I have checked them several times throughout the summer and would often find them crowded on the sill of the hive in a small swarm attempting to fan themselves and the hive to keep it cool. Initially, I had regretted putting one of the hives in the shade of a tree, but then as this abnormally hot summer has progressed, I have rethought that position and have noted that, of my two hives, the shaded bees are clearly the more comfortable. It fascinates me to visit the hives. My entire childhood, I was afraid of bees, worried about stepping on them while they were busy patrolling the dandelions and the white clover, instructed never to go too near a hive. Now I find myself sitting on the palates upon which my hives stand, a mere inches from thousands of bees that are busily going about their business. They dodge and swoop around me as I peer at them and I have occasionally been accidentally run into by one or more of them on their way to or from the hive. Like any Midwesterner would, I apologize for being in their way and kindly move aside. They don't sting, they don't get angry, they just keep on working.
I have bemoaned the loss of the flowers and watched as the clover has sadly dried up and wondered what the bees would find to eat, but they are clearly more resourceful and optimistic than I am these days. I set out yesterday to crack open the hives and see how they are managing things on the inside after hearing stories from some of the other beekeepers in the area that noted that they had had the entire comb within their hives melt down in the heat. Not that bees can't handle that sort of devastation, but it takes them a while to clean up and rebuild.
I happened to have the foresight enough to take along a few empty frames and a deep super just in case. The first hive that I opened, the one that I typically think of as the weaker of the two hives, had finally filled both levels of supers up with comb and were putting down a substantial amount of honey in all of the upper frames. I had to break into the bottom super to find the brood of bees and be sure that they were doing well. The size of the hive had clearly expanded and there were any number of bees that were very unhappy with the general ruckus that I was causing them. It takes some amount of control when being mobbed by several thousand bees at once, not to swat at them or get anxious. Bees are a very intuitive lot - they respond almost instantly and as a single organism to slight changes in mood and surroundings. I have watched them milling about on the outside of the hive and a bee will twitch differently and the whole group changes its dynamic simultaneously. When I am busy trying to move bees aside so that I can get a grip on a frame, I will notice subtle differences in the tone of their buzzing and can tell when I have angered the lot of them. I don't work with a smoker because, for the most part, the bees are fairly tolerant of me and don't attempt to sting....that doesn't, however, mean that they aren't unhappy with me. I find myself humming the Winnie the Pooh "I'm just a little black rain cloud" song and that seems to quiet both myself and the bees down a bit. I did have one bee yesterday, however, that was especially upset with me and she kept throwing herself at my mask repeatedly long after I had put her hive back together and moved on to the second hive. No amount of explaining would dissuade her from her attempts at driving me away.
Having assured myself that the shaded hive was doing well, I moved on to what has typically been my larger hive. This group has completely filled the two initial supers and is now starting on the third. I removed the top super (the one that they are only getting a start on) and launched into the second (or middle) super. I found healthy capped brood in the middle of the super and then chanced to check some of the other outer frames in the box. Honey! Capped, finished honey! I pulled the first full frame up out of the hive - weighing roughly 20 pounds and full of unhappy bees, this is not something that you want to drop - I was completely amazed. Capped honey is beautiful, but brand new clean white honey comb that is full for the first time is really beautiful! I set the frame down and peered into the hive on the other side and was rewarded with a second full frame of capped honey on the other side as well. I pulled this one out as well and set it next to the first frame full of honey and then went to get the empty frames that I had brought along. There were several more frames of mostly capped honey, but the bees use honey as their main food supply for feeding the young bees and always need to be left with enough in reserve to maintain the hive. I put the empty frames in the hive in the places of the full frames and then quickly and apologetically brushed the bees off the honey filled frames back into the hive before I spirited them away to my green house which doubles as the "honey house".
Walking with a loaded wheel barrow while still wearing most of my bee costume to the green house, I attracted the attention of my 7 year old and she came skipping over to see what I was up to. She is a honey lover herself and was willing to run to the house to get a few of the necessary items I would need to clean and prep the centrifuge that I had not even bothered to examine yet, thinking that it would be at least the end of the season, if not a full year from now, before I would need it. With a crescent wrench, some clean rags, a hose and a little dilute bleach, we had the thing up and running in no time. A large knife was obtained from the kitchen and the top beeswax seal on the honey was removed and saved in a pan. In general, it takes 10 pounds of honey to make 1 pound of beeswax and it is worth its weight in gold, so I wasn't going to loose a bit if I could help it. A little balancing of the centrifuge and ten minutes of spinning and a beautiful stream of golden honey came pouring out of the spout at the bottom of the centrifuge.
Honey is one of the easiest food stuffs to work with. It is ready to eat in its natural form, does not spoil, and can be used in just about everything. The only thing that I had to do in order to put this honey in jars was to strain it a few times through several layers of cheese cloth. Seven pounds of honey later, the now empty frames of beeswax were returned to the bees and the empty placeholder frames removed. They will take one look at the devastation that I caused to their comb and start again to clean it, repair it, fill it with more honey and cap it once again. In trade off for my providing housing, food through the winter, protection from the cold and a little water for the hot summer months, these tiny little beings supply me with potentially endless supplies of the most natural sweetener known to man and they will pollinate many of my flowers and crops. I am pretty sure that I am coming out way ahead on this deal, but it really is a fairly symbiotic relationship although, technically, they would survive just fine without me. I do, however, speak on their behalf when the crops are being sprayed with potentially toxic chemicals that threaten to completely wipe out honey bees all together, and in that small way attempt to pull my weight in the relationship.
More and more I see these types of relationships in nature and for many of them, man is thought to not be an important link in the symbiotic chain, but we are perhaps one of the most important players in symbiotic relationships - we have to protect them. "A chain is only a strong as its weakest link." as my brother used to remind me (typically while he was pointing out that I was, apparently, the weakest link) - but it is very much true. Our job as humans, and as links in the chain, is to protect the other links in the chain, the bees being sprayed, the shrimp being covered in oil, the cattle, chickens and pigs being restricted to tiny lots or confinement units. Sadly, we humans are often the weakest links and fall far short on our jobs.
So, the next time you pull out the honey jar and take a teaspoon full of honey, think of the little beings that worked themselves literally to death to bring that to you. Each worker bee, in her short lifetime will produce only the equivalent of 1/10 of a teaspoon of honey, and to produce a pound of honey, bees will fly the equivalent of twice around the world and visit roughly two million flowers. And that is just the honey. The value they represent in their ability to pollinate crops and further provide us with food, eclipses the value of the honey alone. The next time you eat a fruit, vegetable, or even have a cup of coffee....thank the bees.
