A bit of news to start with. My new short story Rock Fever is now on my website and is available to read or download for free. It’s a little tale about a couple of eventful days on a mining asteroid. You might like it even if you’re not a fan of Sci-Fi. The asteroid is populated only by women and there’s a shower scene. I will say no more. Click here or over to the left on “Visit my website” and follow the “Words” link.
On with the blog.
Okay, okay, okay. It’s over. I did it. I succumbed to the pressure. I gave in. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.
I think it’s great that, after a mere 23 words, half of you think I’m off on another rant and the other half think I ran away and got married.
I must be doing something right.
I’d like to reassure the first half, that my rant is done until the next one comes along and for the second half, well, my response would fall somewhere between “not quite yet” and “are you out of your freaking minds”. I’m sorry to disappoint all of you but that’s what I’m here for, or something. In reality, my transgression is that I did something just for fun; something with no practical application at all.
I painted the beehives.
Well, not just painted, but actually thought about it first. The result of which turned out, as you can see from the picture, to fit right into what might be considered a color scheme, if not an actual plan. All that work, all those hours, allegedly for a creature that couldn’t give a flying-rat’s patootie about such things. Like all this stuff, I did it for me; so that the micro-farm could be pretty. It wasn’t for the bees. It wasn’t to protect the wood. There was no practical purpose at all. I just wanted it to look nice.
I mean, really, if I wanted the bees to be completely happy, I would just buy them and set them free next to a hollow log in the woods. If I did all that work merely to make the hives more weather resistant, I should have run down to the Goodwill and bought a gallon of old paint for a buck – no matter what the color, splashed it on, and called it a day. But no, not for me, I wanted it to match the house. It does, and I’m sure the neighbors and visitors will be oh-so impressed.
It probably doesn’t seem like such a big deal to you, but my abandoning a life-long, form-follows-function philosophy is a bit of a concern to me. I’m absolutely positive it will come back to bite me in the ass at some point. But I didn’t stress about it too long because there were other fish to fry.
The paint part of the bee scheme complete, I had to move onto Phase II (or Two, if you prefer). Spring is nigh and it was time to order the bees that are going to move into the beautiful boxes they will call home. Around here these packages of bees, which go by the technical name of “packages”, all arrive sometime in early April. Because the Pacific Northwest is not a big bee breeding area, these packages come up from California, dude. I called my local bee store and talked to the helpful employee.
“I need some bees.”
“Okay, how many?”
“Two packages.”
“What kind?”
“Huh?”
As I mentioned in an earlier post, a package of bees weighs in at about three pounds and contains about nine-thousand angry bees plus their not-yet-adopted queen. But this “what kind of bee” thing was news to me so I quickly hung up and started doing some research.
It turns out that the honeybee is not from around here. Prior to the Great European Incursion beginning in 1492, there were no honeybees at all in North, South, or Central America. The first documented honeybee was imported somewhere around 1622 by early English settlers. At the time, honey was basically the only affordable sweetener because you could grow your own and when you moved, you just packed up the bees and dragged them along. Many hives swarmed and escaped, becoming established in the wild alongside other dangerous invasive species like giant pythons, poisonous lionfish, and the dreaded nutria.
Because there are so many of them per hive and because they are so mobile, they rapidly adapted, as they did in their home ranges in Europe, to the wide variety of climatic conditions that the New World offered. In addition, over the centuries, more were imported from Europe which then interbred – in both planned and unplanned reproductive events (got to keep the PG-13 rating) which all led to my current dilemma.
I called the bee store again.
“What kind are you getting in?”
“Italians and Carniolans.”
Click.
Back to my studies. I learned that Italian honeybees are the most popular because they are widely reputed to be the gentlest. However, they suffer from the drawbacks of being less able to deal with adverse conditions and are famous for chewing through any honey and pollen they manage to save for the winter in a trice. After which they all starve. They are also more prone to drift to another hive and take up residence or just rob the place. Hmmm. . .
The Carniolans, originally from the Balkans, are also known to be gentle. A side note here: “gentle” is a relative term. In beekeeping it means you’re gonna get stung poking around in the hive, only not as much as if it were a hornet nest.The Carniolans are more conservative of their winter stores than the Italians and less likely to invade neighboring hives. The downside is they are more likely to swarm when crowded and require a protein (i.e. pollen) rich diet.
There are also German Black Bees – known for being territorial and aggressive, no surprise there. There is a Russian strain and the infamous African strain. There are Greek bees and bees native to Gibraltar and Malta. Then there are the American versions, the New World Carniolans (which I gather is just a marketing term for “we don’t really know what they are”) and the Minnesota Hygenics, which sounds like the name of a dentists’ hockey team.
It was too much. Basically they’re all the same species and you just have to find a sub-sub-sub-variety that will like it where you live. I had read somewhere that Italians are good for beginners so I called back and got my name on the list. Italians it is. We’ll find out later if that was the right decision.
Then, last week, came dire reports of exceedingly foul weather heading this way. It was being billed as a combination of The Perfect Storm and Avalanche! Snow was heading for Seattle and the prediction suggested the worst snowstorm in fifty years. We could see as much as ten inches of snow.
Oooohhhh!!!!
My thoughts exactly.
Well, it turned out to be not so bad, but the four to six inches that coated Seattle last week was enough to bring the city to a dead stop for two days and most of a third. It was grand fun going out and watching drivers come to the conclusion that the extra money they spent on their four-wheel-drive vehicle would have been better used for a stout pair of boots and a scarf. Vehicles were sliding around like ice cubes on a linoleum floor. Incompetent drivers, combining a complete misunderstanding of the laws of physics with the innate courtesy of Seattle-Nice, made for hours of entertainment as I watched the foolish motorists come to the realization that a vehicle will not steer if the wheels are not turning; usually just before they parked it in a snow bank. But then I got cold so I returned to my bee research.
Ouch! I felt a sharp pain, like hundreds of tiny fangs, in my gluteus maximii. Oh no, not so soon!
Yup.
One of the things about bees is that they, like us, are visual creatures. In possession of five total eyes and the ability to see well into the ultraviolet they use their keen eyesight to identify flowers, to locate a bounty of nectar and determine its spatial relationship to their hive, and for general navigation to and from their hive. However, they’re not too smart, so when returning home to the apiary they need some major clues to help them determine which hive is theirs. Visual clues. One website told me: “it is particularly helpful if the hives are painted different colors or with a markedly different pattern.”
Damn.
The micro-farm is in possession of two hives painted in an absolutely identicallivery – same colors, same pattern. Big mistake. It seems that, given my poor choice of exterior decor, I may have already consigned the bees to the trash heap alongside the other failed projects that litter my past.
With identical hives the bees have to guess which one is theirs. If they guess right all is well. If they guess incorrectly it’s not a big deal for the individual bee because bees are a gregarious lot and will happily take the nectar, pollen, and information from a foraging bee and then welcome that bee into the new hive. But, if this drift goes on for a while one hive becomes seriously weakened and the rest figure they might as well all go and join the other hive because that’s where the party is. They are Italians after all.
Double-damn.
In a desperate attempt to correct my error without repainting one of the hives, I buried myself in more research to determine the specific colors that bees can see well. I then bought two sets of reflective dots, one blue and one yellow, which I’m planning to stick on the front of each hive. This, I hope, will make each beehive look sufficiently different from the bees’ point of view so that they can tell which is which. But I’m not sure and may be completely, as they say, screwed. I’ll let you know what happens.
So now it’s: Hives – Check; Funny Looking Bee Suit – Check; Bees Ordered – Check; Knowledge in Hand – Mostly Not. But I start class next month so, if nothing else, I’ll soon learn how big a mistake I made.