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