Under the Christmas Tree

From the Templetons of Petaluma comes this delightful gift of a cake pan. We'll try it today!

"The way bees on a drowsy day..."

Spotted in Science Musings:

(with thanks to a friend for finding it)

The phrase is from a poem titled "The Kiss," in which the poet recounts a very special osculation, during which "her lips on mine traced a design to show the way bees on a drowsy day..." Some kiss. Some poem.

Why did the phrase stick in my mind? Well, for one thing, the words are individually gorgeous. Suck is an Old English word, with an ancient Latin root. Each breath we take, each drop of mother's milk, is sucked from the world.

Fuchsia found its name more recently; it commemorates the 17th-century German botanist Leonhard Fuchs. In moving from botanist to plant, the word softened, became redolent with fragrance, got juicier. Along our lane in Ireland fuchsia runs wildly rampant.

And honey. There is probably no English word that evokes more succulent imagery: golden, pure, sweet. Honeycombs spilling their luscious liquid. Oozy sensuality.

Add "bees" and "drowsy" and you have a mini-dictionary of delight.

But it is not just the words. It is what they do together. Shakespeare tried it, too: "Where the bee sucks, there suck I." Ulick O'Connor wraps his kiss with every sense, and sucks deeply at the very essence of life.

More at link

It's just a box of rain. I don't know who put it there

Halloween weekend brought the first rain of the season to our Garden. It started early in the afternoon with the preschool trick-or-treaters trundling quickly along in advance of the first drops, and then held a steady presence through the night as preschoolers graduated to elementary school super-heroes and Bratz princesses and then onto the night's hulking teenage zombie ghouls and their teasing vampire girlfriends and then finally down to the last call of the young unmasked men—the ones in the neighborhood edging closest to actually being scary—disdaining costume but confidently thrusting out their bulging pillowcases of swag to the husband answering the door while I cower back in the living room looking for a good old-fashioned Universal monster flick or two to entertain.

Saturday, the weekend storm broke in Samhain's full fury: leaden grey skies dumped a ceaseless torrent on all of us and a vengeful autumn wind tore through Lanham's streets and fields. In the grove of young trees behind our condo row, denuded branches whipped and flailed at the sky, futilely clawing after stripped leaves flying away into the gutters and rooftops six houses over.

Sunday brought a break in rain and wind and even a weak sun returned with a hint of the summer that was now officially over. We went straight out to the garden to check the hives.

Where we found the ground littered with the dead and dying.

There must have been hundreds of bees there. Some clearly already still; others crawling over the rest in a slow, doomed trek. Here and there, though, a spark of furious energy as two bees tumbled and rolled in locked combat. Bee and wasp? Guard and robber? Worker and expelled drone? We surely couldn't tell.

Truth be told, we held onto the hope that this bleak horror was the pitiless matriarchal banning of the Boys of Summer. But to have hundreds of drones? From that, we moved down the list of plausible explanations to a wild hive looking for shelter in the storm. We knew of at least one such hive in a tree on a hiking trail. Could the rain have broken apart that colony and the refugee bees followed the scent of pampered suburban honey back to our hives? If so, their would-be invasion was repelled with full Amazonian fury. "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Melissa…"

But it couldn't be Colony Collapse Disorder. Certainly not. Unlike that mystery, we had the full evidence of mortality in heaps. Then the husband noted that the pattern of corpses was fullest in front of Blue Hive.

Later, we inspected. And poor old Blue Hive of my inexpert queening and the crazy comb and the inability to keep up with Grey Hive's meticulous energy and achievement: Blue Hive was ailing. The honey super seemed well stocked with capped frames, but there was a disquieting lack of populace about the place. The upper deep showed brood: but in the spotty 'every other cell' pattern of a queen in her decline. And no pollen that I could see. But the full shock was the lower deep. I pulled at a frame and was nearly thrown back by its lack of propolis resistance and the weightlessness of drawn comb unoccupied by egg, larvae, brood or nurse bee. The entire lower deep was a closed-up shop front with cardboard over the windows and a foreclosure sign on the front door.

In shock, we opened Grey Hive. Busy, industrious and thriving. Tokyo on a Saturday night. Lower and upper deep frames bulging with the next generation and their food stores.

We closed both hives and went off to seek advice.

Beekeeping for Dummies

According to them, there are six major bee diseases. These are:

* American Foulbrood – pearly white larvae change to brown and die after capping. Cappings sink inward and appear perforated with little holes
* European Foulbrood – twisted larvae, light tan or brown in color, capped cells seem perforated
* Nosema – bees appear weak, shivery and crawl around in front of hive, spotting in and around the hive
* Chalkbrood – early Spring disease with infected larvae turning chalky white and hard in appearance
* Sacbrood – viral disease similar to the common cold
* Stonebrood – rare but recoverable

We convince ourselves we see signs of all six...

Marin Bee Buzz e-mail

It's normal to find dead drones in the fall, how many I don't know. Drones do not contribute to the needs of a wintering hive and are kicked out as winter approaches. The Queen will produce new drones in the spring to be available for mating over the summer months. Also some of the summer foragers will be dying off as the winter bees are emerging. I believe it is more normal for the older foragers to die off in the field rather than at the hive.

If you are worried about a heavy mite population, you may have to do some treatment. The most significant sign of mite stress shows up as deformed wing virus. Look to see if some of the newly emerging bees have small, deformed wings. If so, you will need to treat aggressively. I use formic acid in the fall and treat with Apistan only as a last resort.

You may need to consider some treatments for your bee hives for mites and diseases.

For Mites you can use:
1. Apistan Strips, active ingredient: Tau-fluvalinate 10.25%.
2. Mite-Away II, also treats for tracheal mites, active ingredient: Formic Acid, a "naturally appearing substance".
3. Apiguard, "a natural and nontoxic" treatment, active ingredient: Thymol gel.

Danny, friend of Jane, a neighbor – fellow beekeeper in the County

You need to install a drone frame and then treat for mites with this recipe:

1 cup of powdered sugar
½ cup of cinnamon
¼ cup of nutmeg

When the queen lays eggs on the drone frame, take it out and freeze it. Then cut off the caps and check for mites.

(We decide that Danny has diagnosed us with Varroa mites, which are treated with powdered sugar. However, they are also visible to the eye and this is one of the few diseases we can strike from the list of probable causes. Still, I do carry cinnamon to the Garden. Weakened as it is, Blue Hive has also been targeted by ants hungry for the sugar stores. A line of cinnamon around the hive base is laid out as a defensive moat.)

Simon Bodington – Ex-patriot from Fair Albion and fellow beekeeper in the County:

You'll need to call Dadant right away and see if there's still time for a treatment. But my biggest foe this year has been the wasps. Wasps could be raiding your hive. Wasps will be killing your larvae.

Member Forum of Beesource:

Endlessly circular arguments between those who favor medical treatments and those who are committed to an fully organic approach for mite treatment. Swerving into tangential arguments over McCain and Obama.

Doug of Beekind, Sebastopol – the man who sold me the bees:

"Dead larvae is normal. A small hive is normal. But, yeah, sounds like your hive is troubled. Sounds like tracheal mites. You'll want to treat. But then…you know you won't be able to use the honey from a hive in treatment. Do you have a laying Queen? If you don't have a laying Queen, you can re-queen. But it's going to be expensive though. You'll have to get her from Hawaii…

(Do I have a queen? I haven't seen one. On subsequent hive inspections, I've seen larvae—still white and healthy enough—but uncapped and untended by the dwindling population. The husband and I have debated about dumping a frame of healthy nurse bees of Grey Hive into Blue Hive. Nurse Bees haven't yet imprinted the location of their home and won't have a scent to displease guards. They'll be accepted into the ailing hive and pressed into service tending its sick and raising its young. But the husband will only accept this if we can determine that Blue Hive is disease-free. If it isn't, we'll be sentencing the emigrant bees of Grey Hive to oblivion.)

And "Ah," I thought. "Hawaii. We'll call her Liliuokalani."

But if I can't use the honey of a treated hive, can the bees?

And where does a Winter Queen find her drones?

Doug's advice turns pitilessly Malthusian by phonecall's end.

"You have a weak hive. Making an effort to save that genetic code…is it worth it?

All the advice offered conflicts and loops and turns back on itself as it gives rise to hopes only to underscore the inevitable. The main point is made: I should have treated for diseases in the early autumn. Instead of traipsing around England and Ireland as if the western world economy and my prodigal hive weren't both crumbling. And what of those first few days when I bungled my first queen's coronation? The way we piled the two honey supers on top of them: forcing them to keep up with the high-performing Grey Hive next door? Despairing, shaming guilt, never far from my door even in the best of days, slouches in and sprawls on the couch and takes over the television remote and has me fetch it a beer from the fridge.

And because treatment edges us away from organic methods, it keeps running through my mind that these exceptional creatures have thrived and prospered for millennia without human intervention. I wonder if I haven't overreacted? If this is a bad year for the hive that will be followed by many good years to come? Yet, with each hopeful hive inspection (and none of the many and varied medical advice followed), I know that Blue Hive is slowly, but surely, declining in strength and population.

We inspect again this weekend. If we see any new brood, we'll continue to hope. If not, we'll have to make our final decision.

Til the next thrilling chapter...

Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Drone after Midnight)

This was originally going to be my Fourth of July chapter for the Garden Chronicles. Instead, thanks to the Fellowship of the Dirt Pile double-trilogy (that means a SIX Chapter Saga to you calculus majors); this is being written while American pundits dissect a Paris Hilton televised riposte to John McCain's attack on Obama.

Paris Hilton = Blond + Balls . Who knew? And, sure, it's Obama in '08: but You GO Paris!

And speaking of the long history of American populist fronts: from the moment I heard the name, I wanted to be a Daughter of the American Revolution.

You see, I first heard about this radical fringe organization in one of Abbie Hoffman's later books. He and the girls were working together to save a historic bridge in Connecticut. His thing was stopping some development; theirs was preserving history. So you can understand why I formed a somewhat skewed perspective on the Ladies from his account. There they were: working with none other than Chicago Seven Hoffman! On the front lines of an anti-corporate battle. With a totally bitchin' gang name! Meet up with ya on the streets of Seattle, Ms. Abigail…

Yeah, they sounded hot.

Instead, yes—I am aware of the real story here—they are the well-established organization that requires you to prove that your ancestors were hanging around in 1776 and somehow participated in the severing of the nascent nation's moorings from our mothership across the pond. And then slavishly worshipped the totems of its culture from afar for the next Two Hundred.

In other words: no other immigrants need apply. But hey! That's why we've got the Portuguese Festa Hall, Las Guitarras and Finnegan's of Marin down on Grant Street. Gotta have some Nuevo Mundo spice in that Old World melting pot.

But the point I'm trying to make here, if anyone could claim to be a Daughter of the American Revolution, it's the honeybee. Not aboriginal at all, but early immigrant to the North American continent, crossing over on the Mayflower with John Alden and Priscilla Mullins and Captain Ahab and Pocahontas on her homebound afternoon commute and all. (And then there's me sweating out my hour's drive home with the two packages of starter bees from Sebastopol. Imagine: live bees on a four-month trans-Atlantic voyage. Now that's hard core. All respect to Myles Standish and Company.)

Indeed, the honeybee's manifest destiny to find these bountiful, virgin stores of California pollen earned it the bitter nickname of "white man's fly" from the Native Americans encountering its sting in conjunction with successive waves of European settlers' progress across their lands.

Which brings us to the rich, but problematic, world of the bee as political metaphor. The colony, the queen, the workers, royal jelly, and the drones. All of it redolent with class and caste and labor of the lowly in the service of the great. The Victorians, in particular, went absolutely crackers over the concept. (Or "Oh!" as several of my friends enthuse. "Have you read A.S. Byatt's Angels and Insects?" Yes, I have. Certainly. Years ago. But Possession was better. IMO. MHO of course.)

In particular, the concept of "queen" is a point of fascination for children stopping by to visit the garden hives and for the children we met during our shift at the observation hive at the County Fair. They all ask to see the hive's Queen. Perhaps they are imagining some delicate, bee-beautiful creature with a fairy's gossamer crown. A wing-born sister to that legendarily lovely and languid monarch of the Sea Monkeys (you'd know them as "brine shrimp") who once ruled over her underwater anthropomorphic court in the back ads of the Richie Rich comics of my childhood.

When, in point of fact, what you have here is a fat, slow, non-flying insect stuffed with more semen than a San Francisco bathhouse locker room on a Saturday night in a hot summer month of that morally bankrupt Bicentennial year of 1976.

Well yeah! Baby!! Let us now talk about Sex. Let's pop an amyl-nitrite and cue up the Grace Jones and: Let's. Get. Busy. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. It's Friday night and the lights are low; lookin' out for a place to go.

There's a long, intricate history of wistful legend and hopeful lore of the King Bee in western culture. In Yemen, there's even the concept of a "Father Bee." And there are indeed male bees. They are bigger than the females and do (the technical term here is 'fuck all') little work in or around the hive. The ladies assiduously tend and feed them all spring and summer.

New drones come along, as needed, throughout the summer and I've already learned to look for the particular little brood cells that bulge out from the frames. For a bee, the drone leads a damned lazy and pampered life.

And then: he gets to mate with royalty.

According to the University of Florida Department of Entomology & Nematology, this is a "most spectacular" ritual. As it does involve "partial phallus detachment" (as you do) and death, I think we can all agree with that description. We know the start; we know the end. Masters of the scene:

Copulation occurs on the wing, within a drone congregation site 15-30 m above ground (Gary 1963). An aggregation of drones “lazily” fly within their congregation site awaiting the arrival of a queen, and once she appears a fast-paced chase commences where copulation is attempted (Winston 1987). The term “drone comets” visually describe the continual consolidation and disassembly of this following drone swarm (Winston 1987). Koeniger et al. (1979), utilizing a tethered queen, report that the drone clasps the queen in a dorso-ventral position and everts his endophallus directly into the queen’s sting chamber. The drone then becomes “paralysed” and falls backwards (Koeniger et al. 1979). Woyke and Ruttner (1958) state the eversion of the endophallus occurs from haemostatic pressure caused by abdominal muscles. Ejaculation occurs into the bulb portion of the drone’s endophallus prior to full eversion, and semen is discharged through a small opening in the bulb into the queen’s vagina during copulation (Woyke and Ruttner 1958). Winston (1987) figuratively asserts that the drones “explode” their semen into the queen’s copulatory orifice, and consequently toward her oviduct. Through subsequent pressure the bow of the bulb and chitinized plates, the “mating sign,” detaches from the endophallus of the drone and remains inside the queen (Woyke and Ruttner 1958). Winston (1987) concludes this may help thwart the flow of sperm from the queen’s vagina after copulation, and that it does not function as a “mating plug” used to discourage multiple matings. After the pair separate the endophallus is still fully everted with its associated strong pressure, and with loss of the “mating plug” the endophallus may burst at the tip (Woyke & Ruttner 1958). At the end of copulation, the drone falls to the ground and dies either in minutes or hours (Woyke and Ruttner 1958, Winston 1987).

La question cest voulez-vous!

And there's no luck for the celibate drone either – that smart boy who's figured out that hanging back at the tail of that suitors' comet might be the best way to avoid love's lethal embrace – sure, maybe he flies back home to the safety of his internet porn bookmarks, but the Mortality's Clock still ticks. Come September, after the last nectar flow, the ladies of the hive begin their winter downsizing and all drones are slowly, but firmly, hustled out the front door. They are now last season's boy-toys and, as no other hive will take them in and as they know ("Fuck all," remember?) little about collecting food for themselves, they're toast.

I imagine these drones of autumn meeting up with fellow exiles from other local hives. "Must be that time of the year, eh?" one jokes half-heartedly. "She's never been this mad before" another says in genuine perplexity. Then one of them suggests "Look guys. Let's just get a bouquet of flowers and a box of candy and go back and say 'I'm sorry.'" "What are we sorry for?" someone else asks. "Doesn't matter. We're just 'sorry.'" And indeed, they are.

As for Her Majesty (a pretty nice girl): consider the following. If, in the history of human affairs, many a lovely crowned head landed in the axeman's basket on the charges of adultery, the hive queen – and she can be deposed at any time when the workers decide she's not up to the task -- who enjoys the longest reign is a promiscuous, free-ranging slut.

From Science Daily:

To determine the effect mating has on honey bee queens, the scientists artificially inseminated queens. It's difficult to determine the number of times a queen mates under natural conditions. Some queens were inseminated with the semen from one drone, others with the semen from 10 drones. The scientists then put the queens in hives and observed them.

They found that worker bees paid more attention to the multiply inseminated queens. Worker bees demonstrate what is known as a "retinue response" to their queen; they lick her and rub their antennae on her. The retinue response to the multiply inseminated queens was more pronounced.

"This tells us the workers can tell how many drones the queen has mated with," said Grozinger.

Lick? Rub? Oh honey honey, touch me baby. The Science Daily article also makes clear that the queen may or may not be mating with the drones of her hive, which is why I can claim my small place in helping the world by providing it with strong, organically raised party boys wearing tight genes.

So: Gynocentric advocates of Free Love as well as caretakers of communal property derived from the shared labor of an empowered working class. "When in the course of hive events it becomes necessary for one swarm to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another…"

Can you hear the drums, Fernando?

"It's NOT a monarchy," I told the crowd watching me on April 26 as I was anchoring my rubber band tether around the marshmallow-stoppered queen cage of Grey Hive. "What we have here, as I see it, is a Radical Feminist Collective."

Til the next thrilling chapter,

Miss "They were shining there for you and me. For Liberty" Templeton

P.S. There were five ABBA [and one Beatle] songs referenced in this email. Did you spot them all?

P.P.S. Just to note: my particular breed of bees trace their ancestry back to another group of immigrants. They passed through Ellis Island alongside of Vito Corleone and family.

Sacramento Bee: Monday Evening Edition

It's the morning of the day we're to pick up the bees, and we still have a few last-minute errands to run. There's cutting a ventilation notch in each of the inner hive-top covers, for instance, and also picking up the first 25 pounds of plain white sugar we'll need for our bee syrup.

A few household bills to pay – one of them will be a stop along the way – and a birthday card for Jef's mother to fill out. Foolishly, we have the bees arriving on the same day that the rest of the family will be meeting in Dixon (a good two hour drive from the Bay Area) to celebrate her day with dinner and gifts. We've apologized for this, and everyone has understood. Everyone is with us on the bees.

Purchasing this much sugar gets us into a major chain grocery store for the first time in over a year. Our normal haunt is a semi-organic, eccentric smaller store that favors local products and non-animal tested household items. Sugar there is raw and only in very small bags. So it's over to Albertsons, where the sugar sack we buy is so big, it has a plastic handle and patterned cloth bag. There's huge sacks of tortilla flour in the same row. Putting the sugar in the cart, I turn and find the store also carries Barry's Tea! Rockin'! I get a big box for the house and a smaller box for work.

Home with sugar and then pick up everything and head out for bee country.

Great drive up 101 through Petaluma, then left on the Gravenstein Highway toward Sebastopol. Past Red's Recovery Room, a roadside joint immortalized by Tom Waits, one of its regulars, on his album Mule Variations. I always ask to stop for a drink at Red's. My husband always says no.

We reach Beekind in good time and spend a few moments buying an extra hat and veil. This will be a 'community' hat and veil stored in the Garden Shed for anyone who wants to get close and personal with me and the bees on a hive inspection or two. Then into the backroom where several electric fans whirl away and a tent filled with cages and cages of bees sits.

One more rehearsal of the unpacking of bees. Several people walk in during it, so the store owner keeps starting up from the beginning. Then someone finally goes over and picks up a package of bees and we realize that it is going to be about as mundane as this. We each pick up a package – surprisingly light – and head outside. One expects a little more ceremony. Something Buddhist and ethereal, but no: you bought some bees from our store, so you and your bees can just get going now.

Out by the car, we look at the packages. Inside are thousands of docile, bewildered bees. In their midst is the caged queen suspended from a little metal wire. ("Like a go-go dancer?" asked one of my friends later at dinner.) Their backstory is this: they don't know the queen; she doesn't know them. The whole lot of them are not in the place they think of as home. They aren't about the ordinary business their genetic codes would be having them about. There's no entrance to guard, no brood to nurse (and there won't be for at least two weeks), no nectar to gather, no pollen to store. They are at this moment the most lost things possible in the nature world.

We put them in the back of the car, and try to dislodge the visiting bees clinging to the outside of the screens. You can also see little bee tongues and feet through the screen's holes.

We drive home, stopping several times to shoo out the hitchhikers. Hopefully they are still within the two-mile radius of home. Otherwise, their joyride will have a high price.

At home, we put our two packages in the cool, dark shed in our own backyard. I gently mist it with some cold water, because I've been told that bees like water. They don't seem to mind the misty shower. I check on them several times, worried that the shed will become stuffy with the day's heat. We will take them to the hives at dusk.

So most of the afternoon is spent on minor errands in and out of the house. Keeping an eye, when possible on the bees, and there is one time where they've found a voice and have set up a bit of an aggravated hum. More misting.

At five p.m., we begin the business of hauling the hives out to the garden. Only two deeps (or hive bodies). The second stories will be added later as the bees gather their strength. Then we mix up the sugar. To me, who has memorized the finicky instructions of Beekeeping for Dummies, our methods are a bit slapdash. Haphazard. But the hippie ethos of Beekind has taken hold of the husband and we pour 16 cups of sugar into a bucket, add 16 cups of water from the 'drinking water grade' garden hose and slosh it all back and forth between the first bucket and another, like Goliath's cocktail shaker.

We also dress up for the part. Earlier, during the classes, I made the realization that my habitual skirts weren't perhaps the best choice for this particular hobby. So I bought a surprisingly congenial pair of khaki cargo pants. (Similarly, the husband's utilikilt stays in the closest for all hive-tending duties.) And an old western-wear cowboy cut white shirt with pearl snap-closure buttons on the sleeve. The straw hats and the square veils. (I vetoed the round space-age Area 51 style helmet as too reminiscent of the scary scene from E.T. or the Stand.)

Then, nothing for it but to get the bees.

By now, a number of the neighbors have gathered. Phil Buckley is there (I should say, Mr. BNL, that the younger generation of the Buckleys are fine folk. Phil and Mariah went in on a co-operative purchase of organic dirt with us and John Flanagan and Jafar and Marty Peckins, who has a smaller carbon footprint than Cinderella. And today, at work, while showing off the pictures of the beehive installation: my coworker Sara G spied Phil in his basketball loose shorts and jersey T and said "Oh! You have CUTE neighbors!") Susan from Australia is there. Some other family with child is there. It would seem that my bee installation is also to be a bit of a 'presentation.'

1. Pull four frames out of the eight frame hive
   
2. Pry syrup can off package
   
3. Slide little metal tab holding queen cage out to hole and pull out cage
   
4. Put syrup can back on hole, preferably without crushing the bees who have sighted liberation
   
5. Take nail and 'uncork' the queen cage
   
6. Slap finger down over hole of uncorked queen cage
   
7. Grab marshmallow and plug hole of uncorked queen cage
   
8. Place queen cage, screen down on frame (one over from opened area)
   
9. Take syrup can off again and give cage a 'shake' (uh huh…that's what I said)
   
10. Pour bees into the area vacated by the four frames
    
11. When finished pouring, gently put removed frames back and again: don't crush those bees
    
12. Put the feeder on top
    
13. Put ½ gallon sugar syrup in feeder
    
14. Put inner cover on feeder
    
15. Put telescoping cover on top of the whole thing.
    

Lather, Rinse, Repeat. (That is: you have to do this for TWO hives.)

With the crowd gathered, my 'teacher' genes take over and I begin explaining the significance of it all. But part of me is a little rattled when the movie stops following the script.

For instance: the queen's cage has a fair amount of paparazzi following it and shaking them off so I can perform the nail/cork/finger/marshmallow stunt is a bit unnerving.

And then there's the business of 'pouring' the bees.

To Bee Continued...

Yours,

Miss "No end to the Bee Puns" Templeton

P. S. There really is a Sacramento Bee and there's a Sacramento in the Golden Gate Ferry fleet. But it is on the Sausalito run.

A Gathering of the Hives at the Bee-In

As friends of mine who have shown kindly interest in my newest hobby of beekeeping, I thought I'd share my progress these few final days before the two hives I'm hoping to tend are up and roaring. Yesterday was our last beekeeping class up in Sonoma and this was my first hands-on experience with a working hive. Today, we'll finish the 'bee-yard' -- the garden plot in our community garden that will be fenced and then locked. (Beehive thievery is quite common in the area, especially during almond growing season.) Our two hives are now painted in Miami blue and Cape Cod grey and are just hanging out here in the living room, waiting for their tenants. The package bees will arrive on April 26th.

Yesterday's class was part lecture inside and then part demonstration outside. At the first break, I went out to look at the hives and found myself talking with a mother and son team who were assessing the set-up of hive platform and windbreak and considering how they would adapt for their own space. "We'll be doing Bill a huge favor," said the son. "Our bees will fly straight into his crop." "Oh?" I inquire kindly. "Bill grows vegetables? Or flowers?" (But not grapes, I know. Bees don't interact with the wine industry. A vineyard is a 'desert' to them.) Mother and son chuckle. "Bill's our neighbor. He grows pot."

A moment to consider this and the whole concept of Sonoma County as epicenter of the bee industry made a fundamental shift in my comprehension. "Do you think marijuana needs bees to produce? No wonder people are motivated to save them!" "Yeah, cannabis honey." And then "Can you imagine that? Those would be some lazy bees." "But think of the amount of nectar they'd consume." and so on.

After the full class, it was time for all of us to go out to the hives. The crowd was mostly older, local gentry in their fifties. My husband being amongst his own with the greying ponytails and silvered beards. The women all looked like they knew a thing or two about homemade bread and may have even harbored aspirations for homemade canning. (as I do...someday I'd like to make rose-petal jelly) so there was a congeniality there as well. A young kid in his early teens and braces also on hand, and he and I were the first to get up and personal with the hives. He also was the first to try his own hive inspection.

The first hive opened by the instructor was a wild swarm recently coaxed into its new home. With a young queen, we were told. And no mites. A good colony for genes.

After you pry the various lids and feeders off the top, you find yourself staring down at what looks like a file folder drawer with eight or so pendex hanging files. Except your office desk drawer probably doesn't have the hundreds of fuzzy little things crawling around in it. There's also an amazing odor of what I'll describe as hot-buttered carmel corn, like being by a popcorn machine and candy counter in a movie theatre.

By far the most disarmingly sweet thing is to see a whole line of bee-faces staring up from one of the cracks between the frames. There's a sense of genial curiosity from the hive, as long as you behave yourself like the houseguest you are.

The things looked for are

open brood -- little baby bees in their earliest visible stage (eggs are too small to see)
capped brood -- baby bees now covered by wax and on their way
pollen -- different colors from the different flowers and such, stored as food near nursery
nectar -- open cells with the liquid that we think of as honey
honey -- capped cells of nectar, color will indicate age of stores, or possibly season

Other things to consider

mite count -- mites are manageable but bad. There's medication (which Sonoma doesn't recommend because they're all about the natural) and there's dusting the bees with confectioners sugar. Sounds way cool to do that!
crazy comb -- wax combs on top or bottom of frames, indicates overcrowded hive. You either add another box or split the hive
spotty brood cells -- the queen is not laying eggs in a patterned formation. She might be on her way out.
old, tired queens -- cue the office jokes! "So Dave, the hive kicked you out, eh?"
wax moths/ants -- bad but somewhat unavoidable. A strong hive will make short work of honey-hunting ants.
foul brood -- bad. very bad. Some states require you to burn any infected hive.

So there it is so far. I've done one presentation to the neighborhood and the husband wants me to do another once the hives are installed. It was then I decided to call my presentations "Bee Ins" and intend to take an old Fillmore Ballroom poster and do some groovy psychedelic thing with honeycomb patterns and all. The husband, now tolerant of my need to bring music into everything, asked with a sigh "Okay, what will you do at this 'bee in'" "Are you kidding?" I said, "I'm gonna train the little suckers to hum Ina Gadda da Bee-da!"

Or maybe that Blind Melon song that's all hot again.

til next time!

Lora Lee

How this Blog got its Name

If you visit the New Dictionary for Cultural Literacy Third Edition (2002) you get a definition for the phrase "sweetness and light" which hits the high points of Matthew Arnold's philosophy and even glancingly mentions Jonathan Swift, but the whole thing would have earned a B minus -- at best -- in Sr Samuel Conlan's 19th Century literature class because it fails to anchor the image with the grounding metaphor that Swift employed. (In The Battle of the Books) Arnold's take that sweetness is 'moral righteousness' and light is 'intellectual power' comes across as...well...pompous and dull, to be honest (and that's so unusual for the average 19th century writer). And the phrase itself seems a bit cloying until you find out that what Swift was talking about in his own metaphoric flight was honey and wax, the two primary gifts to humanity from a beehive.

But of course, for us with less need for beeswax candles these days, the bees we've purchased are being welcomed into our garden for their promised ability to increase crop yield by up to 30 percent. And the more I study about the current state of the Honey Bee, the more I realize how significant these little creatures are. The list of plants pollinated by bees is formidable. And to give it some perspective, I like this quote from a US Gov't site: "Bee pollination is responsible for $15 billion in added crop value, particularly for specialty crops such as almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables. About one mouthful in three in the diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination."

And now there's this situation that people are starting to pay attention to: the decline of the bee population. The Colony Collapse Disorder as it is called. People watching the bees started making serious noise about it in 2006. In 2007, there were the television documentaries (we watched a few) on PBS. And there's quite a few websites on the story now. It's evidently serious and yet there's still no clue as to the cause.

But what struck me was the way this is happening. People aren't walking out to their hives and finding dying or dead bees...they're simply finding no bees at all! It's an abrupt disappearance of the entire hive. In England, they're calling it the Mary Celeste phenomenon. The situation is very eerie: the hive appears to be healthy and thriving and then...it's gone.

You alone will appreciate that I was thinking about all this and suddenly landed on my own metaphor for the phenomenon (I might even have to use it in our newsletter article or any other writing I may find myself doing on the subject.) But it's this: these mysterious things which have co-existed with us for millennia and have been tremendously beneficial for our lives in so many ways are now abandoning us.

They're going sideways to the sun, aren't they?

At any rate, it gives a little extra sense of purpose to the project. There's all sorts of encouragement from everyone on this: fellow-gardeners offering to help with the expense, the local Farmers market honey merchants giving advice, the Cal State Agricultural site offering resources, the store we're working with in Sebastopol giving classes -- everyone around here is all for the bees. We'll see if Jef and I can handle this particular task. (I also suspect Jef has landed on it as a way to break the computer's monopoly on my social autism. I do get fascinated by the mechanics of the hive.)

Don't yet know the breed, but I suspect it will be Italian. We visit the store again today to look over supplies and perhaps will even get the gloves, netting, hat and so on. Jef is already out in the garden now working on the space and we'll be building a 'bee fountain' as well. Originally it was to be 3 oak wine barrel halves -- a $150 proposition -- but my idea of a galvanized tin tub on bricks brings it back under $50 with spare change for some ferns and water plants.

So that's the latest on the bees. I'll update with all the major moments on the project.

(Correspondence originally written on February 9, 2008.)