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.

The Humming Tree

We came around to the hives again on Sunday afternoon.  Once more I dragged my things out of the boot of my car and walked around the front of the house alongside the canal.  The gardens are at their absolute best now; colours bursting out all over, backed by the rich, verdant greenness of grass and wildflower.  Everywhere the flowers are out - campanula, forget-me-not, roses, apple blossom, hawthorn, sweet cicely, iris, allium, lupins, red hot poker, buttercup.  Purples and yellows and whites and reds and gold and pinks; you could lose yourself in the rainbow of colour and scent.

I sat down in front of the hives, waiting for Tom and Liz to come back.  I watched the action at the front doorsteps of all three hives.  Number One - "Mum's Hive" - showed some activity, bees going in and out, but I couldn't see any pollen baskets coming in.  Hmmm.  Number Two - "Tom's Hive" - was absolutely rip-roaring away - thousands of bees pouring in and out, pollen baskets filled, bees queueing up to get in and out of the entrance way.  Number Three - "Margo's Hive" - showed some bees coming in and out.  But I knew straight away; years of watching and waiting have taught me some kind of inner signal.  I knew.  They were slower than the other bees.  They kind of meandered around the entrance in a bit of a pointless fashion, looking a bit aimless and muddled.  No pollen going in.  I knew.

We opened it up and nothing has changed.  There were still three or four frames covered in bees, but no cohesion among them.  They weren't working together, interacting, talking, exchanging, waggling or busy.  No brood, nominal honey stores, the same old sticky, messy frames.  My colony is gone.  And our devices have not worked.  We stuck in a frame of brood in all stages, and the bees have not made a Queen cell.  Thinking about it logically, like a bee, of course they wouldn't.  The bees in my hive box are not in their home, they are merely sneaking in to rob out an empty house.  This is not their home; their home - with their Queen - is elsewhere.  They have Her pheromones fresh-licked all over them; of course they wouldn't make another Queen.

We went through Tom's hive and it has recovered brilliantly; the Blue Queen is there; lots of brood in all stages, but no attempt to build honey in the super above.  Of course not, they don't need to - there's a playground to mess around in, in Margo's hive.  More worrying is the third hive, which has no brood, only an overload of pollen, and honey. The Queen is there, but Her blue paint has been licked off and She is not laying.  We need to watch Her carefully.  So we took my box, and placed it over a sheet of newspaper on top of Tom's hive.  The two groups of bees will nibble through and come together slowly without aggression.  I packed away my brood box, roof and floor, and crown board.  My hive is gone.  Tom and Liz left me there for a while, and I sat and watched the two remaining hives.  I felt a kind of nothingness, and then a sense of rightness.  

When I used to do my beekeeping alone, as a solitary, sometimes I would talk to my bees.  I know I'm a crazy woman (you knew that, right?) but you would have done it too.  They're like an entity, a single mind, a whole creature.  How can you not talk to someone like that?  I used to mutter and grumble, or compliment them on their hard work.  I'd ask them how they were doing in the depths of winter as I knocked on the outside of the hive, and I would hear their reassuring hum coming back to answer me through the wall of the box.  So this time as I watched them, I felt like I was saluting them, acknowledging  the richness of the gift they've given me - all these years of learning from them, working with them, exchanging honey for food and protection.  As they went on their way, entirely unaware of my presence, I could only admire them.  "It's been a privilege," I said, as I left them.

Then me and Tom and Liz had tea and talked, and made notes and plans.  And I wandered through the garden and we lay beneath the laburnum tree and watched the bumble bees.  In the warm afternoon with the blue sky above, the sun shone through the wash of yellow and set it aglow, and we heard in the silence the sound of bees, so loud it seemed that the tree itself was humming.  It felt like a living thing connected to my skin through the ground and the grass and back up into the branches, right up to the very top.  

Perhaps one day I will keep bees again.  But for now I just feel a kind of relief.  I've been freed from duty; freed from my responsibility to the bees.  They've let me go, even if it's just for a little while, so that I can try and find my way again.

They always did know better than me.

... And In Other News ...

 

If you know me well, you will know that the one thing that keeps me going is the question, "What Will Happen Next?"  The soap opera aspects of life are the things that help me get out of bed every day to negotiate the obligatory tedium of earning a living and to deal with the banality of trying to stay alive as required by the norms of society.

So as I sit here today manning the Reception area in my new role (don't get me wrong, I am loving this job - it's great so far - touch wood), my mind turns to the recent hilarious developments with my bees.  Three weeks ago Tom, Liz and I decided to do early "Shook Swarm" on each of the three hives to combat varroa in the growing brood comb.  We did mine first and it worked perfectly except that I forgot to put a Queen Excluder under the chamber to keep the Queen contained inside.  Unfortunately Her Maj decided she didn't like her new quarters and she took off - taking all of her colony with her.  Cow.

So after all the joy of welcoming a strong colony through the winter and into the spring with a fertile, marked Blue Queen, I opened the hive two weeks ago and found - nothing.  Zip.  Zero. Nada. Nix.   My colony had not so much swarmed as absconded.  Part of me felt bereft, but another part of me - the weary, rebellious, solitary, hermit child - felt a kind of relief.  I had been excused from duty for the summer. 

 

Tom had some Queen Cells in his hives, as well as a lot of sealed brood he was planning to throw away after doing early "Shook Swarms" on his own hives.  It always seems such a tragic waste to a beekeeper, to throw away perfect Queen Cells and perfectly good brood.  So we made an attempt at a rescue by placing them all carefully in my empty hive and closing it up.  If a Virgin Queen were to be born and mate, and the brood all emerge successfully, there was a chance, just a small slight weak chance,  that I could establish a new colony.

 

But thinking about it later, I was convinced that the cold snap would mean the hive temperature would be too low and, with no housekeeping bees in there to raise the temperature, there would be little chance any of the still-to-be-born could survive.  So I took some equipment home with me to set up a decoy hive in my garden with a view to possibly installing a hive next year.  And that was it. 

 

Or so I thought.

 

  "There's activity on the front doorstep of all the hives," said Tom last week. 

 

  "All the hives ?" 

 

  "Yes.  All of them."

 

Well, blow me down with a feather.  What could that be all about, then?  We speculated that Tom's bees could be visiting my hive chamber to rob out all the honey stores left behind.  But my curiousity got the better of me and I couldn't resist driving over to take a look.  We walked down the garden, bursting with life and colour in all its finest spring glory.  And yes indeed.  There were busy bees flying to and fro - out of all three hives.

 

Without my suit on I popped the top off my hive and I saw bees under the crown board, so we gave them a huge box of sugar water feed.  I put the top back.  I walked away.  I stopped.  I looked back.  Again, my curiousity overwhelmed me.  Just what the hell was going on in there?  All advice, all advice is No Entering the Brood Chamber when a Virgin Queen is about to be Mated.  

 

 So what was there left for me to do?  I had to know.

 

  "I'm just going to have a look underneath" I said and lay down on my back and scooted myself directly under the hive.  Liz and Tom looked on in utter bewilderment.  They must have thought I'd completely lost my marbles this time, the few I have left.

 

But lying on my back with my face six inches away from the open mesh floor, I could see a lot.  And what I saw was a lot of bees.  Bees on the floor, bees working, moving, exchanging, interacting.  Bees.  Bees!

 

I wish I could say that I came away unscathed but the little beggars caught me as I emerged directly into their flight path.  PING!  One on the chin.  Ow! Bugger!  I hardly cared or noticed.  I was uplifted, filled with fizz, laughing and shaking my head at the same time.  Bees!  Never, ever a dull moment.

 

Tomorrow they say the sun will be shining and I hope to be able to open the hive box and finally find out for certain what has happened.  It could be bad news - just a bunch of robbers.  Or it could go the other way and be very, very good news indeed.

 

What Will Happen Next!?

Double What the ... !?

In unexpected news, there appear to be a whole lot of bees in my hive box.  Those fearsome little b*tches stung me in the face.

We shall know more in a couple weeks' time.  Keep the faith!

What the ....

So last week we trooped off down the garden to see what the results were of the early "Shook Swarming" of my hive, and to continue it with Tom's two hives.  We began by opening my hive.

The minute I took off the roof it was obvious there was no-one home.  They have gone.  Gone, gone, gone!  My glorious Blue Queen and all of her bees - gone.  They clearly did not like the new frames, the new foundation, the new box, and the intrusive nature of the manipulation.  She simply packed Her bags, collected Her entourage, and left the building.

Sob.

After taking a moment to absorb the full impact of the fact that I now have no bees, we closed the box up and carried on to Tom's hives.  They were all doing well, but it was quite astonishing to see so many Queen Cells.  How and where and when did they get those built?  We didn't see anything seven days before this.  Nevertheless there were Queen Cells, and some of them were already sealed up, which means they were at least seven days old.

Tom's hives were Shook Swarmed.  It is an awkward, hard, sweaty job and it disturbs the bees terribly.  I can completely understand the motivation to remove all the brood with its varroa load, but it is awful nevertheless.  However in this instance we took some frames of broods, and all the frames with Queen Cells on, and moved them to my empty box.

A last desperate attempt to recreate a colony for me.

But as I sit here, a week later, I am wondering whether they even had a chance.  It has simply been too cold, and there would've been no active foraging bees in my hive to keep the brood warm.  I am convinced I will go there tomorrow and find everything dead.  Dead from the cold wet spell we have just been through.  And then I have to consider that, perhaps, now is the time for me to quit.

When I first took up beekeeping I was with Guy, and we could afford to share a house with a large garden.  And it was always about having bees at the bottom of my own garden, where I could visit them every day, watch the action at the hive entrance, and inspect when ever I wanted.  I am finding the regimen of visits every Sunday too prescriptive; much as I love them.   

I have taken a hive box and assembled it at the bottom of my own little garden here in Amersham.  It is empty but it gets the neighbours used to seeing a beehive there.  I will ostentatiously parade around every now and then in a beesuit.  And maybe one day, I will have bees again.

But not, I think, today.

As It Should Be

Tom and Liz and me go down to the bees.  We have big plans.  But as in all things to do with beekeeping, they don't quite pan out.  

The plan was to Early Shook Swarm all three hives, replacing Tom's colonies in his new equipment, and putting my hive back into my clean, original old equipment.  Except that my colony is so huge we decided to use some of the brood to build up Tom's hives to full fighting strength before we do Shook Swarms on his.  And so all of Tom's brand new equipment ended up surrounding my bees, with new frames and foundation, and some food.  It's only temporary, till next week, but it did all feel a bit back to front!

There were a few frames of brood left, and it was Tom and Liz's clever idea not to let these go to waste, but to feed them to the chickens.  We lay the frames around on the green grass and let the chickens start to nibble on the honeycomb, dipping in to find juicy fresh larvae.  We began to scrape and clean my old equipment.   Then Tom's heat gun ran out of gas.  So we shrugged, and sweated off the beesuits and sat in the cool fresh afternoon under the magnolia tree and drank tea.

As the afternoon got warmer, the baby bees in the frames on the lawn began to birth.  It was quite heartbreaking to see all those new baby bees come out ... to a hostile environment that was not home in the hive .. destined to die.  I ran back to the hive trying to save some, but really - a silly, bleeding heart gesture.  The chickens will eat them.  And so they should.  

As I left, Tom and Liz gave me a six-pack of eggs.  And it occurred to me this morning, as I chomped through a deliciously soft-boiled egg, that this is the way things should be.  We work the bees, and harvest their honey.  We take the frames of brood that must be disposed of and feed them to the chickens.  And the chickens give us eggs, and we eat them, and gain energy to go back once more to the beehives.  

It makes such perfect sense to me.  In the summer we'll eat the apples off the trees, and we'll harvest apricots for the jam.  And the sun and heat will warm our bees and make honey, and all the local forage will build our immune systems and make us feel well, and then winter will come back again to allow everything to rest and regenerate once more next year.

How could things be any other way?  

I am so grateful to have experienced this natural process, and to be a part of it.  It makes me feel healthy and whole again.

It is all as it should be.