The Sting

    Day two of our queen search-and-destroy mission begins ominously with looming dark clouds. David reasons, “The weather channel says it will rain every day this week. But they are usually wrong, and we have to go out sometime, so let’s go out today anyway.” Among the first days of bee lessons from David I learned that bees will find a lot of reasons to be disagreeable, highest among them weather and season. Working with bees during rain in late summer, for example, is sure to be awfully uncomfortable.

smoker- calms bees

    We set out in just these conditions nonetheless, generally assuming the rain will pass quickly even if it comes. Confident in yesterday’s successes, I enthusiastically pry open the first hive. Two exhaustive sweeps later, I declare the queen in hiding. It begins to rain in bigger drops. David, embroiled in his own hive, waves me down the line to the next hive with an upturned brick. Remembering he had deemed this colony aggressive, I gingerly remove the lid, feeder, and seal. I snub the smoker, trusting more in my bee suit to prevent attacks than my skill finding a queen hiding from the smoke.

    As I peel back the plastic sheet directly over the frames, I immediately rethink that decision- 6 bees zoom toward my hands, aiming at the seam between glove and suit, seeking any breaks in continuity. Rattled, I walk away a little, trying to compromise something like a gentle swat to remove them. I can smell that they mean to attack (bees give off a scent when angry), and warily watch the hive from a ways off. When I go back with the frame-grabber in hand, it’s with the reassurance that I still haven’t been stung, and I can trust my suit. On one hand, I had been joking for days that I can never be a real beekeeper until I’m stung, on the other hand, it’s obviously quite painful and I didn’t mind continuing to put it off.

line of hives

    I unstick the first frame, trying to reimagine the buzzing as friendlier. Suddenly, the buzzing is a lot closer. I look up, feel the bee buzz against my ear inside my hood, and begin to panic. I grab my hood and make motions toward isolating the bee away from my head, I suppose, while shouting something surely incomprehensible to David. He comes right over, but I’m already stung on the head, just back from my left temple. Still panicking (I can hear the bee continue to buzz around in my hair and above my head), I retreat further into the suit and make wilder thrashing motions.  “What do I do! What do I do!” Reassuringly he grabs me and directs me down the road away from the hives (I can’t see- my head is in the body part of my suit). We need to get away from the bees so that I can take my hood off and get the bee out. My thrashing subsides as the buzz of the dying bee lessens (bees die without their stinger). David chortles a bit at what must feel like my drunken stumbling, and I embarrassedly calm down, wincing at the sting and noticing how disheveled my tshirt has become in my bee suit. David stops me, brushes off the last few stragglers, and opens my hood. When I emerge, bleary, he has the culprit between his thumb and finger, thoroughly squished (I’m sure he takes boyish pleasure in bug guts, still). I find the site of the sting with my fingers and clear the hair away so he can check for the stinger. Finding none, David congenially suggests we take a break now, and we head back to the car for sandwiches and coffee. Out from under the trees he must have steered us toward, I notice how heavily it has started raining. In the truck I recover and David laughs that I have at last received my wish! I laugh too and we turn back to plans for the bees. The rain is clearing up, but David declares the situation probably hopeless, so we close up the hives and then head back to the shop to resume more mundane activities for the afternoon.

Finding the Queen- Beekeeping in Sweden

    Ok, to the present: For the past week or so I have lived in southern Sweden with a beekeeper and his family. I’m here through an organization called WWOOF, which places interested volunteers with organic farms around the world. In exchange for a place to live and meals, the wwoofer works and learns about farming on the job. A little bit atypically for wwoofing, I am learning and doing beekeeping.

     

     At this time of year, the honey harvesting is finishing, bees are winding down for the season, and the beekeeper turns to a list of other tasks. This week we have been doing a lot of queen exchanges- in hives that have been marked with undesirable traits (primarily aggressiveness, or the tendency to swarm), we find and kill the queen, and replace her with a queen bred from known pedigree to lack those traits.

     Basic bee biology: in a hive there is one queen, many tens of thousands of female worker bees, and a variable but lesser amount of male drones. The queen is in charge. She lays all the eggs, fertilized or not to become a worker or drone. The hive centers on this basic function- other things such as pollination and honey collection are for the ancillary purpose of eating.  Basically (as I can tell to be the case) the beekeeper tends the bees to take their honey, and may feed them with sugar water so they survive the winter.

can you spot the queen? she's marked

We set out both yesterday and today to far-flung locations of groups of hives (David has maybe a dozen hives in about a dozen places? It adds up to a lot of driving because optimally productive bees are picky about location). After my two or three days of exposure to bees in frames (wooden frames of wax cells filled with honey, pollen, brood, or larva) David saw fit to equip me with a bee suit, grabber (sort of forceps for grabbing frames from the hive), and knife (more of a little pry-bar/chisel, for prying apart things stuck together with wax or honey), and set me on a hive to find the queen.

     I warned him from the first one, “David, I am not very optimistic.” He replied, “Well, optimism is the first thing.” Ok, great. When I ask for more identifying traits of the queen, besides the fact that she is bigger, he says unhelpfully- “Well, maybe her abdomen looks different. Also, the bees around her will act differently.” Ugh. The strategy is to start with the frames (ten in a hive, housing about 30,000 bees altogether this time of year) that have the most brood- or unhatched bees, because the queen will have been there recently. Additionally, when the beekeeper reaches to grab the frame where the queen is located, the bees may start to make a different noise, agitated at her disturbance. A bee colony is freakily connected, in a way reminiscent of the Borg from Star Trek (I’m sure, an intentional reference).

David and I, suited up

     But when it comes down to it, you are looking for one bee, almost identical to the others, in tens of thousands. I clung to the method and dove in, enjoying the cloud of bees that curiously (but not aggressively) rose around my whole body. Four frames in, I spot her. !!! Lucky chance, I reason. David congratulates me, hands over the clip to catch her, and takes her back to kill her himself (tacitly but considerately not forcing that task on me). We take one of the good queens and release her into a little box tacked to a frame filled with older brood about to be born. Those bees are most likely to accept and take care of the queen, instead of attacking her. In a few days, after her pheromones have spread, she will chew her way out of the little plastic box and reign at large.

     Tentatively energized, I move onto the next marked hive. Sure enough, I find this queen as well. A bit cheaply- she was marked with a blue dot from a previous experiment. David is struggling with his the second hive, having given up on the first. He sends me to the first hive to give it a try. Sure enough, a few minutes later I spot her, strutting around on the third frame.

     And I begin to get it- really, the queen’s main point of distinction is that she is unpinpointably different. When scanning frames with thousands of bees one can’t be assessing minor differences in abdomen length or color. It’s easier, and more practical, just to look and feel, because ultimately she will make herself known. No single difference will jump out, but everything about her together will shout different. How she walks, her general demeanor, the way she interacts with the cells and those around her. She is also bigger, and often colored differently (but not consistently differently), but these factors stick out less.

     Pleased with my realization, I move to help David with the fourth hive, nearing a stage of impossibility. At a certain point, the strategy will no longer work if the bees have become agitated enough to hide the queen in some corner where we will never find her. Instead, we toss all the bees out (maybe you can imagine the ensuing cloud), and set the hive back up. The worker bees will all find their way back the hive, but the queen won’t fit in the entrance. The worker bees will instead find the new queen, protected in her box until they accept her as theirs.

     Unfazed by this last submission, I go home pleased with my modest victories of the day. David sensibly withholds too much admiration, because the next afternoon I prove my skills to be significantly subject to chance. Nonetheless, I am pleased with the strides I have made in this miniscule field of queen-location, with hopes of continuing improvement.

Paris

 

Ok- time now for catching up. I think I last wrote in Turkey, from where I traveled haphazardly through Europe for a couple weeks before landing in Sweden, my location from now until when I go home. I probably won’t write in order, but there is a handy map I updated with the order of my journey if you’re interested. Cheers!

     Did you know that wine can stain lips? I feel as though Horace probably mentioned this somewhere (‘her wine-stained lips’ ?), but that I discounted it as poetic license meant to be interpreted that Horace loves women. Because in general, that seems to be the accepted interpretation of Horace.

Pistache, whom I lovingly address as 'fat cat'

     But it can! Maybe only if consumed slowly enough, or over enough time, or in Paris. All of which were the case for my second night in Paris. I was traveling with Kami, a long-lost sort of friend from middle school, and Matthew, a friend of hers from college. We decided that afternoon that the optimal, and optimally French?, evening would comprise French wine, cheese, baguettes, candles, and Cat Stevens (that last decision came later as the result of options on hand).

     The idea occurred when we encountered a line of shops, cheese and wine next to each other. We began in the cheese shop, where we were directed to select wine first (I think- Kami and Matthew speak French, so I, the deaf-mute, tagged along only intermittently engaged). We browsed the wine shop a bit by ourselves first, generally impressed by the low prices, but otherwise lost. Eventually we got the attention of the young man at the counter, who explained that he is just an economics student intern, but that he can more or less mimic what his boss tells people. A leisurely conversation later, we took two bottles of similar types (heavy, fruity?), but different years- a more interesting point of comparison. I stood by idly and admired the way French men dress (official theory: they are not necessarily more attractive than American men, they are just many many times more attentive to their appearance. With very positive results).

     We pull up our hoods to the rain and go just next door, where we wait our turn for the attention of one of three cheesemen. It only took a moment for him to ascertain that we were both going to speak French and were genuinely interested in learning about cheese, and he warmed up to us. I enjoyed watching him because although I understood very little of what he said, it was nonetheless very apparent to me how passionate he was about cheese. He spoke with his whole body, punctuating certain words with scarily widened eyes. He said for the wine we had chosen, we want a soft cheese with a less strong flavor, so as not to overpower the strong wine. We then asked for a recommendation for an inappropriately strong cheese, just to try. Somehow we were directed to munster, which now I suspect must have been a joke (maybe I should have known when he turned to me to provide a one-word translated summary: stinky). Unable to distinguish the munster from all the other cheeses in the shop, we happily took a quarter and left with both in hand.

     A few errands later (and increasing suspicions about the munster emitting strong aromas from Kami’s backpack) we were on the last train back to Le Val D’Or, the little town on the edge of Paris where we were staying in a vacationing friend of Kami’s.

     As planned, the evening was quite perfect. We uncorked the wine, roughly chopped the baguette, cleaned up the living room, located a cd player, cds, candles, rearranged lamps and chairs. Finally we sat down, overcame the moment of self-consciousness at our efforts, and commenced our evening.