Sculpin

On Tuesday afternoon, I watched a beehive being installed at the Picardo P-Patch. It’s amazing to watch somebody dump several thousand bees out of a box. The sound is tremendous. I got a lot closer than I was expecting to!

I’d heard of “re-queening” but didn’t know what exactly it involved, so it was interesting to watch Thane the bee guy put the queen in. It’s not the queen from the original hive, so it takes a few days for the bees to get used to her. She started in a little screened wooden box with a stopper, and he replaced the stopper with a mini-marshmallow. By the time the bees have chewed through the marshmallow, they will have accepted her.

After they’d settled down from the indignity of being shaken out of a box, you could see the newly-installed worker bees hanging out in front of the hive fanning the air vigorously. Thane said they were sending out pheromones that say, “This is home!”

It was during the bee dumping that I became exquisitely aware that my borrowed beekeeper’s mask was a little problematic. It had gotten severely squashed in storage, and I wasn’t quite able to unsquash it, so it kept touching my ears, which suddenly seemed like landing pads for angry bees. But while there were a few folks who got stung that day, I wasn’t one of them.

Later on I retreated a ways and took off that problematic mask. It’s weird to get bees stuck in your hair. They seem really, really loud. It takes a couple of seconds for them to untangle themselves. A few times they ran right into my sunglasses. POCK!

Thane’s doing some sort of project with a bunch of kids from U. Prep. “My goal is to get one new beekeeper a year,” he said; he sounds very committed to small-scale apiculture. So he looked intrigued by my interest in the bees, and I’m sure intrigued by his interest in teaching beekeeping. I’ve been interested in beekeeping for — sheesh, must be coming up on twelve years now, but there was always something keeping me from getting involved. My concerns these days have been (a) would I get freaked out by thousands of agitated bees? and (b) can I physically perform the required movements? But in fact I felt cautious but unfreaked, and the Picardo bee yard is a very handy place for me to further acclimate to the presence of tens of thousands of bees. As for (b), Thane has some possible technical solutions for my problems with lifting heavy things.

Thane mentioned some neat art one of his friends made. The guy’s a ceramic artist; he made a big bowl, glazed it, and put it upside-down on top of the hole in the top of the hive. It sort of functioned like a super, in a way. The bees came up and made a fantastic city of comb in it. At the end of the year he took it off and turned it upside down, shooed out the bees, and there was his art.

More bee art: a bee-made vase. (Updated to add even more bee-altered art.)

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