For over a year, my good buddy CJ had been telling me about his bee hives and how much fun they were. He had so many cool stories about being stung, and relating bee culture to The Borg and communism... how could I resist? Any time we can bring Star Trek, Carl Marx and venomous creatures into the same conversation, I'm going to be intrigued.
So I got approval from Teresa Turbo to set up a hive - as long as it was away from the house and away from neighbors, as everyone assumes that my "killer bees" will eat their children and carry away their pets. I ended up picking a spot that was next-door to the middle of nowhere. Obviously chosen for its easy access and convenient proximity to places I don't go.
CJ set me up with a hive from a friend of his, I bought a bee suit and a copy of Bee Keeping for Idiots... and next thing I knew I was a bee keeper. I set up the hive, opened the lid and though "Dear God, this looks nothing like the book". It was going to be a crash course, for sure.
Fast forward one month since the hive touched down:
The bees and I have been getting along fine. I leave them alone and they don't sting me. It was a perfect relationship. Until today.
This afternoon I went out to the bee yard to see what was going on, and things seemed quiet. A little too quiet. Nobody was flying around the hive, rather, there were a few just hanging out in the entrance taking a siesta. That's when I saw it - about 10 feet away, across the barbed wire fence on the neighbors property there's a big post that's covered in woody vines - and on it my bee colony had swarmed. The mass of bees was a little larger than a football. Nice.Some quick advice from CJ was to "get a box and knock them into it." He also stressed that it was important to get the queen. That's pretty easy, since she looks almost exactly like the other 20,000 bees that are hanging on the shrubbery, right?
So I donned the bee suit, opened a big storage tub, and hoped for the best. The good news is that the post was at eye level, and the bees were pretty calm. If they had been 30 feet up in a tree, I would have just ordered more bees. The bad news was that the bees were all around the intertwined shrubbery, and the post was wrapped with barbed wire. This was not going to be easy for the new guy.
The easiest thing to do was to rip out sections of the shrub so I could zero in on the center of the swarm. But even with that, it was still not possible to knock them all in at once.
I was able to scoop the majority of them into the box in one move. I had no idea if the queen was in that group, so I just kept at it. CJ said that they would follow the queen, so if I got her, the rest would just tag along eventually. No such luck. After a few minutes of this there were bees in the box, bees outside the box, bees on the post and bees in the air. They seemed pretty confused, so I decided to take a break.
You know, the sound of a swarm is unique, and surprisingly loud - think of it as 20,000 little fluorescent lamps with bad ballasts. But as I walked away from the swarm, the sound didn't get any softer. I looked in at my reflection in the truck window and was startled to see that about 1/3 of the swarm was now calling the back of my bee suit home.
Is this really how it's supposed to go for a new bee keeper?
Another call to CJ (hey man, what's that sound - it sounds like you are inside an electric motor!), and he suggested that I simply open up the box and jump up and down next to it to knock the bees in. A combination of jumping jacks and a long handled bee brush got most of them into the box. You know, the neighbors thought I was eccentric before I was doing calisthenics in a Hazmat suit. I wonder what they think now?
I went back to check on them and do a final collection just after sundown. I was able to scoop up a few more straglers, but it appears that I got the majority of them in the box. At that point I realized that the only way I could get them home, and into a new hive, was to put them in the back seat of my SUV. How would you feel about sharing a ride with 20,000 new friends? Ok, what if they all had stingers?
I feel very fortunate that I wasn't pulled over on the way home. Living in a small town, unusual things often make the local paper. And I was driving home with a truck full of bees wearing a full bee suit. My guess is that qualifies as unusual around here. On the plus side, I now have a 2nd hive, and zero stings from the swarm collection!
Posts
