Sometime between Thursday and today, the bees released the queen from her cage on their own, eating through the candy plug entirely. They even built some burr comb (wax comb that is out of place) on the side of the cage, and filled it up with condensed sugar syrup! I took the empty queen cage home with me as a souvenir.

Yes, I did stick my tongue into the burr comb to taste the sugar syrup. Wouldn’t you?

The bees have done a great job of building up lots of new comb over the past week. I’m seriously impressed. In a week or two, I’m going to go back in to check for evidence that the queen is laying eggs properly, but for now, this is the good news I’d hoped to see.

(Both photos in this post are better when seen large! Click on each to get to the large version.)

Cat asked me to spin a me-and-her yarn for her, and this was my attempt. If you know us, it’s pretty easy to see where I was going with this. Her long, gorgeous, silky black hair mixed with my wild and erratic curls, icy beads to accent thread-plied in, and wrapped with red thread to bind us together as in her latest novel, Palimpsest.

64ish yards of superwash merino, unknown curly locks, commercial thread and tiny beads.

That’s a close-up of the queen cage with a few bees hanging out all over it. (Bigger version.) This was taken after we shook off most of the bees that were clinging to it when we first pulled it out.

Beekeeping is amazing. Thrilling, relaxing, and meditative, all at once. Immensely satisfying. I end up covered with the smell of smoke and sugar syrup together. It’s like firespinning and working with liquid nitrogen all rolled up into one. Focus, sublime focus, and a dangerous pleasure that only works if you can enter a state of smooth calm when working with it.

This is my setup:

The box on the ground in front of the hive was the package. We’ve since fully cleared it of live bees and thrown it away. It looks like most of the bees that remained there after we left last time did manage to find their way into the hive without freezing to death. Phew!

We opened up the hive and pulled out a few frames, hanging them on this useful doohicky with two arms that hooks onto the edge of the hive when it’s open. The bees didn’t seem to mind at all. This let us pull out the queen cage to examine it.

The queen and her attendants were still trapped inside the cage by the sugar plug, which was only partially eaten away. She looked fine. The other bees were totally covering the cage, but they didn’t seem hostile, just interested - I don’t think she’s in much danger of being balled. (When a colony rejects a foreign queen, they kill her by surrounding her as a group and overheating her to death.)

I poked a wider hole all the way through the sugar plug with a screw - not wide enough for the queen to get out, but surely enough to really help inspire them to finish the job. If they haven’t released her when I check back in a few more days, I’m probably just going to do it manually. They’ll have had a week to get used to her scent, and they don’t seem to be acting aggressively towards her, so it should be fine.

Yep, that was Selena being insanely badass and beekeeping in a skirt. The rest of us wear pants, and pull our socks up over our pants to keep bees from climbing up inside. But oh, no, not her. She has to be all tough. It’s like she’s all, I’ve been to the waaaaaaaaaaar, this is nothing.

Those little glints of golden light in the air in front of her? Yeah, those are bees.

That’s it for now. The bees have started building some comb, and they seem to be doing well. Anderson has been emailing me to reassure me that they haven’t suddenly disappeared. I’ll try to get some better photos of their progress next time! They are gorgeous.

You should check out the bigger version here.

“Princes Perhaps Charming, But Not So Successful”
(paper, glue, yarn)

“Like prayers tucked into a barbed wire Wailing Wall, or the tiny, short, sad stories of princes who struggled through the thorns to reach Sleeping Beauty.”

“When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.”
(ivory linen card stock, sepia ink, chain)

Text from Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente. I gave this piece to Patti Digh of 37 Days when she came to New York.

“When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.”
(ivory linen card stock, sepia ink, chain)

Text by Philippe Petit, from when he explained why he walked that tightrope between the Twin Towers.