
Today was an epic day at the hive. The ladies are finally starting to really draw out comb on the plastic foundation, though strangely they seem uninterested in the one foundationless frame I slipped between two drawn out frames full of nectar. I suspect the progress is largely due to Jim telling me I was mistaken in leaving the mite board in all summer, and my finally taking it out – I thought I was being a conscientious beekeeper by constantly keeping an eye on it, but in fact I was just making it harder for the ladies to cool off the hive in the endless heat wave we’ve had here this summer. Oops!
Jim also told me a fascinating fact about beehive ventilation: when it’s hot, apparently the ladies line up on the floor of the hive in rows. If you pull the entire hive up from the base, all supers at once, you can catch them at it and see that some rows fan to the front, some fan to the back. And some hives are right-handed in how they direct the air flow, and some are left-handed. The best part is that hives are consistently right-handed or left-handed from season to season. I hypothesize that this is somehow genetic and determined by the queen, and would be fascinated to test to see if it changes when hives are re-queened.
We have a growing population of beekeepers in NYC. What do you say, folks? Can I grab a few tall, strong friends and do an annual or biannual survey of your hives to see which way they fan, and if it changes when you requeen? It’s for science!
Back to my hive:
Brilliant day for the bees. As you can see above, over the past week they must’ve found a source of some intensely orange, neon-bright pollen that they’re storing in frames near the edge of the second super that they never really bothered to fully draw out before. I have to wonder what kind of plant this stuff is coming from, since it looks totally alien. One lady landed on my watch and shook some yellower pollen onto it while trying to check the time, so I surmise that they have multiple sources.
We’ve become so calm with them, calm as they are with us – forget jackets and closed toe shoes, pants tucked careful into socks. Selena and I do hive inspections in shorts or skirts, sandals, tank tops. We unzipped our veils from the jackets and wear them loosely over our heads. I still haven’t been stung by my hive. They land on my arms and legs, crawl mischievously along the sole of my foot when I slowly take a step, but they don’t attack. Selena lifts her skirts to brush bees off her legs before we go inside, but no one seems to mind. We have a relaxed understanding, and a comfort level I’d never expected to achieve.
The bad news is that I found a single bee wandering on the ground with one wing bent in what might’ve been K wing, or might’ve just been the raggedness that comes with age. Since I found a single bee that looked similar earlier in the summer (and none since), I gathered this one into a tupper to be on the safe side. She’s interred in my freezer at the moment, and at some point this week I’m going to dissect her and examine her trachea for mites with my goddaughter’s microscope. Worst comes to worst, we’ll treat for mites. Even if there are some, it doesn’t seem to be a huge systemic problem, given the tons of healthy bees I see in the hive nowadays, and only two iffy ones all summer.
And back to the good news – the queen lives! We saw Her Majesty (Esther? Vashti? Shekhina?) wandering around a frame in the second super, looking big and healthy as can be. I’ve been worried all summer that I wouldn’t be able to find her quickly even if she was on a frame I picked up, but in fact she jumped right out at me. I’ve noticed that drones also stand out for me nowadays – it turns out that if you spend enough time staring at bees, even slight variations in size (drones) or more-than-slight ones (the queen) trigger the eyes immediately as something strange and worth noticing. Like when you’re at a party and you notice THAT PERSON across the room, no matter the crowd of faces and limbs around them. Your eyes adjust to the default, and the unusual jumps out.
We also saw a few baby bees chewing their way out of their cells into this glorious world of pollen and sunlight for the very first time, today. Tiny fuzzy bee heads peeking imperfectly from ragged holes in the capped comb, struggling towards the light. The other bees on the frame approach, seeming to want to help, though I don’t know if they actually do. It’s a miracle. Welcome to the world, ladies! It’s not so bad – warm and bright, with a cool breeze up on the rooftop today, and you can hang out on the front of the hive drinking mint juleps and sweet tea with your sisters as dusk approaches.