From Tao, Brattleboro, VT

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my co-housing neighbors are tending the bee hives. It seems like such a small world, yet it is an exact science as well as a social order that rules our ecosystem’s food supply. I think we could learn alot from “the secret [but effective and efficient] life of bees”. Here’s the latest interesting update from one of our head bee-keepers.

June 30, 2009  Bee Update in Arcadia, by Elisabeth Curtis:
1. June 13 – We had an Orange County Beekeepers Association field day at Busy Bee Apiary’s queen yard, and learned all about rearing queens. In short, it requires painstaking record keeping, very good eyesight, and good luck in the weather conditions. During the course of the demonstration, our queen was selected, marked with green Testor’s paint (each year has a different color), and put into a queen cage with 7 escort worker bees. Susan and I brought her home and installed her in our south hive. Her little cage has a candy plug at one end, and over the course of a few days, her workers will nibble at it from their side and the workers from the hive will nibble at it from their side, and by the time they have eaten through it, everyone will be familiar with each other’s pheromones and the hive will accept their new queen. If you just dumped the queen in there without this initial “getting to know you” period, the hive workers would quickly kill the new queen.

2. June 17 – We look at the cage. It is empty, so the new queen is out and about, we hope doing her queenly duty. If she is, within a week or so we should see new brood.

3. June 26 – We check the south hive.  There is brood in all stages – eggs, larvae, and capped.  So the queen is active and all’s right with the hive. I learned at the field day that when a hive has an active queen doing all the things a good queen does, the hive is called “queen right.”

Here’s another thing I learned recently (thankfully not from personal experience): Sometimes when the hive decides that it’s time for the queen to go – either she is old, or not laying well, or something else about her has made them think she should be replaced, several thousand of them will surround her and press closer and closer and closer until she is asphyxiated. It’s called “balling the queen.” Yikes. But it’s the perfect method of assassination for a system that thinks always on the level of the hive. It’s a group decision, made at some deep level of group understanding that is way beyond mere human powers of comprehension.

So now once again we have two “queen right” hives. We were able to harvest some honey from the extra hive bodies, which are now back at the hives, being cleaned out by the bees, getting ready to be stored until they are needed again. And the north hive has started to cap the honey in its super, but most of the hives’ energies and resources will now go into building up their numbers again.

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