My neighbor’s swarm would be easier to hive and I promised him I would be back directly.
IV
THE BEEKEEPER’S SUMMER
The Beekeeper’s Summer
A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a cow and a bottle of hay.
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly.
“A Reformed Commonwealth of Bees,” 1655
A farmer today would scorn a deal offering him a swarm of bees, even in May, for a cow and a bottle (bundle) of hay. Cows at sixty cents a pound and hay at a dollar fifty a bale are pricey. And a package of bees (the equivalent to a swarm, but better because it contains a new queen) is not. One can be had for a mere twenty-five dollars from a bee breeder. But the basic truth of the rhyme still holds after three centuries. Swarms must be hived in May to be of any value at all and a swarm of bees in July, or even a package of them from a bee breeder, is indeed not worth a fly.
Early, or May, swarms have a chance of building up and proving useful to a beekeeper. A swarm of bees in July, when the flow of nectar from flowers has dried up, could not even keep themselves alive, let alone produce any extra honey to be harvested. Indeed, they would have to be fed lest they starve to death.
In the days of the rhyme, there were no bee breeders who sold tidy packages of bees, and picking up a swarm was one of the best ways to acquire them. Fashions in beekeeping change, as they do in everything else, and a hundred years ago in this country, when colonies died out mysteriously from moths and disease, the apiarist considered himself lucky to have hives which would swarm because it meant that he could replenish his dwindling stock of bees.
Bee breeders nowadays try to develop strains of bees that do not swarm, because contemporary fashion prefers them not to. Although the impulse to swarm may be written in the genes and therefore changed by selective breeding, the exact trigger mechanism of swarming is poorly understood. No one knows what makes one colony swarm and another not swarm. In general, crowded conditions within the hive seem to make bees more likely to swarm. And older queens are supposed to swarm more often than younger ones. However, anyone who has kept bees has had the experience of watching a swarm emerge from a recently divided colony with a brand-new queen in a hive with mostly empty comb. Beekeepers’ generalities are flaunted by bees.
In some hives, the colony will swarm repeatedly during the same season. The first swarm, usually the one headed by the original queen, is termed the “primary swarm.” The bees may have raised many new queens in swarm cells, and, instead of killing one another, the queens may fly out with decreasing numbers of the original population, in tiny secondary and tertiary swarms—a process that continues until the hive is nearly depleted.
It is exciting to see a swarm. The group of bees flies along in a stream, often low to the ground, and to someone attuned to their ways they seem to fill the air with electricity, giving a beekeeper a sense of elation—the human counterpart of the springlike, optimistic, burgeoning state the bees are in.
A number of my older Ozark friends can remember the days when bees flying overhead in a swarm were “tanged” to the ground. For centuries, beekeepers have been tanging—making a ringing noise by beating a metal spoon against a pot—under a swarm to bring it down. I’ve never tried it, and can’t report any firsthand experience. But bees do not have a sense of hearing in the way we do. Gilbert White, the eighteenth-century English naturalist, established this fact to his own satisfaction by roaring at them through a speaking trumpet held near their hive. He reported they failed to show “the least sensibility or resentment.” Modern authorities say bees are virtually deaf to airborne sound but moderately sensitive to sound waves that travel through the ground or through other solid objects, which they can detect through sense organs on their feet. These experts say tanging does not work, and any swarms that descend while being tanged were going to come down anyway.
Before leaving the parent colony, the bees stuff themselves with honey, so they have no need for food for several days. After they have swarmed, the bees lose all memory of their old hive and its location. (It would be interesting to know how this “unlearning” takes place.) They light temporarily in some exposed spot—a tree limb, the side of a building, an automobile hood—while scout bees search out new quarters. In the springtime newspapers often carry stories and pictures of swarms of bees which have caused some excitement by alighting in an inconvenient location, on some downtown building, perhaps.
Passersby are seldom aware the bees are not cross, will not sting them, and, if left to their own devices, will leave in a day or two. Beekeepers like to show off as much as anyone, and when they are called in to help with those urban swarms they enjoy giving the press an animal-taming act by picking up the swarm without a veil and with their bare hands. It is easy enough to do. The bees do not develop a defensive sense of place about their temporary hanging-out spot, and so they are seldom aggressive unless they are attacked by humans who try to squash them or spray them with insecticides. They will cluster around their queen in this temporary location until the scout bees find them suitable new quarters, a process that may take several hours or may stretch out to several days.
We know about two forms of honeybee communication. One is chemical: information about food sources and the well-being of the queen and colony is exchanged as bees continually feed one another with nectar or honey that has been chemically tagged by the bees while processing it. The other is tactile: bees can tell other bees about things such as food or the location of a new home by patterned motions. These elaborate movements, which amount to a highly stylized map of landmarks, direction and the sun’s position, are called the “bee dance,” and have been described in The Dancing Bees by Karl von Frisch, who discovered this behavior. Entomologists are currently questioning some of his findings, but von Frisch claims that the directions given in the dances are so precise and accurate that once they have been deciphered researchers can go to the place indicated by the dance and watch tagged bees arrive.
It is an elegant form of communication, more sophisticated than that used by other social insects—ants, for instance, recruit nest mates too, but they merely drag or carry their fellow workers to the spot where they want them to be.
Different scout bees may find different locations for the swarm and return to dance about their finds. Eventually an agreement is reached, rather like the arrival of the Sense of the Meeting among Quakers, and all the bees in the swarm fly off to their new home.
The bees up by my neighbor’s mailbox were clustering there and receiving scout bees, who were investigating all the snug spots they could find, including various hollow trees and spaces under the siding of the abandoned cabin in back of my mailbox. If I had left them alone they would have selected one of those places and flown away to bother my neighbor no more.
But I interrupted the process. I brought with me one covered single hive body stapled to a bottom board. I had taped its ventilation hole but had left open the entrance, although I had also brought along a screen for it. Inside, I had put a feeder and eight frames of worked comb which, to a bee, would be fragrant with the odor of other bees. I also brought along a white sheet.
My neighbor and his family gathered at a distance to watch. A good portion of the swarm was on the ground because the weight of those thousands of bees had dragged down the small branch. I placed the hive on the ground, near the bees, with its entrance toward them, and spread the sheet in front of it. They would have to walk over the sheet to get into the hive, and the white background would make it easier for me to see the queen. I had to make sure she was in the hive, or the swarm would not stay in it.
It took a few minutes for the bees to become aware of the hive with its welcoming scent of comb on which other bees had lived. The first bees to discover it stationed themselves at the entrance, elevated their abdomens and pointed them outward to expose their scent-producing Nassanoff glands. They fanned their wings to send out an odor trail f
rom these glands for other bees in the swarm to follow. Tired of camping out, the entire swarm started walking slowly across the white sheet and into the hive, in a purposeful and what can only be described as a cheerful manner. I sat astraddle the hive watching for the queen.
The thousands of bees, even though they were marching along at a steady clip, took quite a long time to go into the hive. My neighbors at first found it comical that I had somehow induced the bees to walk into the hive on their own, but soon they grew bored. They had expected something more lively. They had assumed I would do something, not just sit there on a hive and watch the bee parade. My neighbors had long since left when I finally spotted the queen stepping briskly across the white sheet. She was a beautiful golden yellow with three stylish black stripes, marking her as an Italian. She disappeared into the hive. I got up and stretched. It took a bit longer for the rest of the bees to follow her in. Then I shoved the entrance screen into place and stapled it. I put the hive into the pickup and drove home, where I unloaded it out in back by the woodlot. Tomorrow morning, I’ll fill the feeder full of sugar syrup to give these bees a start. In a week’s time, I’ll medicate them and check to see what kind of an egg-laying pattern the queen has made, before I decide whether to let her live or replace her. I hope she is still a good queen—I shouldn’t like to have to kill such a beauty.
A friend who keeps bees stopped over at day’s end for a drink. We sat up on the deck of the barn loft and watched the sun go down. I told him about the swarm and the beautiful queen. We talked about how odd and special it is to develop an affection for bugs. He laughed and proposed a toast.
“To the queen!”
“Long may she live!” I responded.
And then we watched the sun disappear behind the trees.
The banker and I are keeping quiet about the bees in the bank parking lot. They are flying around in a desultory way; we both know they are spiritless and won’t sting anyone, but there is no need for us to let on that we know those bees. They are stragglers from a demonstration our local beekeeping organization held last week to show beginners how to hive a package of bees. We had asked a retired commercial beekeeper to do the demonstration, and he kindly obliged. He has been a great help to our local organization, giving us all the benefit of his years of experience as the owner of a large honey company in one of the western states. Western desert beekeeping is unique, but like big commercial operators in other parts of the country, this beekeeper often moved his colonies around in order to capture different blooms. These colonies were moved within the state only, but in a typical commercial operation in other parts of the country beekeepers will move colonies from, say, Florida, where they have worked citrus flowers, to Ohio for spring dandelion blossoms and then on to the Dakotas, which is one of the best honey-producing sections of the country because of its long summer days and ample bloom of clover, alfalfa and native plants.
These commercial honey companies run thousands of hives, which are placed on pallets so they can be mechanically hoisted for moving. This involves a large investment: fork lifts, boom loaders, tractor-trailer rigs, honey-extracting plants with sophisticated equipment and a large labor force. Honey in other countries can today be produced more cheaply than it can in the United States, and most of the honey on grocery store shelves is of foreign origin. For a time, a federal price-support program kept the big American honey producers in nervous but marginally profitable financial health, but the price-support levels have been cut in recent years, and gloom has settled in a big black cloud over them as it has over other segments of the farming community. Some of them are cutting back and selling out.
I am the only beekeeper in our local organization who fits the commercial definition by government standards: a producer who has at least three hundred hives of bees and makes her primary living from them. Most of the other members have a few hives, and some of them even sell their honey. The banker, for instance, uses his bees to make comb honey, which he packs attractively and which I peddle for him along with my extracted honey in jars. However, none of us have had the broad experience of the retired commercial beekeeper. He is a quiet, softspoken man, generous with his time and knowledge and happy to help newcomers get started with bees. On the Sunday scheduled for our demonstration, he came early to set up his equipment. We had ordered a three-pound package of bees from a southern bee breeder for him. (Package bees can be bought in two-, three-or five-pound sizes.) The bees come in secure cages made of screenwire stretched across a wooden frame, allowing them to have air but preventing them from escaping in the post office—although postal workers are never as sure about that as beekeepers are. Each package contains the specified poundage of bees, a queen in her own small cage and sugar syrup in a can for food during shipping.
We had brought along what a beginner would use for hiving a package of bees: a covered hive body on a bottom board, a feeder and a full complement of frames containing foundation only. It is easier to hive a package of bees on combs that have been fully worked, because the bees are more likely to want to stay on them, but a beginner’s equipment is usually new, and includes new frames with foundation.
Bees in mailing cage
Package bees are disoriented from their trip through the mails; they have often been scooped up from different colonies with different chemical identities, and the queen they are given is new to them. They are out of sorts when they arrive, and may fly away from the hive into which they are placed. Package bees are best installed as late as possible during the day because, as darkness comes, they will be less inclined to fly; if they have one night to get used to their new quarters, they will be more likely to remain in them.
Beekeeping association members and others curious about bees began to gather in the bank parking lot, and by the time the demonstration was about to start we had nearly fifty people standing in a respectful circle around our retired beekeeper. He first stuffed up the entrance of the hive with some grass, to make it harder for the bees to use; then he shook the mailing cage to force most of them to drop to the bottom. He removed the wooden cover deftly, and before too many bees had escaped he pulled out the queen and replaced the cage cover. He removed the cork over the sugar-plug end of it, and wedged the cage down among the frames. Then, through the screen, he sprinkled the bees inside the big mailing cage with sugar syrup. They began sucking it up and cleaning one another off, and while they were all occupied with this, he again took off the wooden cover and dumped the bees on to the frames of the open hive. Most of them obligingly crawled down into the frames, but others flew up in confusion and disorder. He had moved quickly and surely and had not angered the bees, however, so they bothered no one. After he had closed up the hive, people gathered closer to ask questions—ignoring the bees circling in the air. It was nearly dark by the time their questions were answered, and many of the loose bees had found their way into the hive. We put it into the pickup of the man who had paid for the bees.
Back at his place, the bees should release the queen within a few days. Once the beekeeper has taken them home, he will continue to feed them steadily with sugar syrup until they have drawn out the foundation wax in the frames, built honeycomb on them and filled each hexagonal cell. After the first hive body is nearly filled, he will pull out the extra frame and add a second hive body. He will put the one drawn comb taken from the bottom hive body in the middle of the nine frames of foundation in the new upper hive body, thus temporarily giving the second hive body ten frames. The one drawn comb frame will help lure the bees upstairs to work on the new foundation. He will continue to feed sugar syrup, and after the frames in the second hive body are also drawn and filled he will remove the extra frame and thereby reduce the number of frames to the usual nine. He will space them carefully to respect the bee space.
There is no way to tell what the weather will be in the summer ahead, nor when the rains will come, but in an ordinary year these bees will do well to draw out and build comb on the frames of foundation and fil
l them with enough honey to keep themselves through the winter. In an exceptional year, package bees started on foundation may produce some extra honey that a beekeeper can harvest, but he should not expect it. He should put off any plans to take honey from them until the following year.
Our local beekeeping organization, an affiliate of the state association, was started because we thought it would be good to get together and talk bees. Demonstrations like the one we had last Sunday have also given us the satisfaction of helping a number of new beekeepers. For me, whose livelihood depends on bees, there has been another benefit. Our group is a force worth listening to in dealing with what is always a problem for beekeepers—the loss of bees to pesticides.
Insecticides are not heavily used by farmers in the Ozarks, who grow few crops but raise cattle and hogs instead. In some parts of the country the liberal use of agricultural chemicals has made beekeeping all but impossible. Insecticides kill the bees, and herbicides kill the wild plants bees use to make honey. The bootheel of Missouri is an agricultural area, where cotton, soybeans and sunflowers are grown in big fields. Potentially each of these crops is a good honey source, and the only really big commercial beekeepers in the state are based there to take advantage of them. But a few years ago a friend of mine in the bootheel, a man who was running 7,000 hives, lost ninety percent of his bees to insecticides and was forced out of business.
Aside from the economic loss, it is a discouraging sight for a beekeeper to find masses of dead bees twitching in their death throes in front of a hive he has carefully nurtured and brought along all spring. Some agricultural pesticides act so rapidly that the bees die in the field, but with others the bees struggle back and die in convulsions in their hive, where, as long as workers remain alive inside, they are carried out and piled in growing heaps in front of the entrance. The honey and pollen may be contaminated, and the work force so depleted that the hive will probably die out, even if the workers have not brought home insecticides so potent that they will kill on contact all the larvae and developing brood, although that sometimes happens, too.
A Book of Bees Page 12