March 10, 2023
I miss our bees! Our ransacked hive should be waking up just about now. It’s not though. It stands completely empty and silent - devoid of everything but our very best intentions. We cleaned up the mess the bear left behind, put all the pieces back together and are in the process of building a bear proof electric fence.
We could purchase “replacement bees,” and have them shipped from some faraway place – but what’s the fun in that? Somewhere nearby, there’s another honeybee colony that’s just waking up, and though they don’t know it yet, I’m sure they’ll be joining us soon!
As the daytime temperatures rise into the 50’s, it’s finally getting warm enough for the bees to briefly leave the hive. Though they can’t stay out very long, or fly very far, it’s enough for them to relieve their mighty bee bowels. Bees don’t defecate inside the hive, or leave it all winter long, so their initial “cleansing flight” must be very welcomed indeed!
A healthy colony, with a summertime population of 50,000 bees, will winter over with only 15,000 workers and the queen. A third of that wintertime population won’t make it through to spring. As the weather warms up, the queen awakens from her torpor, and the surviving crew gets busy preparing for a new season of growth. The comb, now almost empty of the honey that sustained them through the winter, needs to be refurbished to the queen’s satisfaction so she can start laying eggs again. Slowly, at first, she begins to rebuild the numbers, laying only female eggs and then slowly adding the male eggs in time for mating season. In full production, she lays up to 2,000 eggs a day, and the population inside the hive begins to swell.
When the hive starts to get crowded, the colony will choose to swarm. It is in fact a honeybee colony’s ultimate goal to reproduce itself by swarming. The queen, after laying her replacement, leaves the existing hive with half the workers in search of a new home. One colony becomes two. It’s either genius or magic, I’m not sure which.
Scouts will travel for miles looking for the perfect place to start over, and that’s where our best intentions truly shine. We put our swarm boxes in just the right trees at just the right height. We made sure they were clean and dry and then we rubbed the inside of them with wax and propolis. To a passing scout they should smell exactly like home. If we could bake chocolate chip cookies inside the boxes we would, but to a honeybee the fragrance of propolis and wax is probably even more enticing.
Surely the scouts will notice that we have everything they could possibly want. We take care to never mow their clover too short, we have lots of native plants and we never, ever spray. But what if the scouts don’t notice us? Maybe, just to be sure, a personal ad on a dating website, or local paper is in order. Something like;
Two HWF (hard working farmers) seek queen and entourage to rebuild and flourish.
Lots of clover and native plants.
Recently rebuilt hive, move-in condition, and a brand new 50,000 volt bear proof fence.