Avert Thy Gaze

After my rather disastrous attempt last year to take up beekeeping again, I decided I'd had enough and gave up on it.  Keeping bees in this climate is expensive and heartbreaking.  However, the empty hives have remained sitting out in the field for two reasons:

1. Every time I looked at them and thought about doing something with them, I was filled with a sense of exhaustion and paralyzing indecision.  So, I opted for a time honored therapeutic solution I call "Avert Thy Gaze".  Sometimes, procrastination really is a good thing.
2. I had the vague idea that the hives, still full of honey, might attract a wild swarm.  I've had beehives on and off for 15(+/-) years and it has never happened, but hey, it does happen sometimes.

Every now and then I'd wander past the hive looking for a bit of activity.  Every time I failed to find any, I'd quickly turn away and revert back my procrastination therapy.  It is now very late in the year for swarms and I had quit bothering to even peak occasionally at the hives.  I was even starting to form some semi-coherent thoughts about getting rid of them.  Then, early this week, I drove past them on the ATV and thought I saw some activity around one of the hives.

I stopped to check it out and, lo and behold, there be bees!

I haven't done anything more than pull some of the weeds from in front of the hive, but it seems to be a very large swarm that has taken up residence.  They are bringing in goldenrod pollen and rather frantically gathering food.

The hive appears to be robust and very active, but a late summer swarm like this faces a truly daunting challenge to gather enough food for the winter and raise enough young bees to survive till spring.  August swarms seldom survive and most beekeepers would combine this swarm with another hive to improve the chances of survival.

I have no other hives to combine them with so they are on their own.  This hive had large stores of honey left over from the hive that died last winter, which is no doubt what attracted this swarm in the first place.  I hope that this leftover honey will give them a much needed boost and a chance to make it.

These bees had to come from local stock who have survived well enough to reproduce, so I am hoping they will be tough enough to make it here on Hellwind Hill.  I've decided to maintain my hands-off approach and just leave them to it.  I will erect a new wind break for them since they don't stand a chance without it, but otherwise, they are on their own.  They are either survivor stock or they aren't.

This may sound harsh, but I've found that trees and plants that need coddling and care from me never survive the winters here.  The plants that are tough enough to live through drought, flood and freezing are the only ones that make it.  There is no amount of help that I can provide to make them grow if they aren't strong enough to do it on their own and I am not strong enough to keep throwing my energy at lost causes.

The bees are going to have to do the same as the trees because I know that if they can't survive without help, then they never will.  I'm sticking with my original plan to avert my gaze and hope for the best because only the strong survive.

Half Full or Half Empty?

For those following the honey bee saga, there is good news and bad news.  The good news is that one of the hives is so full of bees it is bursting at the seems (especially when it is 90 degrees and 1000% humidity)...

The bees have been making honey recently, which I know because the air smells wonderfully of honey all around the hive.

If you look closely at the bees on the bottom board, they are lined up facing the entrance, butts in the air and beating their wings furiously. They do this to create a breeze inside the hive to cool it and to move air over the nectar they have gathered so that it will ripen into honey.

It wouldn't seem like a few bees fanning their wings could do much, but if you were to put your hand in front of the hive entrance, you would be able to feel the breeze they create.

 A very busy, very full, very beautiful hive.

I opened the hive very briefly, just to give them some more hive boxes so they will have more room to hang out and to (hopefully) make more honey in the fall Golden Rod bloom.

These bees are quiet, productive and easy to work with.

We've had a terribly hot summer and last weekend was just brutal, which is why everyone was hanging out on the porch all afternoon.

As for the other hive....it is dead.

I don't know what happened to it, the bees are simply gone.  They left behind two frames filled with fresh eggs and larva as well as the beginnings of their honey stores.  There is no sign of disease, they had fresh eggs so they could have tried to raise a new queen if the needed to and they had food.  But, there is not a single bee left in the hive, alive or dead.

And that is the way of beekeeping - joyous, vibrant, frenetically, beautifully alive.  Or not.  

To Bee or Not To Bee

I used to be a beekeeper.  I never managed to get much past the amateur-owner stage, but I had hoped to.  At one point, I made it up to 15 hives that I thought were all strong.  I figured at least 2/3 would make it through the winter and I would be able to expand further the following Spring.  This was several years ago, just when Colony Collapse Disorder was first starting to gain a bit of press.

When Spring came, all 15 hives were dead.  A couple died from normal winter problems.  One got wiped out by skunks.  The rest were just gone.  There were baby bees in the combs, lots of honey in the larder and NO bees, which is what happens with CCD.

Keeping bees is a tough business.  The bees are plagued with mites and disease.  The honey they produce sells for pennies a pound because of stiff competition from cheap, poison tainted honey flooding in from China.  Equipment is expensive and so are the bees.

Keeping bees can be brutally heartbreaking.

And yet, there is something very satisfying in tending a hive, in watching the flight of busy bees, in sitting next to them on a sunny day and listening to the quiet, vibrant hum of life.  There is satisfaction in pressing your ear up against the cold side of a hive in deep winter and hearing the quiet thrum of survival.  Honeybees are fascinating creatures, so profoundly alien in their endeavors and yet, so similar in their goals.  We all just want to survive and thrive.

I came to think of individual bees as cells, much like a red blood cell. A single honeybee cannot survive on her own.  The hive can lose a few cells, but cannot survive if it loses too many.  Every bee is a cell, with a job to do and a path to follow.  The hive, as a whole, is a distinct organism whose blood flows throughout the world.  They are the living proof that we all share the same circulatory system.

I've gathered up some of my old, abandoned hives and I am trying to decide what to do with them.  It looks like a pile of junk, but there is real potential there.  Most of these could be full of bees in a couple of months if I want to invest in them again.  The price of buying new bees has more than tripled in the past five years though and they can be hard to find.  At $150 each to reestablish a hive, this could be a large investment.  Aside from the money, I am not so sure my heart can afford it either.

A lot of this can be salvaged and I have more hives stacked in FB's Quonset hut that are in excellent condition.  Some of them are still brand new, not even painted yet.

Some of it is beyond repair and not worth bothering with.

And some of it is just down-right sad.  I found several frames of comb that had been full of capped larva.  Each one of these cells holds the remains of a dead baby bee.  This hive died just days, even hours, before all these babies would have hatched out.  They probably froze because there were not enough adult bees left to keep them warm.

There should have been.  This came out of a hive that was chock full of bees and honey going into the Fall.  There was still at least 50 pounds of honey in this hive when it died in late winter, more than enough to feed them through the rest of the cold.  But, there were no bees.  None.

The hives were all over at FB's place and I have not been able to keep a hive alive since the farm down the road from her started growing corn.  I do not think that is a coincidence.  A toxin introduced into the bloodstream cannot be removed.

We plant seeds that have been coated with poison and that poison travels into every cell of the plant.  From there, it travels into every cell of every creature who consumes that plant.  From one bloodstream to the next, from the pink coated seed in the ground to the larva in the hive, the poison is in the blood.

And so I come to that age old question, to bee or not to bee?  Do I scrounge up the money and the fortitude to buy enough bees for just one or two hives and try again here on Hellwind Hill or do I list it all on craigslist and let someone whose heart is more whole try where I failed?