends than his dad, despite the latter having read Aristotle’s treatise on friendship—which, it turns out, hasn’t helped me much. The problem, I think, is that Aristotle forgot to include a chapter on making friends in an era of social media. Or if he did, that chapter has been lost to antiquity.

I am thankful for beekeeping, not just because I enjoy it, but because other people do too—and beekeeping occasionally draws oddballs into an orbit of friendship around this shared pursuit. And I mean pursuit in the literal sense, as in chasing and catching swarms. For instance, once I showed up for a swarm call only to be greeted shortly after by another beekeeper pursuing the same swarm. He looked oddly familiar, though I couldn’t place him at first. It turns out he was my wife’s obstetrician-gynecologist—the doctor who delivered Thomas into this world. Before long, we were not only swapping bee stories but extracting honey together.

Last year, I made a new beekeeping friend who lives nearby. He’s an engineer. I’ve always been impressed by engineers because their brains make decisions based on logic, math, and physics, whereas my brain mostly fails to make decisions. I’m also impressed by engineers’ discretionary income, which makes them the best bee friends—not only can they design an efficient and ergonomic honey house, but they can afford to build it and stock it with state-of-the-art shiny equipment. Meanwhile, with inflation these days, I can’t even afford to shop for equipment in my daydreams.

My engineer friend designed his own swarm trap and had a local woodworker make forty of them. He plans to place them in trees throughout the countryside. He said if he spent thirty dollars apiece on forty traps—$1,200 in total—he’d only need to catch ten swarms to break even since a swarm has roughly the same value as a three-pound package of bees, which currently costs about $120. I told him I was impressed, that being a former English major, I never knew math could be used like that. “Is that what calculus is for?” I asked.

“No, that’s just arithmetic,” he said.

Breakfast with Bees

~ sanebishop ~ 11 Comments

Once in a moment of inspiration, I decided to buy 32 apple trees. Talk about making work for yourself. Now, every winter, the trees need pruning to ensure a bountiful apple harvest for the gluttonous woodland creatures. Between the racoons, opossums, and deer, we probably salvage half a peck of apples for ourselves, enough for Natalie to make a delicious homemade apple crisp each year to remind me of the foolishness of my moment of inspiration.

“This better taste good,” she says, “how much did you spend on those apple trees again?”

I will be glad when the apple orchard turns seven years old; according to the IRS, I can then discard the receipts and all physical evidence of that moment of inspiration. Thereafter, I can plead amnesia when my wife asks me silly questions about costs. 

The problem with apple trees is that they grow, which means the chore of pruning becomes substantially more labor and time-consuming each year, yet the actual return on investment usually remains the same–nothing. Some years it’s woodland creatures. Other years it’s late freezes or early springs. Unfortunately, some of our apple trees had already started blooming this year when winter finally decided to return this week. Not a pretty site. What was a beautiful apple tree white with blooms now looks like it decided to paint its petals black in goth attire. Thus, the woodland creatures might have to go on a diet this year. 

And the weather is not only rough on blooms but the creatures that pollinate them. I got a call on Tuesday from a local farmer who said he had a big swarm of bees on a post in his shed. “Are you sure they’re honeybees,” I said, “cause it’s too cold for bees to be swarming?”  Turns out he wasn’t kidding. Sure enough, there was a big swarm of bees on a post in his shed. Only problem was they swarmed on the Monday before the cold front blew through, then spent all night huddled and shivering on the post as temps got below freezing. By the time he called me on Tuesday, they seemed half dead and the ones that were alive were just barely moving. 

Sometimes with cold bees, dead is “not quite dead yet.” They may look dead, but if you can get them back in a warm area they will miraculously buzz back to life. I brushed the bees off the post into a closed-up nuc box, took them home and put the box over a vent in our dining room. The next morning, I was eating breakfast with the sound of bees roaring. They were up and at ‘em early, ready to escape their nuc box and forage because it was 72 degrees in our house. Because the weather was calling for another night of below freezing temps, I kept them inside on Wednesday night and then put them in the bee yard today since it has warmed back up.  I put a frame of eggs in there just in case the queen wasn’t among one of the resurrected bees.  

So far, they seem to be flying and doing good–just no thanks to the weather!

A Boy and the Beekeeping Bug

~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

Men, if your wife is trying to tell you she’s pregnant, whatever you do, don’t turn to her and say, “But I don’t need one, I’ve already got three.”

Not that I had three children already, I had three bee jackets. The fact is I didn’t have any children–my wife and I had been trying for years. Once you’ve been married for eight years, you start to resign yourself to the possibility that the only offspring you’ll hear in your house will be when you rediscover your long lost burnt CD collection in a storage box1 (sorry, if you didn’t get that joke, it was really very clever–you just weren’t a teenager in the 1990s. Please refer to footnote #1 for historical context). 

So I certainly wasn’t expecting to be greeted with life changing news when I walked through the door one Friday after a long day’s work. Still, I should have known something was up because on the kitchen counter was an envelope with my name written in my wife’s handwriting. That should have been a red flag because it wasn’t my birthday and, after a quick mental panic, I realized it wasn’t our anniversary either. My wife then handed me the envelope and told me to open it. 

“What’s this for?” I asked. 

“Just open it, and you’ll see,” I said. 

Well, I didn’t see. The greeting card had two little cartoony bees on the inside, and it said, “I’m so happy to bee with you.” Underneath that, my wife had written, “It looks like you’re going to need a new bee suit.” And underneath that, she had drawn a tiny little bee, about the size of a popcorn kernel. Likely, because I’m a man and was too busy wondering where the gift card was to pay for said bee suit, I overlooked that baby bee and blurted out, “But I don’t need one, I’ve already got three.”

And my life has never been the same since. Thomas is now two years old, and I’m actually starting to shop for his first beekeeping apparel. Now that he is old enough to run, I figure he’s old enough to run from bees with me. Secretly, I do hope that Thomas will one day enjoy beekeeping. Growing up, my dad always took me fishing and metal detecting, his two favorite hobbies, and some of my best memories are from spending time with him doing those two things. That said, beekeeping is a lot more like work than fishing or metal detecting, so I’m not terribly optimistic. Right now, he does have some semi bee-related interests, namely rolly-pollies and caterpillars. Mostly, though he just like trains, firetrucks, tractors, and monster trucks.

Even if the beekeeping bug doesn’t bite Thomas, a boy has got to develop a good work ethic, and there is no harder work than lugging honey supers around on a hot July day. We will see.

1In the 1990s, there was a popular band called The Offspring and this thing called Napster where teenagers downloaded music for free to record, a.k.a. to burn, onto CDs. This was more or less illegal, but everybody did it.