Month: July 2011

Re-queening a hive

Five hives in the same blueberrry meadow, same flowers, same sun, same loving care.  Yet, each hive has it’s own personality.  One hive is very gentle and will let us manhandle them without a peep.  Another colony is so focused on building its honey stores that they almost bump into us as they streak back to the hive.  But when one hive became particularly irritable in the last week, my beekeeping partner, Betty, and I decided to take a closer look. 

One sign of normal hive activity is lots of baby bees in the nursery.  These future workers ensure the survival of the hive.  When we opened our irritable hive, we observed that the nursery was a ghost town.  The hive seemed to have lost its queen.  Our suspicions were further confirmed when we noticed that in a pitiful attempt to raise a new queen, the worker bees had constructed special queen cells in the empty nursery.  Ideally, hives use queen cells to prepare for the birth of a new queen when their aging queen is running out of eggs.  But this hive was clearly missing its queen altogether.  No wonder they were in such a bad mood.

This late in the summer, finding a new queen is not easy.  Fortuntely, we know a bee supplier who happened to have one queen that had been ordered by another beekeeper and then forgotten.  He was glad to dontate her to the worthy cause of keeping the hive alive. 

Like most new queens, she came in a little cage, surrounded by five attendant bees, who look after her and feed her.  The tiny queen cage has a small plug made of marshmallow that the bees must chew to liberate the new queen.  By the time they have worked through the sweet, white plug, everyone has become used to each other’s smell and the hive is ready to accept their new monarch.

Queen cage with white marshmallow plug, held in place by wax and honey.

We fixed the queen’s cage in the hive by pressing it into a frame of wax and honey.  Then we closed up the hive and walked away.  When we checked three days later, the cage was empty and the nursery was showing signs of activity.  The hive was calm once again.  

Our new queen is an Italian honeybee.  Italian bees were first brought from Europe to North American in the 17th century.  No wonder the hive was calmer.  Their queen came from an old and venerable line of sweet lovers.

Little lost bee

This weekend I spent some time in the Mackinaw Valley, working with my bees.  In particular, I wanted to be sure they had enough room to store the nectar they have been bringing in.  If a hive becomes honey bound with no more room for expansion, the bees might collectively make up their mind to swarm away.

Who exactly makes the decision to swarm is a mystery.  The queen is not the decision maker.  The desire to swarm just sort of arises and the bees start packing up.  Scientists sometimes attribute this collective decision to “the hive mind”.  If the beekeeper is not on top of things, s/he might arrive one day to find half the hive has taken off.  Since the bees gorge on honey before leaving, a lot of the honey is gone, too.

So I was out in my bee suit in the 100 degree heat wave this weekend, swapping out some honey frames to make more room.  I carefully checked all the equipment for stray bees before packing up my car and heading back to Urbana.  Mission accomplished, or so I thought.

The next day I was parking my car when I heard a telltale buzz in the rear window. Sure enough, one lone honey bee was trying to find her way out.  I opened the hatch, feeling a little sad because I know she will never find her home. Honey bees can fly only about five miles, and her hive lay about 60 miles away.

However, it is possible that my little honey bee might find another hive that could use an extra pair of wings and take her in.  But if they are not feeling friendly, they might consider her a marauder and kill her.  It is entirely a matter of luck.

Good bye, little honey bee.  May luck be with you.

Independence Day Dreams

It rained all day on July 4, 2010.  I remember because I had been invited to an Independence Day barbecue on the route of the Champaign-Urbana Independence Day Parade.  As we huddled in the rain munching hot dogs, we watched sad groups of drum majors and marching bands file before us, drenched to the skin. Then I experienced a life-changing moment.

Between a fire truck and a troop of Girl Scouts, the lone figure of a local environmentalist, David Monk, came into view.  His long salt and pepper hair peeked out from his bedraggled hat as he bent against the torrent, pulling a child’s trailer with a simple sign, “Grow It, Don’t Mow It”.  The scene exemplified the dogged persistence with which Mr. Monk has pursued his life’s work, championing the revitalization of our state’s vanishing resource, the Illinois prairie.

As he wended his way along the dreary parade route, Mr. Monk waved to the crowd and smiled with his characteristic good humor.  As I watched, I was seized with a vision of accompanying him in the 2011 parade, dressed like a honeybee.

David Monk

I kept my vision to myself until mid-June 2011, when I crossed paths with Mr. Monk during the National Pollinator Week festivities.  In a lighthearted moment, I explained to him my foolish ambition.  To my delight, he immediately took my idea to heart.  To my horror, he embellished it beyond recognition.  Like a modern Cecil B. DeMille, Mr. Monk’s grand vision included a 20 foot trailer, eight foot photographs of prairie flowers, a two ton truck and a swarm of human honeybees.  Mr. Monk himself would be dressed as a beekeeper.  With only a week to go, I was doubtful that we could pull it all together, but Mr. Monk was unstoppable.

Within 24 hours of our conversation, Mr. Monk had enlisted the aid of two Japanese students, Mai and Nobu, to fabricate larger than life honeybees from recycled materials. Mr. Monk then embellished his trailer with their artwork, his own prairie photographs and painted signs saying, “Pollinators Need Flowers”.  He attached the finished trailer to his old Chevy pickup and drafted Kim Campbell of Campbell Apiaries to haul the trailer along the parade route.

When I arrived in my honeybee costume on the morning of the Fourth,  I took my place in the parade with Mai and Nobu, who were also dressed like honeybees. Kim Campbell started up the truck as Mr. Monk strode to the head of our group, and we took to the streets of Champaign-Urbana.

It took about two hours to walk the parade route, circling the slow-moving trailer.  Mai and Nobu danced comically as I teased the children in the crowd with a honeybee pinata that swung enticingly from an old fishing pole.  I expected the children to try to touch the pinata, but I was surprised at how many adults also grabbed at it, laughing.    But it was clear that David Monk was the main attraction of our group.  All the way along the route, people pressed forward to shake his hand and talk to him.  I realized that I was in the presence of an environmental superstar.

After the parade, our little group lingered in the side streets of Champaign-Urbana, tired but happy.  The weather had held, our float was a success, the truck didn’t break down and the crowds had responded enthusiastically.  And I was quite pleased to have realized my dream of accompanying David Monk in the Independence Day Parade, dressed like a honeybee.