Among my many, many duties in this life, I am the house beekeeper. Something happened to me on Monday which I’d never experienced before. One minute, my hive looked like it always does, with Jesus and his pet bear cheerfully keeping watch over my 9,000 honeybees, as a few of them flitted in and out of the hive.
Then, out of the blue…………HOLY GOD ALMIGHTY!!!!!!!!!
I’ll just cut to the chase and explain what happened, because it took me a bit of research and consultation to untangle this event.
Simply stated, the hive was too successful and it got too crowded. More baby bees and honey than room would permit. I’m a beekeeper, yes, but a damned amateur, and I’m still learning some basics. Evidently, once the hive is well established, it’s important to add another brood box so there’s tons of room for the colony to get bigger and stronger. I had basically become a slumlord.
If you’ve read even a little about bees, you know they are positively ingenious in how they structure their society and how they behave themselves. The same applies to this swarming behavior.
- They collectively realize it’s too damn crowded;
- They stop feeding the queen so that she can lose enough weight to fly again;
- They also harass her whenever she’s trying to deposit eggs so that she lays fewer, and somehow those that she does lay have a good chance of becoming the new queen;
- Once they’ve got everything all figured out, half of them ditch the place. It’s a miracle to me how they figure out how to split the hive, but somehow or another, 50% of them, and the queen, say “see ya, Tim!” and head off for some other part of Palo Alto to set up shop, leaving me with a much less crowded hive.
I also learned I need to stop being so shy with taking honey, especially now that winter has passed, so even though we don’t use much honey, I did so. It’s only about 15% of what was available, but it’s over seven pounds of the stuff, and way more than enough.
