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.'
- Pull four frames out of the eight frame hive
- Pry syrup can off package
- Slide little metal tab holding queen cage out to hole and pull out cage
- Put syrup can back on hole, preferably without crushing the bees who have sighted liberation
- Take nail and 'uncork' the queen cage
- Slap finger down over hole of uncorked queen cage
- Grab marshmallow and plug hole of uncorked queen cage
- Place queen cage, screen down on frame (one over from opened area)
- Take syrup can off again and give cage a 'shake' (uh huh…that's what I said)
- Pour bees into the area vacated by the four frames
- When finished pouring, gently put removed frames back and again: don't crush those bees
- Put the feeder on top
- Put ½ gallon sugar syrup in feeder
- Put inner cover on feeder
- 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment