It’s been a whirlwind spring full of adventure and blossoms (and yowza is it summer already?). Tales of THUNDER to come, but in the meantime, a little shout out to my girls in Shangri-La who we thought requeened themselves last fall and now we have proof. In short (just to blow your mind if you don’t know too much about bees/love Shakespearean-style epics): a beehive always knows how their queen is doing. Much like in any period drama, a small scrim of bees called the “retinue” surround the queen at all times and groom her and feed her and generally worship her. Only a few bees at a time comprise the retinue and they swap in and out so many bees have a chance to get close to the queen. Once the bees closest to the queen have swapped out, they then are able to send the pheromones of the queen to every ladybee in the hive in a complex game of telephone, so that every bee in the hive knows exactly what the queen is up to at all times. This is super important to all bees, as the health (and fertility) of the queen is necessary to the hive’s survival. If something happens to the queen, the hive can immediately tell. If the queen dies, if she gets squished by the beekeeper, if robber bees kill the queen, if her pheromones start to get weak, if the queen is just getting old, the hive will know. A very strong and intuitive hive (disclaimer: beekeepers are infinitely desirous of anthropomorphizing their hives. I do it, like, one million percent) will get the sense that their queen is failing and they will pick a part of the hive where the current queen seldom goes and they will start grooming a replacement to overthrow her. I put this Shakespearean cloak-and-dagger impulse in italics because it is truly incredible. Various factors (brood pattern, queen cells) led us to believe that we had this exact “re-queening” situation in Shangri-La last summer. Like her sister queen in our other hive, the old queen in Shangri-La had a red mark on her, so the only way to be sure that the hive had, in fact, re-queened itself, was to spot a new, unmarked queen in her place. This spring, we saw her, in all of her huge, beautiful, un-marked glory. Proof. Proof that these crazy divine bees know what’s best for themselves and proof that (on however small a scale) by keeping bees we are helping the species overcome the obstacles that we as humanity have set up for them. She’s in the bottom right corner, with a shiny exposed thorax (where a store-bought queen would normally be marked) about twice as long as the worker bees and surrounded by cells of larvae. Long live the Queen.
And in case you have trouble spotting her, here’s an image with an arrow:
Tag: Queen Bee
There She Is
Spotted in Xanadu, the Queen Bee.
The Queen
There she is, the Queen Bee, marked with a red jewel on her back so that we can tell she’s fancy, but everyone else here already knows it.
Bees: Movin’ on Up
if you’ve encountered either me or my Mama at a cocktail party in the last year you will have heard all of this and more: the first question anyone asks us when they hear we’ve started keeping bees is “when do you get the honey!?”. That is a good question. The answer is sort of complicated because the final answer is “Maybe never, or perhaps in October?”. A little explanation: bees make honey for themselves, to nom nom nom through the winter, and you have to be sure they have enough for themselves before you take any. When you first get a hive, the bees are all in one hive body, a single box. They build out comb and store honey and the queen lays eggs and they raise their brood, growing, building up their hive until they fill up that box. Just like any growing family in a Brooklyn apartment, there’s a lot of discussion on what to do next, how to renovate, whether to move upstate. Luckily for the bees it’s possible to just double the size of the available real estate just by adding a new hive body up top. If only it were that simple for the Brooklyn brownstone (just add another one on top!). 
With the addition of a 2nd box, the bees have room to grow, to begin filling that hive body up with honey, pollen, eggs, and brood. Then when/if they have that hive body filled up, then you can add another, smaller box to the hive called a “honey super” and that’s extra, that’s gravy, that’s honey. We might not get that this year, we might not get that ever, but as of now we’re about halfway there. Two weeks ago we added the second hive bodies, and last weekend, after my great uncle Tall Paul’s 94th birthday party, Mama and I came home and did a late afternoon hive-inspection to see how the hives, Shangri-la+Xanadu, were doing. Shangri-la is always busier, always has a scrum of bees outside in the late afternoon, while Xanadu is a little mellower, her bees coming zagging in backlit in the afternoon sun heavy with loads of pollen and nectar. It’s almost impossible to tell what they’re up to until you open up the hive, and we’ve been consistently surprised. They’ve both started building out comb in their new additions, but Xanadu (quiet thunder) has stepped it up, is already putting away honey and is growing fast. The glistening comb in this picture is full of almost-ready honey, and the white capped comb at the top is honey stored and ready to go.
Mama took the top picture, I took the middle two, and Daddy (getting very close in just his shirtsleeves!) took the last one. Love+Honey indeed.
Save your Bees for a Rainy Day
Actually, TODAY was the day. Mama and I went out to the east side of town to pick up our two nucs from a very sweet beekeeper named Jacob who I immediately wanted to set up all of my friends with (laaaaaadies? he breeds his own queens!). You can see our two nuc boxes resting on top of the two hive bodies above. A “nuc”, or nucleus hive, is a short box containing a fully-functioning mini-hive, five frames (as opposed to the 10 in a standard hive) of bees who have already drawn out and built the wax comb every aspect of their lives is based on, who have already been storing honey and pollen in those combs, and a beautiful queen painted with a red dot who has already been diligently laying brood to make more bees to go off and harvest the sweet nectars that are flowing as we speak. Last night, we strapped down the two long, audibly buzzing, rectangular boxes to the back of our little pickup and began the hour long trek home. When we got back, not only was it dark (ok for bee move-in day) it was also raining (NOT ok for bee move-in day). So we had to put the bees under cover and wait for the morning to move them in. When we woke up, the pent-up bees were making so much heat trying to cool down their plugged up hive, it fogged up my camera lens, air hot to the touch being beaten out of any vent hole by the flapping of 40,000 wings.
We puffed them with smoke to calm them down, then sprayed them with sugar water to zuzz them up and then moved them, slowly and surely, frame by frame, from their temporary cardboard hutches to their forever-homes. They immediately took up ancient established positions- some moved to the empty frames to start exploring, some situated themselves at the door of the hive, fanning their wings with a special perfume to let any sister-bees know that this was home, so come on in, and some of them alit on the dewey honeysuckle nearby to cool off after a hot night in cardboard city. Needless to say, after our very first time handling our very own bees, meeting our very own beauties, Mama and I are two very happy beekeepers.
Feather By Feather 