http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/11-execs-6-foreign-firms-caught-in-huge-honey-sting/19618562

Arriving in the mail box a few days later I ripped off the mailing package and looked at the box.  First impressions are important to me  and it was nice to see a real CD in a case with nice graphics and not some hand scrawled note of “Listen To This” sticky noted to a generic Panasonic 750MB data cd. So far so good. Driving to the bee yard was a perfect time to listen to this album. How was it?

Pretty darned good. Instead of music engineered for a Raffi concert I heard real music with real love and heart packed into it. These guys were not just singing flim flam songs about bees with touchy feely vocals and healf hearted strumming of the guitar. They believed everything they were pouring out of the speakers.  From listening to the lyrics you get the feeling that at least one of the band members has bees because their lyrics spoke truth to the biology and the behavior of Apis Mellifera.

This album is just fun to listen to, more so if you happen to bee a beekeeper and can understand the inside the hive humor.  If I had to label them as sounding like another band it would be hard but for the sake of the review I would say a combination of The Violent Femmes, maybe a little They Might Be Giants, The Presidents of The United States, and a dash of Weezer or The Sex Pistols. Good fun music that is catchy and should be paid for with a modest payment to Amazon or using their website found at the link below.

Amazon

ArtichokeTheBand

I give them 4 jars of honey. Of note, 5 jars of honey equals something like the greatest song in the world and has never been acquired in human history.

I now have to objectively assess what I want to do.  Although my bees are not the easiest bees to work with I have to admit their population is vibrant, pulling most of the comb, and actually storing a fair quantity of honey for the winter.  I am amazed with their brood patterns.  They  are solidly packed with eggs, larva and adults. No half-ass placement of eggs by these queens. They have the work ethic and craftsmanship of  German engineers. The Italians on the other hand are not so productive.  They exhibit the same level of industry as a Yugo factory.  They get the work done and in theory it should work, but in the end they will probably starve to death over winter without any help.

I think I will just put up with their antics as long as they keep producing well.  They may have the temperament of an angry German engineer but they do fine quality work.   Maybe their horrible personality is part of the price for having bees that will survive on their own without medications or weird Rube Goldberg devices to remove the mites.

On another note, as I was working with the bees I realized how important it is for a beekeeper to be mindful in their own actions.  My beekeeping mentor of old taught me a lot of what is needed in the way of mindset when working with the bees.

We have a picture in our mind that we are helping the bees and are their benefactor. With our white suit and hat and general outlook on life that I have found most beekeepers have it is easy to forget that to them we are really monsters. Basically we are like a whitely suited King Kong ham-fisting our way through their home on a  bi-weekly basis. For all we know they have come up with a hive mind like mythology or religion based upon our appearance.  “Oh no, the sun has risen and fallen 14 times. Now again begins the ritual sacrifice we must go through to live in such a well designed home!!! May the great White Sheet God show mercy upon us with his hands of smoke and sword!! May he only crush 200 of us unlike the last time!! Oh woe is us!!” See what I mean.

So we can either be the angry bearded old man god found in the Old Testament who wiped out cities for juggling pigs or we can be the benevolent god of peace which my Google results could not find a single one.

Comparisons

To help beekeepers become the kindly Amun-Ra of their own bees one should keep in mind several things.

1. Know exactly what you want to do before you do it.  The more you move the components of your hive the more likely it is you are smashing, grinding, and de-limbing your worshipers. Every action should have a purpose. If you just want to take a look for the sake of looking your are probably going to kill some bees for your own gratification. Look because you are trying to determine something. The hives health, state of stress, mites, anything but just don’t look for the hell of it. That is what an observation hive is for.

2. When replacing hive bodies or supers I place the box at an angle compared to the other box. I then slowly rotate the boxes until they line up. Doing this helps gives the bees time to move out of the way of the oncoming wall. Just plopping the box down on top of the other so that they align right away is a sure way of crushing 10  or so bees.

3. Have the movement of a sloth or Tai-Chi master.  Bees don’t like swift movements.  Maybe their minds exist in another temporal space from ours but  I have found that when you move quickly, like when you swat at bees, it only attracts more and seems to aggravate them.

4. When pulling the frames out. Be sure you have loosened them well and pull them out as vertically as you can.  Any movement of the frame off from its 90 degree extraction will kill bees between the frames or at least increase their stress levels as they are mashed into the adjacent comb. Again go slowly as you do it.

5. When placing frames back into the hive, don’t ram them home like a railroad spike. Slowly and deliberately is the plan for the day.

6. Don’t smoke the hell out of them every five seconds.  Use just a little smoke  when necessary. I have seen some people just asphyxiate their bees with bellows of smoke.

7. Wait until later in the day if possible.  Too early and their will be more population in the hive equaling more potential for loss of worshipers. Wait too late and the same thing happens.  I usually go out between 2-5 depending on the time of year.

These are just seven lucky tips I try to keep in mind.  If any of you have others please add them in the comments below.

The key is just to play it smart, be deliberate in everything you do, and try to keep your bees less agitated.  The more agitated they become the greater the chance they will find their location too much of a hassle and swarm to some place less inhabited by the angry bee gods.

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.

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.

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.

Get ready for potatoes with every meal.

At least the massive oil spoil by BP will not affect the bee population.

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

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.

When I first got into beekeeping I read all of the standard newbie literature on the subject. And unlike my high school Algebra, I absorbed it like a sponge. But by far the most interesting book concerning the nature of bees was written by an almost blind man with the help of his wife, Karl von Frisch.  It was called, “The Dance Language and Orientation of Honeybees”.

Karl von Frish was an Austrian ethologist and zoologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work with animal behavior. One aspect of his research delved into the ability of honey bees to transmit information concerning the quality and direction of a nectar resource through the “waggle dance”.

Karl von Frisch - "Now we dance"

As foraging bees search the area around their hive for nectar they will come across resources with varying degrees of worth. Nectar is mostly water and to turn it into honey by the bees, they must evaporate most of the nectar’s water content level to about 18%.  To do so requires the honey bees to use their high speed wing action and create a flow of air through the hive that pulls the moisture out of the nectar.  The higher the water content, the more time and energy is spent by the bees to reduce its levels.  Knowing this, it is in the honeybees best interest to locate nectar resources that already have a lower level of water compared to similar nectar resources.

Karl von Frisch realized upon a behavior of honeybees that points out to other foraging honeybees the compass direction of a resource in relation to the sun  and its distance from the hive.   This behavior is known as the “Wag -Tail  Dance”.  When a honeybee performs the “dance” she is making any one of several types of movement patterns that each translate to a key piece of information about a resource.  Below is an image of several types of dances.

Bee Communication Dances

The type of dance they perform partly translates to the distance the hive is from the nectar source.  If the nectar source is about 0 – 10 yards from the hive a bee will perform the Round Dance.  When 10 – 100 yards from the hive the dance will transition from the Round Dance into a Crescent Dance.  Beyond 100 yards the dance will transition again into the Wag-Tail Dance. Karl von Frisch observed that  the number of “straight runs” the bee makes as she performs the Wag-Tail dance  is an indicator of how far away the nectar source is.  A straight run is the middle course the honeybee takes as she performs the looping pattern.

Cant touch this!

Graphically we as humans can see the pattern of this dance from  looking down on to a 2-D surface.  However, to the honeybees this visual reference is useless.  They rely on a phenomena caused by the dance itself. Following Karl’s  discovery it was later learned that honeybees also pick up  information related to distance  from sound signals that occur during the dance.   Honeybees can perceive “airborne sounds by detecting air-particle movements, rather than  pressure oscillations as in human hearing.” The Hive and the Honey Bee (page 284)  As the bee dances, her wings emit low frequency pulses in the 250-300 Hertz range with a pulse duration of about “20 milliseconds and a repetition frequency of approximately 30 per second.”

The honeybees surrounding the dancing bee pick up on these pulses using their antenna which are placed near the abdomen of the dancing bee. The number of pulses detected translates into the distance of a nectar source from the hive. The greater the number of pulses, the greater the distance the nectar source is from the hive.

So now we can see how bees communicate distance but how do they communicate directional information. Honeybees use a compass not based on the magnetic poles but  upon the location of the sun over the horizon during a given time.

During a bee’s flight in search of nectar she may happen to come across a large cluster of plants within the midst of their nectar flow.  For the purpose of our first example we will assume it is directly in front of the hive, at least 100 yards out, and the sun also happens to be in straight alignment with the food source and the hive.  In this scenario the honey bee would come back to the hive and do her wag-tail dance with the “straight run” going right up the vertical face of the comb as seen in the picture below. (Image 1)

Hive, nectar source, and sun are in alignment.

Hive and nectar source are in alignment. Sun is 45 degrees to the right of the hive.

If the sun was 45 degrees to the right of the hive and the nectar source was in the same place as in the previous example, the “straight run” of the honeybees dance would change accordingly.

So, the angle of the run is 45 degrees left of the compass direction of the sun.  45 degrees left of the sun puts the food source in straight alignment with the hive. (Image 2)

Now if the food source was to the right of the hive by 45 degrees and the sun was straight in front of the hive as in the first example the angle of the “straight run” would also point 45 degrees to the right. (Image 3)

Honeybees are also able to communicate to one another about the quality of the nectar source.  When a honeybee forager returns to the hive other forager bees in the hive will vibrate the honeycomb using a 380 HZ frequency.  These “begging signals”  will stimulate the forager to regurgitate a droplet of its new found nectar source for the others to “analyze”.  This is very useful in that it will alert other forager bees whether another source of nectar has been found and if it is better than the resource they are currently culling from.

All of this information compounds upon the initial discoveries from Karl von Frisch’s research during the 1950’s. Although the idea of the honeybees having their own means of communication  was  put forward earlier by Ernst Spitzner in 1788, it was not until Karl von Frisch published “Uber die Sprache der Bienen” was attention truly devoted to this aspect of the honeybee’s behavior.

It is very interesting to read these older works and learn what was considered “current” for the time.  Science is always evolving and building upon itself and to appreciate it  one should try reading these little gems.  The information may be out of date or completely wrong but being a beekeeper I am fascinated by all that we have learned since the time of their writings. My next endeavor is to complete Lorenzo L. Langsroth classic, “Hive and the Honey-bee”.

Hive and sun are in alignment. Nectar source is 45 degrees to the right.