Bees find us again

"That buzzing noise means something. You don't get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there's a buzzing-noise, somebody's making a buzzing noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing noise that I know of is because you're a bee... And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey."
- Winnie the Pooh

Yesterday we had the good fortune, karma, luck, whatever you want to call it, to catch our THIRD swarm of bees. I have been thinking about this non-stop since 12:30 pm yesterday when Joe first noticed the distinctive buzzing-noise and tracked it to a redwood tree in our neighbor's yard. How is it that before we started beekeeping, each of us, Joe and I, had seen only one swarm of bees ever in our lives, but as soon as we started learning beekeeping, bought our own bees, not one, not two, but three swarms have landed practically in our laps?

From bird-watching, snorkeling and diving, I've learned that the more you look, the more you see. It's crazy and gratifying how as soon as you start noticing, there is so much to notice, so much more than you noticed before. It keeps expanding! And surely now, because we're attuned to bees in a way we never were before, we're more likely to notice. But three swarms? OK, it's true that there is a big hive two doors over from us, under someone's deck, the confirmed source of the first two swarms we caught last year, and most likely the source of yesterday's. And right now, April, is a very likely time of year for swarms. But really, why always come over toward our place? And why always swarm when people are coming over for meals?

The first swarm arrived in our apple tree on Mother's Day 2009; we had all of three weeks' experience under our belts and were just wrapping up brunch in the garden with friends. A week later, another swarm landed in a tree next door, and Joe, his humerus freshly broken and casted, worked with our neighbor Dave to capture them while his parents and I waited for him to come home so we could eat. This time, a year and a week after we started our beekeeping adventure, Joe noticed the swarm just I was starting preparations to host my parents for lunch. He threw down his hat and the weed-wacker, grabbed the swarm-catching necessaries and was off, 100% engaged in the task, delighted. It was, so he says, the easiest catch yet. We went back last night to pick up the hive box, drive them here and set them up in their permanent spot in the yard.

It's wonderful to have more bees. We lost two of our three hives over the winter, one colony was weak and starved after stronger bees robbed their food stores; the other lost their queen late, too late to make another and they eventually died, too, leaving behind a hive full of honey. Our only remaining hive until yesterday was the first swarm we caught, the Mother's Day bees, so wild and sturdy, such tough survivors. And now we're up to two again, more wild-caught bees, likely to survive and prosper.

Of course I know it's just a combination of circumstances -- the location of the mother-hive, the season, perhaps the breeze -- that has brought us three colonies of bees since last year. It's not a reward for good behavior, it's not karma, but damn, it sure feels like something more than just luck. We're listening for the buzzing-noise, so naturally we're going to hear it, but that doesn't explain the Why Us we feel every time the buzzing-noise shows up. I am fully aware that it's not personal (even though part of me wishes it were), that it's instead that somehow we've managed to create, just maybe, a deliciously intoxicating pollen- and nectar-rich oasis aromatic with bee-ness. Whatever the reason, every time has felt like a charm, like a privilege and delight. Keep coming over - we can't get enough!

Bee-donkulous: lessons learned from bugs this year

We've been spending a lot of time in yoga lately talking about the coming close of this year, the opportunities presented by the start of the new year. What's your vision? Who do you want to be? Where have you been this year?

This has been a crazy year for us for sure, more ups and downs than I am prepared to list here (though that list is coming, you have my word), but today's cold honey harvest is really making me think a lot about some of the big lessons I learned from bees this year:

- keeping bees entails managing conditions. The bees will do what bees do naturally - all the beekeeper is really in charge of is ensuring that the conditions are right: that the hive is dry, sizable, cozy enough. The bees do the rest. Honey just happens. This is a lesson we learned a long time ago with compost - that with the right conditions, it's something that just happens. Honey is the same deal. Actually, everything is the same deal. In yoga, when you create the conditions - set up the pose, align yourself in it, feel it -- then grace happens, illumination.

- keeping bees requires getting comfortable with death. We discovered the death of our first hive this week, but long before that we learned that beekeeping involves a little death almost every time you open the hive. Every time we approach the hive, open it up to ensure conditions are good, our intention is to do as little harm as possible, but it's virtually impossible to work the bees without crushing a few unwittingly while moving frames in and out, back and forth. Losing an entire hive (the queen died late in the season, well past when the workers could make a new one) was hard. Opening what was previously a thriving (though not our strongest) hive and hearing quiet, the place empty, was rough. Not long after the queen gave up the ghost, the entire colony died. Boy, have we lived with death this year. Three cancer diagnoses in the last twelve months -- my sister, our Jasper, our Joe. Death is always there: how much grace can we muster when we face it? That's another lesson learned from bees.

- keeping bees means letting go of what you learned from a book or a lecture and really learning through doing. No amount of classroom preparation can really teach you what you need to know - the actual Doing, the experience itself, suiting up, stoking the smoker, repeatedly opening the hive and observing -- builds the life-experience that is the real learning. As our beekeeping teacher said one day while standing in a cloud of bees, "you have to let go of knowing."

- keeping bees involves making errors (sometimes fatal) and recovering. We managed conditions to the best of our amateur ability on Hive #1 - we checked them weekly during the summer, supplemented their food in June when it was clear their stores were empty, reduced the entrance when we were concerned they were not strong enough to withstand the incursions of yellow jackets and other robbers. We watched them and did everything we could think of to keep them strong. But clearly we made errors, mis-read the signs, didn't re-queen in late summer, and now they're dead. And we recover, pouring what we learned into our attentions to the two remaining hives.

- finally, keeping bees allows deep drinking of the nectar of life. The addition of bee hives to our garden has brought us so many gifts. We are still struck dumb by how beautiful they are, how remarkable their society, how perfect their comb, and how tasty the fruit of their labor. Living with bees we sit down more often, stop and watch them as they go about their busy bee-ness, marvel at their labor of love, their ecstatic rolling in pollen. And now with a late, unexpected honey harvest, we are savoring, in the dark of winter, the bright taste of sun and flowers.

I am grateful for so many things this year, but deeply, deeply grateful to these bees, the living, the dead, and those yet to come. Without them I would have missed so much beauty this year, beauty that is literally right in front of my face. With them, I see more and more clearly, on a diet of honey and delight.

New Hive: Demo and Reconstruction

Inner cover of new hive, loaded with bees and unruly comb!

Joe realized last night that the swarm we caught and hived on Sunday was building some pretty unruly comb in their new hive box. He discovered this by peeking in the entrance with a flash light. Instead of building in the frames that we’d placed in the hive, they built comb from the inner cover and the follower board almost all the way to the bottom of the hive box.

After consulting with our teacher, Alan, Joe got to work. We couldn’t wait; this had to be done today, much to my sorrow. So I stayed at work and missed the show. Joe suited up completely: veil, gloves, long sleeves and pants. These bees have been wild for two years that we know of, so working with them is different from working with the Italians we bought in a package 5 weeks ago. And there are simply way more of them.

To get started, Joe assembled all of the tools he would need – bee brush, hive tool, frames, rubber bands, and the smoker, stuffed with burning strips of burlap. When Joe smoked the bees, the volume of the hive instantly rose, and it was clear that they were agitated by the smoke.

First Joe had to lift the cover off. The bees had built comb not only in the empty part of the hive box but also between the tops of the frames and the inner cover, making the cover hard to remove, basically waxed shut by comb. Joe tipped the cover up to a 45 degree angle, and one of the big pieces of comb fell to the bottom of the hive box. The comb wasn’t just one sheet. They didn’t build it in parallel lines. They built a few rows one way and then the next 90 degrees to the first, sort of a Tetris construct. Joe was amazed at how many bees were there, and it was just like a swarm again hanging from the inside of the cover. The bees had actually begun to build comb in just one of the frames, but only about a three inch disk. There were thousands of bees on every frame, some of them hanging in chains, so it’s possible that some were beginning to build in the frames.

Joe didn’t really know how to remove the comb from the cover, so he just grabbed the comb up toward the top (i.e., at the cover) and it pretty much broke free from the wood. Once he got all of the comb off, he just laid it on top of the hive and on the cement and set the lid aside. The lid was covered with bees by the way. Joe then proceeded to rubber band the big pieces of comb into the frames as instructed by Alan.

It was pretty much like catching the swarm all over again, lots of bees in the air, bees crawling all over him. Anything that got honey on it, the bees would stay there.

Good thing for gloves. At least 5 bees stung Joe’s gloves, then took a couple steps away from their stinger and venom sack, and started fanning. This is in contrast to other bee stings we’ve observed, where the bee just falls over and slowly dies, its insides essentially pulled out when the stinger leaves its body.

Joe left in the five frames that we originally put in the hive box – never took them out since bees appeared to be busy in them. He checkerboarded in the 4 frames with the rubber-banded comb, and added the tenth empty frame.

Joe smoked the bees twice, once at the beginning and once in the middle. And by the way, one of the burlap sacks that we picked up from the coffee roastery is actually made of hemp and definitely smelled like weed.

We had put in a quart jar of sugar-water when we hived the bees on Sunday. They had drunk ¾ of it by this afternoon, fueling their tremendous comb output.

Joe did not see the queen, but did see eggs. Not many. Most of the comb is either not fully developed, shallow, or was full of honey and pollen.

Joe brought in a plate covered with broken pieces of comb, which has made for some great observation and tasting. The variety of colors of pollen is amazing: purple, orange, gold, greenish gold, blue like eye shadow, and yellow. Very interesting taste. I can’t say that either of us has ever eaten pollen like this. The honey is very thin and fruity, probably because it is really more nectar still than it is honey.

Mother's Day Swarm

The swarm, resting in the apple tree.
That's 15,000 bees approximately!

This Mother's Day was pretty amazing. I was already happy with the day: breakfast with Laurent, then yoga, then riding the tandem with Joe to the Farmer's Market and meeting friends, then lunch on the patio. And then the best present of all appeared: a swarm of bees over the garage, which then proceeded to land in our apple tree from which we later captured them. Amazing!

Besides the super fun and excitement of hiving these wild bees and doubling our potential for pollination and honey now that we have two hives, some other great things came out of this:

- We learned more about our new bees' background from our neighbor Dave, who had observed them living on the neighbor-on-the-other-side's house for two years:

They used my pond as a water source and seemed to have a highway of sorts out over your roof... it looked like they were heading out towards the big berry patch farther out... but there were always bees in the garden.

So even though they're not exotic, in the sense of having travelled, it's still super-cool that we know exactly where they were before and that we also know that they weren't from a beekeeper's hive that split, but are truly wild bees. And actually, it's great news that they hadn't been swarming long since it means they're going to use all of those stores of honey that they gorged on before swarming to build comb inside their new home.

- We discovered that we're part of a cool community of bee-people now. I posted something to my Facebook about the swarm just after it appeared and we were getting ready to go get them, and my new beekeeping friend Rebecca and her adorable daughter Ruby responded instantly, and rushed over to help. After I posted an email message to the Marin beekeepers listserve, I got some amazing, helpful and charming responses by phone and email from fellow beekeepers, all of them strangers to us, and even found a long-lost acquaintance in the mix. One email in particular, which arrived after I shared with the list that we'd caught and hived the bees, read:

Congratulations, Ariane! What auspicious blessings for you! You must have had many lifetimes as a loving mother for this gift to appear now! Have fun giving them a new home!

I was already completely high on the experience of the swarm and its capture, and then had extended buzz from all the beekeeper love and support that poured in. Now that's sweet as honey!

So now we'll be settling in to managing two hives and are just thrilled with this gift that just fell out of the sky into our laps. It's probable that we'll see and catch another swarm. But a swarm just coming to us in this way? That's a once-in-a-lifetime blessing that we're savoring, every moment of that experience just vibrant like the bees.

Beekeeping 101

Today Joe and I had the first class in a four-class series in beginning beekeeping out at Green Gulch Zen Center. This represents the culmination of a long dream for me - I've honestly been interested in keeping bees for years, and am so glad that we're now on our way. I was surprised at how many people were in attendance, and at how most of them were from San Francisco, looking for ways to keep bees in an urban environment. Super cool!

So much of what we heard today echoed what know and think about the state of the planet: bees are dying due in large measure to the madness of commercial beekeeping, in which bees are trucked from Florida to California to pollinate the almond orchards, for example, subjected to the stresses of the transport, the chemicals used, the mono-culture diet. This is the same crap that is making us all sick and poisoning the earth in general. We're excited about doing our part to add more bees to our patch of the world.

Our teacher, Alan Hawkins, is all about natural beekeeping which suits us fine. We think we know just where in the garden we'll put our hive when we set it up in April (after getting our packet of bees with queen!), and can't wait to get some hands-on experience.