June 17, 2022
We built our itinerant bee swarm a very nice home of their own.
We opted for a “Horizontal Hive”, which is a bit different than the ubiquitous American “Langstroth” hive. The horizontal hive is popular in Russia, Ukraine, and the northern parts of France, and is designed more with the bee than the beekeeper in mind. Its proponents advocate a hands-off approach to beekeeping, allowing the bees to live as naturally as possible. It appeals to my inclination to let nature be my guide, instead of constantly fighting to dominate it.
We will likely never get the volume of honey the more sophisticated Langstroth hive can produce, but that’s okay, Anne and I are more interested in having the bees thrive, than we are with producing honey.
Transferring the swarm to their new home was an enormous personal triumph for me, as it required that I ignore every fiber of my being which sent me strong warnings to drop everything and run. Just the thought of opening the swarm box and transferring thousands of bees to their new hive filled me with such trepidation I considered giving up the moment I started. My fears, however, were thoroughly and completely unfounded.
I’d always heard the secret to working with bees was to “smoke them” which I thought meant creating huge plumes of billowing smoke - to daze and confuse them. In fact, though, all a honeybee needs is to smell a gentle waft of smoke and it becomes completely pacified. It’s nothing short of magic (or a few million years of evolution).
When honeybees smell smoke, they assume that their hive is about to be destroyed by a forest fire and the entire colony immediately begins to make preparations to leave the hive in search of a new home. The first such preparation the colony makes before it swarms, is to consume as much honey as it can so it will have the reserves it needs to survive the ensuing period of hivelessness. Their fixation on eating honey is to the exclusion of everything else, including guarding their hive from intruders like me. As soon as I sent a series of gentle clouds of smoke in their direction, they all became completely preoccupied and totally docile, and I was able to easily transfer them into their new home.
The more time I spend watching our bees, the more common ground I discover we have. I, too, spend much of my day preoccupied with thoughts of food, and if I am packing for a journey of any length, foremost in my mind is “What about snacks?” In fact, if my house was on the verge of being consumed by a forest fire, there’s a good chance that I also would run back inside to make a sandwich. My friends and family may find my legendary preoccupation with snacks amusing, but I now suspect that it may simply be that I am extremely well adapted, highly evolved, and perhaps, part honeybee.