I went out to the hives yesterday into the sweltering humidity that only a 3:00 pm summer day in Virginia can provide.  Armed with two bottles of ice water and small packet of Propel drink mix I was ready for anything the bees could throw at me.  Knowing that my hives were a little bit on the ornery side I double checked all of my bee suit openings to make sure the warrior queens would find no entry.

After smoking the front of the hive I now dub as House of the Rising Stinger I walked behind it and slowly lifted the top cover. I now know what it must feel like to be a member of a bomb disposal team. Would she blow when I opened the box or would this just be another bucolic day out in the apiary like I had envisioned years ago when I started beekeeping. Then she blew. Hundreds of tiny insectoid winged shrapnel flew out from underneath the inner cover with a loud drone.  The drone came from me and not the bees.  Luckily I had my suit on otherwise my face would look like an 80 pound mutated turnip or Mickey Rourke.  Bouncing off of my screened face I laughed at them as I began the process of quickly dismantling their hive for inspection.

House of the Rising Stinger

Solid Brood pattern, check.
New eggs, check.
Pollen, check.
Honey/Sugar Water, check.
Angry worker bees, double check.

All was good.  I was a little disappointed to not see much in the way of honey stores yet but they had only just begun working the upper parts of the hive. I also decided to rotate the bottom hive boxes to give them more room as they were already in the upper hive body chamber which was packed with brood. During the whole time time they were progressively getting more angry. As I was putting the hive back together, “Flight of the Bumble Bee” echoed through my mind only performed by classic Metallica and not that new crap they are selling. What a circus.

The second hive went much more smoothly. None of that pent up aggression was found in their hive.  I found the queen and told her what a wonderful job she was doing in keeping her children in line unlike the ruffians down the way.

The third hive was a dream come true. Quiet, industrious, and friendly. I call these bees The Waltons.  They actually gave me a tour of their hive with shortbread and tea as a treat.  The most surprising new addition to their home was a 1/2 full super of pure liquid gold.  For only being active for 4 months they had done a great job of building up their population and wax structure to actually allow for significant honey storage.

The Nice Bees

As I closed their hive I said thanks and then clicked my heels in the air before I headed home.

That first hive is a real problem. Defensiveness works wonders in nature but when you are in a bee yard it can become catostrophic.  Sometimes I feel like committing regicide and replacing the queen with a better one but I should at least give this hive a chance to prove itself.  It may work to my favor if a bear is seen around here again.  A bear poking its nose in this hive is likely to regret it.

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This has probably been one of the worst weeks I have had in a long time.  My bees hate me, the sun hates me, mosquitoes love me,  and now even trees plan my demise. About a week ago we had either a micro burst or a tornado go over our area and man it looks like the thing from Cloverfield took a stroll through Charlottesville.  Trees were split in half, some bisected nice little brick colonials, and one even landed on our house. Still I consider myself lucky.

The Death of Treebeard

It was around 4:30 PM. I had just taken Leia home from the pool because I noticed some storm clouds moving in our direction. Not less than 5 minutes in the door the wind really started to pick up.  The trees began swaying, lightning began to streak across the sky and the once blue heavens turned a dark greenish color.  It was like going to a Rave Party except all of the dancers were 100 ton trees who were angry at us for living in a house on their Killing Floor.  At first they only began throwing limbs at our house and when that did not force our exit they decided to fall on us.  Contrary to M. Night Shyamalan’s crappy movie about vengeful flora our trees are not yet sentient with most of them banzai-ing onto their fellow flora or simply falling to the earth with a thud.  All of them except for one cluster of bastards that decided the apex of our roof would be a nice place to recline.

This tree looked like one of those mutant trees you might find growing near Chernobyl. Three torsos from one pair of roots.

From inside the safety of our basement we heard the wind from outside just blow the trees around like dandelions.  Then, the sound of a wooden sail ship getting rammed by a white whale echoed over our house as one of the tree triumvirate broke its back on the top of our roof.  Immediately following that, from our back basement window we spied the top part of its carcass crash down on the other side of our house clipping our deck.

Once it settled I ran upstairs. First floor was OK except for some cracks in the ceiling.  The second floor was far worse for ware.  Right where the tree had fallen, on my office bathroom, it looked like it had survived a medium sized earthquake. The roof had shifted and there were breaks in all of the dry wall.

Outside the mutant tree had fallen right along the crease of our roof and the one larger tree was hanging precariously over the entire length of our house applying considerable weight on our beams.

I can only imagine, and I frequently do, what Charlottesville  might sound like during a zombie invasion.  The following 5 hours was an audio replay of one. Sirens everywhere, horns honking, and people wandering around in disbelief.  Worse were the gawkers. You know those kind of people. The ones that rubber neck at traffic accidents or the ghouls who watch war footage on You-Tube all night. If there was a hell, these people have a special place in it.  One dude was even taking pictures.

With this calamity came the second one.  Our  Safeco Insurance salesman and the fly by night “arborists” that descended onto our household.  Both trying their best to weedle money out of us.

Hey Man we will take care of your tree for 20,000 quid.

By far the faux arborists were the worst.  Knowing people were in a tight bind their rates became extraordinary exhorbinant to the point of criminal.  One group of clowns offered to cut our tree off the roof for a measley 10 grand.  When he found out we had gone with someone else, a real aroborist, he wanted to see if he could match their price.  I was like, you just tried to gouge us buddy for 4,000 dollars more than the real tree man, why the hell would I trust you to cut my trees.  The funniest attempt were these dopes having nothing more than a beat up pick-up and two chain saws.  When they saw the amount of work involved they did not even bother to come down the stairs to our house and tucked tail and ran.

The people that did come out were professionals with a capital “P”. They gave us a solid quote, came out the day we had the estimate done, and took care of our main concern of getting the large tree off the roof. They used ropes and other tree limbs like a master surgeon when extracting the the lifeless body of Treebeard from our roof.

Stihl vs Treebeard

During that time my family and I took up lodgings at the nearby Discomfort Inn with the rest of the Charlottesville refugees and made the best of it.  Across the street we drowned our sorrows at Duncan Dunouts and a local restaurant called Lord Hardiwicks.

Once most of the tree had been cut off we moved back into our house and are now living in our basement.  It sounds bad in words but our basement is finished so don’t shed a tear. We are doing fine.

Later in the week I went out to see the bees to see if they could comfort me in my time of hardship and like before they stung the bejeezus out of me.  My bees are hateful little bastards. I might jar 100 of them and leave them in my Insurance Man’s car for being such a cheapskate.

Other than the 20000 cc’s of bee venom volunteered by my bees they are fine.

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Well it has been more than one month since my honey bees were delivered and all seems well. They are still pulling in the sugar water I am providing and are using it to substantially build comb upon the new foundation.  The brood cluster is as dense as as can be indicating a queen of good breeding and high moral character.

I will soon begin rotating frames from the outer edge of the brood box into the center region of the cluster to start filling out their foundation.

The first few weeks of working with these bees seemed like a dream come true. I felt like the Monty Roberts of beekeeping.  I could work without wearing gloves and the bees seemed to read my mind, moving out of my way when I needed to lift or replace a frame.  This is easy!!

By week three or four my 10,000 pacific daughters of virtue turned into Brazilian Amazon she-bees.  Coincidentally this seemed to be synchronous with the first set of new adult bees emerging from their cells.  Even with a gentle waft of smoke into their hive entrance and the surgeon like care of removing the frames during inspection the bees seem to go on the attack. Brazilian style.  After completing work with one hive I would have to take a walk and lose some of the warriors through the three foot high grass surrounding my cleared mowing area.  I would have to walk about 150 yards before the last honeybee was sure I was done meddling with her home.

She-Bees of the Amazon

Then it would happen again with the next batch.

I know I can be somewhat ham-fisted when I work but this seems ridiculous.  At this rate, the bees are going to become sentient by August and deflate the air out of my tires to fly in through the vents to kill me before I can even don on my protective clothing or drive away.

These bees are touted by BeeWeaver as being hardy and able to survive mites and disease without treatments.  Maybe this hardiness also comes in the form of angry bees who get pissed off at the drop of a hive tool.  Hopefully they will grow to learn I am their friend and advocate.

One of the nice hippie ladies who is working on a massive garden in front of the hive said there was a report of bears in the area.  Maybe they are coming up to the hive but I have detected no sign of damage or stepped in any bear poo. Maybe this has caused my girls to become a little anxious.

My new bee friend working with me has had less success with one of his hives.  After 3-4 weeks of nice looking brood patterns the queen just seemed to stop laying.  So he ordered a new queen and we found the old one and “replaced” her.    Only during the next few days will we learn if the succession was a success.

His bees are sweet angels compared to mine.  He often works barehanded and they don’t seem to mind one bit.

Well for now that is all to report. I will try to write more frequently.  I am just surprised how busy summer can be.

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Yesterday I went out to the hives to check the progress of the honeybees in regards to releasing their queens.  The first two hives did a bang up job.  They were even able to pull the queen cages to the front entrance for easy extraction. How they did this, I do not know, since I had the cages wedged between two frames in the traditional manner.

The last cage however the beekeeper forgot to drill a small hole through the sugar candy to make it easier on the workers.  As a result she was still sitting inside her bower staring glumly out of the cage while the attendants assured her they were working on the problem. I took the small cage out and pulled off the screen gently and let her out into the frames.  For a brief second I worried she may just fly off with a “Smell You Later!”, taking her colony with her but luckily she decided her new home was good enough.

This year I decided to use the frame division feeders.  You simply replace one of the normal frames with a frame shaped container which holds about 1 gallon of sugar syrup.  Two hives had sucked it down like a fat kid on a 7-eleven slurpy.  The other one had imbibed about half of the sugar syrup.  Fortunately, my new beekeeping friend brought some sugar water with him and let me use his to refill my containers.

The bees had started drawing out comb in good order.  I saw some eggs in the two hives with the freed queens  and pollen was also seen in some of the cells.  I also centered the cluster as they had begun drawing out comb close to the hives wall.  Other than that everything looks pretty good.  I will go out again on Friday or Saturday to feed them more.

Jesse

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It has been over a month since I have posted last.  The main reason is that I am starting a new business selling Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Gi’s (KillerBeeGi.Com) and have been devoting most of my time to creating an efficient process for a smooth running business.  The other reason is that I sometimes get lazy about writing but now that the honeybees are here I feel rejuvenated about writing something new instead of rehashing old beekeeping anecdotes from the past.

Of note, I have joined up with a new beekeeper who became hooked on it while serving in Afghanistan in the military.  A fellow soldier talked with him about beekeeping and put the bug in his mind to start his own colonies.  Now that he is back in the states he has set up two hives next to mine and I will try to teach him what my teacher taught me.  Hopefully I will be up to the task.

As I said before I ordered my bees through BeeWeaver in Texas as they do not use ANY treatments in their apiary.  This is the philosophy I will employ, maybe to the bees detriment, as my new outlook on beekeeping.  Either my bees will thrive on their own or my wallet will laugh at me next year when I have to order three new packages.

The delivery of the bees did not have the perfect timing of a Swiss watch but they got here none-the-less.  The bees were shipped out from Texas on Wednesday using a rented Ryder van with only one driver. Imagine shipping a time sensitive delivery across the vertical axis of the United States in a 48 hour time span with one driver, 55 cups of coffee, and probably 4 packets of No-Doze.  Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me but somehow they were able to eventually pull it off.  My suggestion for BeeWeaver is for them to have a team of drivers like the Tractor Trailer folks use on long hauls.  When the bees arrived they were in great condition.  Only a few dead bees were on the bottom of the cage and they seemed to thrum excitedly to be let out.

The Bene Gesserit Pain Box

I drove home and then prepared to install them later that day.  At four o’clock P.M. I drove out to the property and first mowed the lawn  in front of the apiary so the bees would have a clear path of travel and the sea of ticks would have a harder time sucking the life blood out of me. I quickly deconstructed the first cage and installed the queen cage and honeybees.  The second package was more of an issue as I dropped the queen cage into the package while trying to pull out the sugar syrup can.  I had to stick my bare hands into the package opening and feel my way through the mass of bees for the queen cage.  I am always amazed that honeybees are not prone to stinging when they do not have a colony to defend.  My mind knows this but my hand inside the queen package does not.  I am not sure if you ever have read Frank Herbert’s, Dune, but there is a section in the book where Paul Atriedes is bein

Time to go home.

g tested by the Bene Gesserit witches with his hand in the “Pain Box”.  It was kind of like that but without the Sandworms. I finally found the cage by touch and extracted it like an EOD technician defusing an artillery round. With that done I quickly installed the package.

By package three my new bee friend arrived and he helped with some pictures and installation.  We then looked into his two hives to see how they were doing and they appeared to be doing well.  Because he purchased the standard Italians I might suggest he later order a different variety of queens  as I don’t think Italians are suited for our climate.

With that done we talked for a while about bees, politics, economics and enjoyed the scenery.  Following a cursory tick check we then headed on home.

So far so good.

Another day milking the bees.

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