by Dave Doroghy
It might seem strange that the swarm moves so much slower than regular bees fly and that the bees have to make so many rest stops. It would seem more natural for the bees to spread out like they usually do when they are foraging and quickly hightail it to their new home. Remember fat Queenie diligently following her weight-loss program to prepare for her big flight? Well, she usually misses the dieting mark. Because the queen is still too out of shape to fly efficiently, the entire swarm escorts her at a reduced speed. She controls the interior of the hive with her pheromones, and she sets the pace for her 30,000 disciples, who clamour to be near her in mid-air so they can feel that pheromone love. When the swarm temporarily lands to rest, the ball of bees compacts as each worker bee manoeuvres and jostles to get closer to Her Majesty.
Now comes the final step of the swarming process, the part I find the most fascinating: the way those 30,000 bees and their plump queen find their way to a new home. If you look closely enough at a resting swarm, you can see several scout bees performing waggle-dance moves on the surface of the tightly packed buzzing bee ball. The waggle dancers are indicating the location of the new home they have found for the secessionist hive and relaying directions to it. With so many scout bees waggling away, the bee ball can look like a mosh pit. Several waggle-dancing scouts perform at once, advising the swarm of a range of potential new hive locations. The more vigorous the waggle dance, the more promising the proposed location.
The queen and the mass of worker bees in the swarm seldom make a snap decision about where to fly to next. A swarm can remain at rest for two or three hours to allow the out-of-shape queen to recharge, while collectively deciding its next move based on the waggling scouts. Sometimes the swarm will deliberately overnight and can even ruminate for days before it gathers itself up and continues on through the air.
This brings to mind a memorable and catchy line in the chorus of the 1961 Brook Benton hit titled “The Boll Weevil Song,” which was adapted from an old traditional blues tune first recorded by Lead Belly in 1934. Like the famous line in the song, swarming bees are “just lookin’ for a home.” Luckily, bees are thought of as better neighbours than the weird-looking, destructive boll weevil with its long snout and penchant for eating the flowers and buds of the cotton plant.
Once the swarming colony is settled into its new branch, tree fork, or trunk cavity, the cycle of life continues. As for the old hive, the one they left behind that still houses 40 percent of the bees, well, it now needs to create its own new queen in order to continue on.
If you ever see a bee swarm, don’t be frightened. Simply give it a wide berth and leave it alone, then call the friendly experts at your local bee club. Or, if you love Born Free, simply continue on your way and let the bees continue on theirs. Above all, don’t touch or try to contain a swarm, unless you are a knowledgeable beekeeper with the appropriate capture paraphernalia in your trunk. Messing with a swarm could be messy and backfire. The same can be said if you stumble on a bee club meeting in a church basement. Just leave them alone.
I walked back to my van after the bee club meeting, thinking it was pretty clear a club swarm was inevitable. Should I stay with the old club or join the clump of people flying to a new location? If I were to join the swarm, when would we swarm, and to where? Would we do a trial swarm by having dinner together one night at a restaurant near the old church?
On the way back to the float home I passed three churches that seemed larger and more suitable than the one I had just left. I also passed a large modern community centre that I knew had a sizable gymnasium. The centre could easily fit a growing bee club. So I began daydreaming about the next bee club meeting and how, during a coffee break, I would communicate the location of the community centre to my fellow club members. It was obvious. While shoving crumbs of banana bread into their mouths, I would waggle around in a figure-eight pattern with an axis that pointed toward the community centre while frantically flapping my arms up and down.
Bee School
The beehive that Miriam and Len had bravely left in my care didn’t come with an owner’s manual. Even if it had, you know by now that I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to read it. Everyone in my circle of beekeeping friends and family had 100 times the knowledge of bees I had, so it was no fun always asking them dumb questions like the ones I asked Miriam: “Just how many eggs does a queen lay each day?” Or, “How often should I check for mites?” Or, my most frequent inquiry, “When will I be able to finally harvest some honey like we did in the halcyon days when you first dropped off the hive?” It was no fun having zero jars of honey to hand out, especially after I had boasted about how great my hive was to so many people. I had established this faux reputation of being a real beekeeper. It was definitely no fun waking up in the morning and walking out onto the back deck to check my hive only to sweep dozens of dead bees off the deck into the river.
My ineptness was starting to get me down, and I needed to re-establish my reputation among family and friends as a competent beekeeper. So I signed up for a series of apiarist classes. The cool thing about this beekeeping course was that if I could pass a final exam, I would receive a frameable piece of paper from the British Columbia Honey Producers’ Association proclaiming that I was a certified beekeeper. The provincial Ministry of Agriculture helped to develop the course curriculum, so it was legitimate. Plus the certificate had a really cool embossed gold stamp. Jeannie had completed a similar course a few years earlier, but at the time the course hadn’t offered the provincial certificate. I loved the idea of being a provincially certified beekeeper when she wasn’t, even if my one and only hive was dying while her hives were producing upwards of 300 pounds of honey. Miriam and Len had certificates, but I’m not sure if they required writing a test. At least if I got accredited, I’d have bragging rights. The course cost around $250—a small price to pay to save my hive, while bolstering my ego and restoring a few shreds of self-esteem.
In actuality, other than looking academic and official, the certificate serves no real purpose. It’s not as if you have to show a certificate to someone to buy a hive or sell a jar of honey. And it’s not as if the bees care either. But heck, I never went to university, and the thought of framing the certificate and hanging it in the float home near my beehive appealed to me. The only problem was the course came with a 205-page textbook I was supposed to read, and I had to actually attend 24 hours of classroom instruction over 12 weeks.
I did lousy at biology in high school and still carried some unhealthy emotional baggage from my Grade 10 experience with a certain science teacher who shall go unnamed. He gave us a 10-point quiz that required us to memorize the parts of a human eyeball. We had to notate the terms on a crudely drawn black-and-white eyeball diagram. I got the parts all mixed up and received a 0 out of 10 on the quiz, even after I studied for 45 minutes the night before. When the insensitive teacher—who had obviously chosen the wrong profession—handed back the tests, he made fun of me in front of all the other students. Of course, they laughed, all 30 of them. Ever since that day, I have had a neurotic aversion to written exams, especially when they have to do with biology.
I was pleased to discover the beekeeping class had fewer students than my high school classes, only 14 or 15, and they were all adult beginners like me. Some had hives and some were considering getting a hive. At the start of the first class the teacher handed out the syllabus, which outlined the topics we would be required to learn over the next three months in order to pass the course. They were: the basics of honeybee biology, municipal bylaws, proper equipment selection, bee acquisition, identifying hive diseases and assessing overall colony health, honey production, apitherapy and the products of the hive, honey harvest and extraction, winter preparation, bee life cycles, and capturing swarms.
During the first class session I sat in the middle of the front row reviewing each week’s lesson plan while sipping a disappointing lukewarm coffee out of a paper cup. The curriculum looked somewhat interesting
. The only catch I noticed was that in order to actually get the certificate, I had to pass the final exam by getting at least half of the questions right. The teacher explained that all 24 hours of classroom instruction and all reading assignments boiled down to this 50-question final test, with each question worth two points. The textbook on which the exam was based had some nice colour pictures, but I later discovered the writing was torturously dry. Still, I felt optimistic about my chances for success. On the inside wall of my float home, the wall nearest to my hive, I had hung a calendar, which my bank had sent me in the mail, to track when I fed my bees, when I last checked for mites, and other important beekeeping journal entries. When I got home I walked right over to the calendar and marked the date of the upcoming final exam with a giant red X. If I were successful, in 12 weeks I would display my beekeeping certificate on the wall right next to my calendar.
But the truth was I hadn’t been examined in a classroom setting for over 40 years. I teach a university-level international sports marketing course part-time in Vancouver and Vienna, and thus I am used to handing out exams and marking them, not taking them. So as the bee exam got closer and closer, I started to mildly wig out. Latent neurotic negative feelings of possible exam failure and the humiliation that accompanies ignominious academic defeat haunted me. I began having a tough time falling asleep at night as I tried to memorize facts presented in class that I thought would be on the test, but since I hadn’t taken any notes, it was rather hard to memorize them. It didn’t help that I had missed about a third of the classes as well. And I never completed reading the boring textbook. This was looking grim.
I had trouble committing to memory fundamental facts, such as the differences between venom, propolis, larvae, and royal jelly, or the best way to treat your hives if they have American foulbrood disease. I knew the exam would be asking me these and dozens of even harder questions, like the distance apart that each wooden comb frame should be from the other frames in the hive boxes. Was it half an inch or three-quarters of an inch? I tried to memorize all the major parts of a bee’s body, like the head, abdomen, and thorax, but there were 15 smaller subparts that I just couldn’t get straight. Plus, learning biological parts of any kind brought that eye diagram swimming back into my brain, along with the word zero in angry red ink. In one class session we were taught that the inventor of the modern hive was some guy named Langstroth, which I already knew, and we had to remember that he patented the hive design in 1852 … or was it 1853? I tossed and turned each night in bed, my mind a jumbled mess of bee body parts, disease names, biological theories, city bylaws, hive construction measurements, historical facts, and other easily forgettable bee minutiae. Bee exam insomnia translated to daytime fatigue.
With the exam less than two weeks away, my anxiety worsened and began to affect my day-to-day routine. One day I paid for my groceries at the supermarket and forgot to take the two bags of food out of the store. True or false: worker bees must have protein, carbohydrates, and water to raise brood. Later that same week I missed the highway turn to the float home. If a queenless colony has only capped brood and no eggs, does that mean the queen was present and laying eggs eight days ago? Is it true that the medicine fumagillin is used to treat the disease caused by Nosema apis? I was so nervous I was stumbling over the most rudimentary questions. How many legs does a honeybee have? How many wings does a honeybee have? I knew the answers were four and six but was not sure in what order. I feared this final beekeeping exam was shaping up to be a disastrous repeat of my Grade 10 biology test. During the second-to-last beekeeping class, one week before the big exam, I looked around at the rest of the men and women in the room. If I failed the exam and they all passed, would they laugh at me? Do we ever really outgrow our adolescent cruelty?
I didn’t know the answer to that question, but I wasn’t about to chance it. I hate to admit what I am about to tell you, but compelling creative writing can only come from total and direct honesty. Here it comes: I cheated on the bee exam. I am not proud of this, and I can come up with numerous excuses for why I cheated, but in the end, I admit it right here, right now: I cheated.
I used an old trick I learned in high school that I call “shorthanding.” I was quite certain that listing a bee’s body parts was going to be a question on the test, so I took the first letter or two of the 15 body parts listed in chapter 11 of the textbook and wrote them out on my hand in blue pen. I’m not talking about thick felt-pen markings, just small subtle letters inscribed with fine-point blue ink that only I could see written secretly on the fatty part of my hand under my thumb. Teeny tiny letters that only one person in the whole world knew about. Based on my limited experience of cheating in high school, I remembered that the fleshy part of the hand, large and flat enough to accommodate 30 or 40 characters, naturally faced down on the desk, hidden as you sit; thus, it’s easy to secretly turn your hand over to read when the teacher isn’t watching.
I know what you are thinking: “When you cheat on beekeeping exams, you only cheat yourself.” But I figured I wouldn’t need to know all these microscopic bee body parts in the future. All I needed to do was remember where I left the course textbook, and that way if the need ever arose, like for instance if I needed to take one of my bees to the dentist because it had a sore mandibular gland, I could refer to the book to learn where that gland was.
Perhaps you’re getting a bit judgmental at this point and thinking I should not have taken the shorthand shortcut. You might feel I should have just hunkered down and memorized all those bee parts. Okay. Bee my guest and here they are: antenna cleaner, proboscis, mandible, mandibular gland, antennae, hypopharyngeal gland, compound eye, ocelli, forewing, hindwing, wing hooks, Nasonov gland, stinger, wax glands, pollen baskets.
Boring.
After reviewing that exhaustive list only once, I am sure you will agree with me that one could save a lot of time and energy with 15 helpful, hidden, one-or two-letter hand hints: AC, P, M, MG, A, HG, CE, O, FW, HW, WH, NG, S, WG, PB. When I snuck a glance under my thumb, each one of those letters ignited some galvanic nerve memory response deep in my brain that would recall the correct word. It wasn’t really cheating; it was more of a little helping hand.
On my other hand, I wrote a cryptic series of words, numbers, and letters to help me answer other predictable questions. These facts, on the other hand, were important to know as a beekeeper, and so rest assured that I have since gone on to commit them to memory. They dealt with the number of days it takes after an egg has been laid for the egg to develop into one of the three types of bees that inhabit a hive. This is practical information that can lead to clues about when the queen was last laying eggs and when newborn bees will be arriving. A queen bee takes 16 days to develop from egg to bee, a worker bee takes 21 days, and a drone bee takes 24 days. In shorthand written under my thumb, I noted the following code: “Q-16, W-21, D-24.” In the bit of room left over on that hand, I wrote the word “India,” which is where the North American honeybee originated, and also the letters “AHB” for African hive beetle, which I had learned was a new pest threatening hives in North America. Thumbs-down on those beetles invading my hive; thumbs-up on getting a mark for knowing its name.
I’ll admit I felt a bit stupid, a tad guilty, and slightly foolish sitting at my kitchen table writing tiny letters under my thumbs in the hours before the final exam. When I ran out of room on both hands, I stopped writing, grabbed the keys to my van, and left to take the test. Driving to bee school that night, I worried that if I ever got caught and ended up in Bee Exam Court, it would be considered first-degree cheating. Just like first-degree murder, first-degree cheating is premeditated. But I figured I had a low risk of getting busted. The lady invigilating the bee exam probably wouldn’t be paying that much attention. Besides, it’s not as if she really cared, and anyway what kind of dopey, lazy low-life in their late 50s would cheat on an exam for a hobby? It was not like this was an important medical school surgical exam where my studying short
cut would harm a patient. It was a victimless crime. Um. Well. That’s not entirely true. There were 50,000 potential victims.
While the pangs of guilt plagued me, I was actually quite proud of my two fleshy cheat sheets and gloated to myself over how well and neatly I’d prepared them to address dozens of anticipated exam questions. I was confident my inky codes would be well worth the time and effort and pay off with a passing grade. The gold-embossed certificate conjured visions of those stately framed degrees hanging in the offices of high-powered lawyers.
But as I pulled into the school lot and parked the van, I began to sweat. The real test was just minutes away. I worried the sweat would smudge the tiny letters on my hands. Upon entering the classroom, instead of sitting in the front row like I usually did, I sat in the very back row, not that I was being obvious or anything. I was now sweating profusely, realizing I may have inadvertently made a wrong move that would bring unwanted attention from the teacher. When she glanced over at me, I nodded and then, like a good test taker, I neatly placed my binder, textbook, and notepad on the floor beneath my seat. When I hand out an exam in my marketing class, I like it when the students clear their desks because it demonstrates respect, seriousness, and an honest, fair approach to the task of writing an exam. The teacher walked down each row of tables handing out the test papers. I smiled and clenched my fists as she placed my exam on the desk in front of me. When she was gone, I neatly wrote my name on the front page, blood pressure surging like I’d just been jabbed with an EpiPen. I turned to the second page where the very first question asked me to list the body parts of the honeybee. Bingo!