July 30.2008
A couple of days ago, well, a couple of weeks ago, my honeybee homie Billy-G rings me and says he’s got a swarm. I’m thinking, ohhh man, just what I need more bees. Currently I am at bee capacity. I’m trying to down-size to the point that if any of my colonies look weak this fall I’m either going to become a mellifera pastor and marry them all, or continue down the two-queen colony road, which I have been having fabulous results with this year.
Honestly, if I could have only 10 colonies of the most dope bees in the Valley I’d be satisfied. I spend most my time looking after other people’s bees anyway, and to have less of my own would lighten my load. Recently I have come to the conclusion that it’s not about me-me-me, it’s more about the bee-bee-bee. Spread that survivor stock around, don’t be all getting your Scrooge on acquiring all the bees on the planet to just to fill your apiary.
This is a little embarrassing, but here goes…
I used to be a crazy turtle guy. Really!
I was, and still am, a member of the local turtle and tortoise club. I have five box turtles, three sliders, and my one beloved California desert tortoise: “The Big Guy.” The same mentality crosses over from Gopherus agassizii to Apis mellifera regarding the human need to obtain. I once knew people who had so many turtles and tortoise they couldn’t see straight, with numbers so large that it was a detriment to their pets. At the meetings they’d be rubbing their tortoises down with oil and shit. All but making love to the poor reptiles. The whole time I was thinking these people are out of their frickin’ minds. Literally, it drove me out of the club. I love Felice Rudd [who’s she?] bless her turtle loving heart, but the rest of ‘em are a bunch of hard-shelled freaks!
I’m starting to see the same thing with bees. Not the whole oiling-the-bees-down-to-shine-their-little-exoskeletons, but beekeepers becoming preoccupied with building massive apiaries and losing track of the individual bee as a species. We as beekeepers need to nip this in the proverbial bud.
Split your strong colonies and sell your bees, trade your bees, barter your bees, whatever it takes to spread your brawny genetics.
Back to Billy-G and his swarm…
When I rolled up to help with the swarm, Bill had been waiting a while -- it took me a few to pull together all the gear needed to hive the bees. For this swarm I’m less concerned with the bees than I am interested in making a Quicktime stop-action video of hiving the colony, which should be no problem because of their easy access. At first the task at hand appeared easy: We prepared the hive on a ladder and even fabricated a small wax bridge for the bees to enter the hive. But for some reason unknown to me, I couldn’t get the bees to go into the hive to save my life. Most of the time if you have a swarm clustered in a convenient location you can take a frame or two of drawn comb in a hive, tuck it up under the cluster, and the bees will march right in like little soldiers. Not these gals, they just didn’t want to go into the hive. At one point I set my camera up to take one frame every second and I left to do errands. I returned five hours later and found my camera exhausted and the bees just as I had left them.
Drastic times call for drastic measures, so I climbed up on the ladder and lopped the orange tree branch that had the clustered bees and shook it and the bees into the box. Well, half of them went in, and the other half broke loose, despite my heroic effort, and fell to the ground. I was, however, able to find the queen and put her directly into the nuc box. Apparently she had a bigger plan that wasn’t about moving on up like George and Weezie, because the next morning I went back to check on things and the queen is not in sight.
Which just goes to show, you should never second-guess a bee.
Bees clustered around oranges:
Billy-0 checkin’out the dilly-0
A pretty big swarm - about 3-4 pounds of bees.
My hand in the pretty big swarm.
Charlie, the home owner, going at it with the loppers.
