Sad

I never did have any luck with Blue Queens.

Max and The Tower of Doom

A few years ago R approached me to say that he planned to keep beehives at the very end of his (enormous) garden, where he wanted a wildflower meadow and the picturesque site of a couple of little white bee houses in a corner, with bees merrily going their way.  "No need to harvest honey," he said, "I want the bees to have it all, and I want to practice a kind of benign neglect, leaving them to exist on their own."

I should have said no.  I should have explained more vociferously how bees can't be neglected; not in an urban setting.  They need to be looked after, a bit like livestock, managed and helped along, to ensure minimal swarming so as not to offend neighbours, and to give them (the bees) an optimal chance for success and a long life for the colony.  I should have warned him.  Well, I know I tried.  Really, I did.

But people don't listen, do they?  They hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest, when they have a romantic illusion in mind.

And so it was that I became not so much a beekeeper, as a beekeeping mentor.  At first it was lovely.  I envisioned those gorgeous drowsing summer afternoons once more, when I could lie on my back among the flowers, under the hive entrance and watch the girls fly out into a blue sky.  I thought of honey once more.  I dreamed of moving quietly among the hum of ten thousand bees, talking serenely to them as we went our way together.

Once or twice it was like that.  But not so much.  Our first honey harvest - I insisted that they had too much honey, and talked over R's ridiculous ideas of leaving it all for the bees (they are bred, after all, to produce a surplus).  Our first honey harvest was a ghastly, glorious mess, a shambolic floundering in his garage, of boxes and frames and extractor and bottles and stickiness and grumpiness and epithets and honey. 

"Never again," we both agreed.

His bees did not survive the winter.

But he is a patient and persistent man and as we spent afternoons together over tea, then bottles of wine with cheese, talking books and bees, he bought another colony the next summer.

That year I kept away more, left him to it as I went off travelling on some spectacular holidays and taking up kayaking on the weekends.

We left the honey on, and his bees made it through the winter. 

And then I went on holiday to South Africa, and came back into apocalyptic scenes of pandemic and lockdown.  For weeks on end I just worked and walked, and gardened and Zoomed.  I kayaked alone, but once or twice with a friend.  I just plain plumb forgot all about the bees.

R called me two weeks ago and invited me to come over.   He said, "a month ago, my neighbour told me she'd seen a swarm fly past."  Uh-oh.  Not good.  I finally made it there last Sunday.  How strange it was to finally put on my bee suit again and squelch into my wellies on a hot summer afternoon, clump our way up to the wildflower meadow and light the smoker once more.

As we approached I could see straight away that there was only minimal activity on the front doorstep of the hive.  I used to love, and miss dreadfully, all the hours I whiled away sitting next to my hives, watching the front doorstep activity. 

You can tell so much about the conditions inside the hive just by sitting nearby and observing quietly.  You can see purposeful bees buzzing to and fro, legs filled with pollen baskets.  Such a good sign of a healthy, busy, Queen-right hive!  Or you can see wasps robbing.  Or no bees.  Or the lovely floundering to and fro-ing of young bees on training flights, flying back and forth in front of the hive, facing it, learning what home looks like.

None of that this time, I'm afraid.  So we went in and yes, they seemed to have no Queen.  There were two supers stuffed full of delicious smelling honey, and a brood box filled only with pollen and nectar.  No brood, no babies, no Queen sign at all.  What we did find were lots and lots of empty Queen cells.

I could see, in my mind's eye, what had happened.  That first swarm a month ago, taking the old Queen and half the hive.  Then the next Queen born and She left too, taking half again of what was left of the bees.  And so on and so on, for every empty Queen cell, half the remaining colony gone.

What surprised me was how calm the bees were.  They were just lovely.  After an initial loud group buzz, they stayed calm and busy on the frames; no buzzing in our faces, just working and working away.  I should have thought, "hmm, that may mean they have a Virgin or newly-mated new Queen."

So we sealed up the hive, R and me, and went for tea.  And wine.  And strawberries.  And cream.  And a seriously fabulous catch-up, in which he mentioned how he'd finished his novel (like me), and is already sending it off to literary agents, and generally being much more disciplined than me. Huh!

We decided to buy in a Queen, although I should've been patient, and realised about the possible Virgin.  But that's me - a slow thinker.

It was only when I got home that I remembered that G nearby has got a hive.  Also a WBC like R's, so the frames would fit.  The very, very best solution of all - to go and take two frames out of G's hive, frames filled with BIAS (Brood In All Stages ie larvae, sealed brood, and tiny rice grain eggs that might provide an emergency Queen), and place them in R's hive.  Test Frames.

So it was all arranged.  Muggins here would head over to G, take two frames out of his hive and take them to R's hive.  Easy peasy, right.  Right?  Ri-iii-ght.  Hahahaha!

I got to G's place on Monday afternoon. Boy, was I in for a shock.  The hive was positioned in the most dangerous place you could ever imagine, right on the edge of a high cliff wall, surrounded by piles of loosely placed wooden planks with 10 inch rusty nails sticking out and rolls of razor wire piled everywhere.  Not only that but the hive was a towering pile of junkified boxes, nearly 7 foot tall and no way was I going to be able to manage that on my own.

And then there were the bees. Eighty thousand thuggish bees thundered mightily around this tower of doom, looming menacingly in my direction.  I nearly, nearly just walked away, consigning R's bees to an early death.

But Max came out to save me.  Young Max, all gung-ho and bare skin, with a hammer and chisel.

"Here," he said, "let me help."  Oh my god, what an afternoon we had.

I stepped back and watched in bemusement as he leaned over, revealing great swathes of tanned skin, fodder for the bees, under his too-short bee top.  He hurled all the razor wire and planks aside and proceeded to lean in with the hammer and chisel, thumping his way through five years of bee propolis gluing each of the eight boxes together, one on top of the other.

As I stood there in paralysed horror, those eighty thousand thugs arose like a great cloud of death and hummed mightily, closing down around us like a blanket filled with a million sharp needles.  I pumped frantically on the smoker till Max doubled over, coughing, "asthma," he gasped, "my asthma."  I didn't care and kept surreptitiously pumping away all the while.  There were so many bees they were building sheets of comb around the outside of the inner boxes.  Walls of honey dripped gobbily onto the ground, the boxes, the frames, the smoker, the torch, our hive tools, everything, everywhere.

Eventually he managed to wrench two frames out from the box second to the bottom, and I grabbed them with relief.  Of course no rice grain eggs.  She wouldn't be laying, I thought, She's got eighty thousand of the blighters already, why would She want any more?  And why in god's name has She not swarmed?

I didn't know, and I didn't care.  While Max sealed everything back up again, and his B & B guests leapt around the garden, yelping and swatting at angry bees I picked up the frames and ran for my car.

"Bye Max, thanks for everything!" I yelled over my shoulder and he waved back cheerily, completely undeterred.  He hadn't even raised a sweat.  Astonishing.

On the way over to R's place the weather closed in, and a thunderstorm of Biblical proportions threw itself all over me and my little car as we fought our way down the single lanes of the Berkshire countryside.  Still in my bee suit, I fell out of the car into R's arms and spent twenty minutes raging about the folly of beekeepers and their ridiculous romantic ideas about "keeping a hive for the honey for our guests and, you know, a gift or two at Christmas."

"Burn the lot of them," I sobbed, " and give me a gin and tonic right now!"

Well, not quite but you get the gist.

I left the frames for him to place in the hive, which he did later that evening when the storm had passed.

Two days later I went back.  R had received a Queen through the post.  We gazed at Her in awed fascination.  She comes in a little plastic container with air holes.  She is accompanied by Her retainers, seven female worker bees. She has a big blue dot painted on her thorax.  And She is mated.  Good and ready to go.

This afternoon R and I took Her down to his hive.  We spent a glorious afternoon, in the drowsy summer heat, two heads in the hive while honeybees worked contentedly on their frames around us.

We have placed the Queen in the hive in her container.  It will take the bees about 48 hours to eat their way through the candy barrier and that will give them time to meet Her, smell Her, lick Her, share pheromones and - hopefully - accept Her.

Pray for the Blue Queen tonight.  We are praying, and we hope you will too.