When we added two rooms to the house, close to 20 years ago, we had our incoming electric line moved from the south side to the new north-side mud-room, but I never thought to block up the two-inch hole leading to the original breaker panel (which I had removed and wall-boarded over).
Several years later, we noticed bees flitting in an out of the outside hole. They’d set up a hive inside the partition between the bedroom and the old bathroom. Lying in bed, it sounded like a motor running in the wall. By this time, we were ready to tear out the partition so we could expand the bedroom and move the bathroom from its tiny, skinky, pink-plastic-tiled alcove to a Real Bathroom with the a clawfoot tub.
Anyway, we called a local beekeeper, I think his name was Kaufmann, to come by to see about removing the bees safely and taking them with him. Thing was, if he broke down the interior partition, we’d have the entire unhappy swarm throughout the house, and the exterior cinderblock wall was resistant to simple tinkering.
So Mr. Kaufmann decided he would attach one of his small hives, housing young bees (he called them “babies”), to the exterior siding and fit a narrowing cone over the existing hole that would let “our” bees out but prevent them from returning. They should then colonize the new hive, and gradually the whole troop should transfer; the old queen would either tell the remaining bees to swarm and scram – or die of neglect, which wouldn’t hurt the rest of the new hive.
He saw that the bees had also found their way behind the aluminum siding by pulling out the caulk around the bathroom window. He put duct tape over it. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll come rip off some of the siding” – we’d told him we intended to remove it anyway – “and attach the cone right to the cinderblock.”
It could take 3-4 months to complete the transfer before we knocked out the partition. Ideally, we could video the stages of the attachment and transfer, but somehow we didn’t. Too bad. I did keep running notes, because I found the whole process fascinating, and Kaufmann said he’d never encountered a situation quite like ours – and had never personally attempted this kind of hive transfer, only heard about it.
As he set up, he shared some interesting facts and ideas about the continuing die-off of bee colonies. For himself, he now only raised “wild” bees: He had bought some commercial swarms from Georgia and “they were the laziest bees I ever saw.” He seemed quite disgusted with these slacker insects. He theorized –“ but what do I know, I’m only a milkman,” his day job – that most commercial bees have been so coddled by humans that they can’t look after themselves.
As a f’rinstance, they get mites on their backs, as do the wild bees, but the commercial bees can’t remove them. The wild bees have longer legs and can reach back and kick the little bastards off.
Since the mites otherwise slip off fairly easily, the commercial growers dust the bees with powdered sugar or the like that causes the mites to fall on their butts. It’s said, in studies of evolution, that any trait that requires extra energy or resources – but that with time or circumstance becomes no longer useful – tends to die out. So maybe long legs have become a useless trait in commercial bees? One theory for why humans don’t produce our own vitamin C is that we developed in a part of Africa where it was plentiful, so we lost the “unnecessary” mechanism for its production.
Kaufmann also noted that the almond growers in California, who produce something like 70% of the world’s almond crop, set up thousands of hives – I read, somewhere, about 800,000. “You get one infected hive, and they’ll spread it around to all the others. You just need one bee from each of the other hives to pick up the infection and bring it back and poof those hives are gone.
“I never put any medicine in my hives. Nothing. If the state bee inspector comes by and says I have to put medicine in my hives, I’ll just burn the hives.” He paid $10 to register his hives. “No matter how many you have – you have 10,000 hives – it’s $10 to the state.” The state requires access to the hives to deal with mites, etc. “I don’t mind, if it will keep the bees healthy. But I paid my $10 and in two years I’ve never seen an inspector.”
What else did I learn? Bears, he said, aren’t looking for honey as such. They hear the buzzing as they amble along, find the hive, and go after the bees. ”100% protein. Sure, they’ll eat the honey, but that’s not what they’re after.”
A few days later he brought the new brood in a cooler, but the cooler got too hot, so some of the workers died in the honey at the bottom. He talked to the bees and seemed genuinely upset when he accidentally killed a couple while attaching the new frame.
He was very reticent and concerned we would be upset if his experiment didn’t work, but he was doing a great job. “Seems to be working, seems to be working.”
His daughter, Brittany, helped him out. He calls her Bert, so the conversations sounded something like an old Piels Beer commercial, with Bob and Ray as brothers Bert and Harry Piel.. She’d been working with him for years and only been stung once. She helped me put on bee gear, and he showed me a drone, pointing out that it has no stinger. A queen mates only once, he explained. “She can lay 3,000 eggs a day for four years.” (My grandmother was one of 13, and I thought that was mind-blowing.)
“I gotta warn you. If a bear goes after the hive, don’t go out there. Those bees will be really mad and that can go on for days or weeks. Don’t go out there. I had a bear got seven hives, put them all in a pile.” That cost him around $6,000. “You never make any money from this, I lose a bundle.”
He loves to talk about bees – endlessly. (He’s another of the typical non-laconic Sullivan Countians, always leaning in a little, even when they aren’t leaning against something… just an incipient lean.) I think he takes his bees more seriously than he takes himself. He’s the keeper/observer of his “people” who do the actual work and he admires them immensely.
He became apologetic for not having foreknowledge of everything that might go wrong with this unusual set-up. Here is a man, honest to the core, humble without broadcasting humility, speaking the truth as he knows it while imparting his enthusiasm: libertarian and environmentalist in the best sense.
* * *
Headline of the week: “Woman rescued from Welsh mountain after fall while scattering father’s ashes”
She was found on a narrow ledge above a 300-foot drop. Rescuer’s quote in article: “This was someone properly worrying for their own life. It wouldn’t have turned out well for her if she’d slipped further down.”
Ya think so?
* * *
My choice for the next Belgian superhero: AntTwerp
lickhaven 