Hive-Mind

Good news via Boing Boing today for my plan to use bees as secret assassins. You see, I’ve been spending long nights laboring over my proof of concept implementation of a beehive-based burglar alarm system. In this sytem, a hive of bees would be positioned over a doorway such that the bees could come and go to the outside at their whim but not to the inside…that is, until an unsuspecting burglar or other ne’er-do-well tries to break down the door. Then, the beehive bottom falls open over their heads and releases my 20,000+ attack bees, who sting the hell out of the unsuspecting fool.

Well, the thing about my beehive-based burglar alarm system (patent pending, mister, so don’t even try it!) is that it would ineffective if I wanted to undertake some larger goal, such as assassinating the pope. Now, please people, do not get the wrong idea. I don’t actually want to assassinate the pope, despite his unconscionable opinions on homosexuality, contraception and abortion, any more than I want to assassinate the president, no matter how sure his incompetence is responsible for thousands of needless deaths or that he is damning the planet to irreversible climate change by ignoring the growing threat of the Greenhouse Effect.

No, my point is that if someone were more inclined to take matters into their own hands, it’s a difficult problem. The Pope travels around in his Popemobile, and the president always has a screen of security guards in front of him, so if someone did want to harm one of these guys, it would be really hard. Unless, that is, you are an army of trained attack bees! Oh, sure, you laugh, but you won’t be laughing when you learn that scientists at the University of Cambridge have trained bees to recognize human faces!

First, the scientists paired up the faces with a sugary treat. Then, later, they found that the bees could pick out the particular faces they were trained on, coming back looking for their treat. As the scientists didn’t report what happened when they didn’t find the promised honey goodness, I am free to speculate that they stung the hell out of those smug fool’s faces! Don’t believe me? Read about it!

So, anyway, a lot of people ask me what my bees do during the winter. Usually, I tell people that they are smoking cigarettes and playing cards. Really, they mostly just huddle together for warmth and wait for Spring. Well, all that is about to change…

The numbers are in and this year was a bumper crop. This year’s honey harvest weighed in at 190 lbs, filling a bit over 3 five gallon buckets. That, my friend, is a lot of honey.

What am I going to do with all that honey you may ask? Well, obviously I’ll put a lot of it in pint jars and give to friends and family (yes, you can have one, remind me next time you see me if I don’t have one in my hand for you), but I had another idea, as well. My friend Scott Simpson recently opened a restaurant (The Jones) with Jason Jones, a sous chef for The Herbfarm, one of the jewels of the Pacific Northwest. Michelle and I had drinks and appetizers there last week and the food was out of hand phenomenal, I had to stop chewing to just let the waves of pleasure wash subside.

Anyway, Scott said that if I brought him some honey, he’d put it on the menu. So I got to thinking how cool it would be to ask Jason to come up with a dish or dishes that week that would showcase the honey, then get a group of folks together and have dinner there, and enjoy the fruits of the girls’ labor. I dropped Scott and e-mail to see what he thought. I’m excited.

Sorry I don’t have more of a story about the honey harvest itself. Unlike last year, when Julie harvested it herself, this year I just dropped it off with Terry Beedle and had him take care of it for me. Terry’s quite a character, and I had the opportunity to bend a piece of rebar with my neck the same way Julie did last year, but otherwise the adventure was uneventful. Drive to Duvall, drop off boxes, drive back next day, pick up lots of honey and boxes of empty comb.

From Inhabitat, I learned that Herman Miller, the makers of those cool-ass chairs, also make honey. Well, I don’t think they secrete it and store it in wax themselves, but they have bees do the work for them. Apparently, they opened some ultra-eco factory, planted a bunch of flowers and gave some tours to the gaping masses, when a bunch of paper wasps (who we hate), showed up and started making trouble. After a quick consult with an environmental specialist, Herman Miller brought in 12 hives of bees and set them up around their factory. The flowers began blooming bum hard and the wasps found their food source stolen out from under them by the prodigous girls. As a side benefit, they end up harvesting something like 5,000 lbs of honey a year. And a bunch of cool-ass chairs.

I know y’all are just as fascinated with beekeeping as I am, so you will drop everything you are doing to read this article about how some bees burn their enemies to death by surrounding them and wiggling themselves to generate heat. I’m going to show the article to my bees to see if they can learn the trick. I’m pretty sure that next year’s colony is going to spinning little bee poi or building comb in the shape of a Firepod.

Well, this will be one of the last posts of the season, and we shall exit with a bang. The air is getting nippy, the flowers folding their petals, so it’s time to remove the honey supers for extraction and tighten up the hives for winter.

When I headed out on Saturday, I expected to have to find Hive 1 thriving, Hive 2 weak but functional. I expected to have to remove the honey supers, then remove each from from each of the boxes and shake all the bees off of it, so I could have bee-less comb to extract (the girls would only return to the main hive after I shook them off). I expected to see some chilly but hearty bees coming and going.

What I found was a riot, looting, and a two hives of bees making a last, brave stand against an onslaught of yellowjackets.

Yellowjackets are not bees. Let me be perfectly clear about this. Yes, they are yellow and black striped, much like bees. Yes, they are flying insects. Yes, like bees, they sting. But no, they are not bees.

Bees are softly furred, industrious, communal workers who look after one another and build colonies that last years upon years. Bees collect nectar and pollen from flowers and store it away to eat and to feed to their young during the long winter months. Bees will sting in self-defense, but, because they leave their stinger behind, they die when they sting and are thus careful about their use of their terrible weapon.

Yellowjackets are nasty, mean-spirited wasps who build their nests from wood-pulp, not wax. Each colony starts the year anew from a single queen, with no sense of contact or history of their previous generations. They eat bugs and other meat that they can lay their greedy little mandibles on, hovering around garbage cans and other foul refuse. They can sting again and again, and do so with malice and relish.

And these yellowjackets, not content to hover menancingly about my backdeck dinners, not content to buzz around the soda-sticky fingers of innocent children, these despicable vermin were assaulting my hives in force, buzzing in and out of the home that my bees had so painstakingly and lovingly built, dashing in past the desperate defenders, gorging and feasting on the winter supplies they found therein, then waltzing, fat and bloated, back out to beat their wives or vote Republican or do whatever it is they do for entertainment.

The horror!

OK, so I got to work. First, I removed the honey supers. I was very pleased to find that they were almost completely abandoned already in both hives, the girls having moved down into the brood chambers (the bottom two boxes that we leave for the girls to overwinter in). There were hefty food supplies in the brood chambers, so they should have no want of food for my harvest.

Unfortunately, while Hive 1 still had lots of eggs, it appears that Hive 2 is still either without a queen, or stuck with a virgin queen, for the only brood I saw were drones. As you may remember from previous posts, only queen bees can lay worker (female) bee eggs. The worker bees, if they are queenless, can lay eggs, but only drones (males), who don’t do any work and can’t lay any kind of eggs. Given this, the population without a laying queen will eventually dwindle to nothing.

This was a bit puzzling to me, as I had clearly seen a hatched queen cell when I was in Hive 2 in July, but who knows…maybe the mating season was over, maybe she died, maybe she’s gay.

In any case, I removed the honey supers (which will also reduce the size of the area they need to keep warm over winter) and added entrance reducers, pieces of 1″ x 1″ wood that sits across their front door and makes it smaller and thus less windy and, more importantly to the immediate situation, easier to defend.

Ah, it was awesome to watch the tides turn on Hive 1. The girls of Hive 1 practically linked arms and set about driving back the invading yellowjackets. The beastly wasps would zoom in and immediately a burly bitch of a bee would march out to him. In most cases, a quick shove from one of the girls was enough to send the foul scavenger packing, but in a few cases, it took a bit more to get the message across: this place is closed. On a few occasions in the half hour or so I watched, I saw three bees jump on top of one of these heartless invaders and put the wasp into a little bee-sized kick circle, the three of them piled on top in a buzzing mass. They’d almost immediately tumble off the front stoop to the ground below, where I’d lose sight of them, only the death cries of overwhelmed yellowjacket audible.

Hive 2 was not faring quite as well. The girls there were heartned by the reduced entrance, but were still outgunned by the neverending onslaught of yellowjackets. I tipped my ear in close and could practically here the flustered and overwhelmed bouncer bees trying to hold down the fort: “Ummm..excuse me…you can’t go in there, it’s closed…aaah, no, excuse me, please don’t go in there or…shit…OK, he can go in, but it’s closed now, you gotta…oh, OK, I guess you’re with your friend there, umm, OK I guess, but that’s the last one…OOF! Seriously guys, I’m gonna have to call the manager if…hey, stop that, you can’t eat that, we’re saving it for…oh, ah, OK but that’s the last one.” Poor girls. I doubt they’ll make it through the winter.

I shot a bit of video of the yellowjackets trying to infiltrate. The first scenes are of the yellowjackets being repulsed from Hive 1. The second set of scenes is the yellowjackets attacking Hive 2 a bit more successfully (watch for one the sneaky sons of bitches sneaking in). The last scene is one of the only full on yellowjacket vs. bee tussles I caught on film. Links to my film below, but really, if you want to see some killer hornet vs. bee action, watch this incredible National Geographic movie. Warning: contains scenes of graphic insect on insect violence.