Country Mouse Monday: bees are just yoga, man

breakfast contemplationThis was one of those weekends that was all bees, bees, bees from beginning to end, a blissful playing with and talking about them, first on Saturday at Glide, where I think we taught about 30 interested strangers, to yesterday when my friend Fredo came over for lunch and hive inspection.  Super-duper fun.

Somewhere along the line on Saturday afternoon, standing on the roof at Glide Memorial in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, one of the students, all geared up in her full-body bee suit turned to me and said,

"It really helps if you stay calm, right?"

Yup. Exactly.

The crazy thing for me -- and maybe it's only because I'm crazy or warped somehow from so many years of yoga, though the yogis would say (I would say) that actually I'm neither, I am just clear about what matters, after so many years of practice -- the crazy thing is:

Beekeeping is just yoga, man.  It's just yoga.

Like asana, it's just another breathing exercise, following your own breath as you send those first puffs of smoke into the hive, breath as you crack open the lid and bees launch into the air around you, breath as you pull out frames to examine them, breath as you endeavor to put everything back, close it up again, with a minimum of destruction and loss of 6-legged lives.

But sometimes it's hard to breathe, right, when you look up and realize that you are just one big-ass mammal in a cloud of determined insects, perturbed at the interruption of what they had going on before these big hands got in their mix.

But really, I'm not kidding, it's just yoga.  That doesn't mean you have to be a yogi to do it.  Or maybe it's that I think, whether you practice yoga or not, you're a yogi anyway.  Listen: you're breathing right now, aren't you?  That's it.  That's what I mean.  

Just breathe and keep practicing.  In the end, that's all it is.

The lessons at Glide were long and fun and challenging. I was completely exhausted from two back-to-back three hour classes, and so looking forward to just having a friend over on Sunday and doing a simpler show-and-tell, not having to negotiate so many big mammal bodies around the hive. 

Bottom line is that I love to do the show-and-tell so I was super happy both days, to spend so much time immersed in that little world I love so much, the warmth of the colony even on a day like Saturday where, as you can see in the photo, it was overcast all day, a little windier than I would have preferred when we did the afternoon class. But perfect weather for big heavy bee suits, all our little astonauts insulated from stings and cold.

So much better was Sunday's bee-time, though, at home.  It was a mixed bag.  The package bees who arrived in our garden courtesy of Maria and Green Gulch in April are doing great.  With Fredo there taking pictures and noticing with his fresh eyes, we even spotted the queen.  She's toward the top of the frame, long dark abdomen.  With great excitement, we watched her run around, deposit eggs in cells, as her attendants followed her about.  Super-great thing to see in this colony we were a bit worried about.  They were doing so well, had so much capped brood (population explosion coming!) that we had to give them another box to expand into.  Yay, such a relief!

credit: Alfredo Guastella

credit: Alfredo GuastellaOn the other hand, I'm sad to report that The Bitches are no more. This colony that I both loved and feared, having swarmed off twice this season, just didn't make it. We blame ourselves a little but also know that it's entirely possible that the new queen just didn't have it in her.  With Fredo over, we companionably dismantled the hive, and had a chance to cut apart the crazy comb they'd built in the bottom box, the original chamber into which they'd been placed as a swarm.

In this experiment of beekeeping, things are so real.  There's success, there's failure.  There's thrill (seeing the Queen at her work), there's despair (poor Bitches). Watching bees hatch.  Squishing bees just by checking things out.  Life and death in one tidy box.  

Just such a mixed bag, but all in all, just super thrilling to be in this spot to witness these remarkable creatures doing what they do, tolerating for the most part our intrusion, and to be able to share that funny complex little world with others.

Sitting in the garden yesterday with Fredo and Joe, hands full of beeswax, bees investigating periodically, I had such a solid happiness weighing me into the ground, just so much joy in the course my own life has taken, the little colony we've built ourselves, such good friends, such good work.  It really is just so pleasing, this view from my hive, and so much more pleasing when I get to share it, invite you in.

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