Forensic Beekeeping...Meanwhile the S.W.A.T. Team's on Standby...

Finally--my tiller is up and running, and I'm playing catchup with the spring turning. I'm thankful to have my hands now guiding a machine instead of handling the shovel to turn the soil as I had to do in the sweet pea patch. It seems just as one problem is solved here on our one slim acre, another is sure to take its place. Is that what's called "karma?"

I'm tilling away on a warm afternoon when I'm suddenly confronted by a rogue honeybee. This pugnacious little lady was not about to practice social distancing, either. She was in my face, up close and personal, ricocheting off my ball cap, right there under my nose. When one is operating a machine that might, if he's not careful, grind up one foot...or both, distractions are not a good thing. Now this beekeeper has been around the block a time or two and a rogue bee is nothing new. Sometimes I deal with the cantankerous bee mano a mano. (An error, perhaps, as the opponent is female.) "Ok, then, let's have it out. Give me your best shot." And I back up against a shrub, tree, or the woodpile to protect my posterior against sneak attacks. We go at it then, my ballcap my weapon and you know what hers is. I usually swat my way into the winner's circle by knocking her to the ground and stomping her, but sometimes she slips through and scores a direct hit. And that is the end of it usually.

Usually. But not always. Once in a while an entire hive will turn rogue on you, and instead of contending with just one malcontent, you'll suddenly be under siege by a half dozen or more. Then it's either retreat or finish your outside chores wearing your bee veil. (If you've ever tried gardening while wearing a veil, you'll know how that works.) Mother Nature works in mysterious ways and for some reason a honeybee queen's genetics set the temperament of a hive. In an earlier post I referenced what beekeepers refer to as a "hot" hive (The wicked queen is dead). The solution is to remove that queen's wayward genetics from the rest of the crew and replace her with milder, gentler royalty. By the time the new queen's first brood cycle is complete, the hive has taken on a more amenable personality.

If a beekeeper does routine inspections of his "flock," he's certainly aware which hive, if any, is a hot one. A hive of such ilk makes no attempt to mask its nastiness. A beekeeper and his charges must coexist peacefully. I'm not the only one who lives on our one slim acre and there is the occasional visitor. In short, who's to be master of the place: me or the bees?

The rogue bee has brought reinforcements twice during my tiller sessions. I took out a couple but there are so, so many more; they'd just keep on coming. The problem is I've been working my bee yard all spring and the ladies and I have gotten along just swimmingly. Now, for some reason, the dynamics have changed and I asked myself why? Mine is a low budget enterprise: I can't afford to hire a PI to look into the issue and have to sort through it myself: DIY forensic beekeeping, if you will. So what's changed, I ask:

1. I haven't operated the tiller this spring until recently; the machine appears to incite them.
2. I have new bees on the place, one three pound package and their new queen.
3. Two additional queens, also, in two nucleus hives I've added to the yard.
4. All the colonies have ramped up their populations: many, many more bees on the place.

I fired up the tiller on a cool, cloudy day and the bees left me alone. Understandable as weather like that few foragers venture out. But summer is coming and with it warmer, cloudless days...and I'm not about to till in the dead of night. So while I figure things out, I guess I'll have to call in the S.W.A.T. team: just me and my ball cap.

Wildflowers between April Showers...

Last week we left our one slim acre and traveled east to lend a nurturing hand to my Aged P (an aged parent, as per Charles Dickens' Great Expectations). These days our ninety-six year old mother needs some assistance and my brothers and sisters and I have been coordinating shifts. During my five day shift while my mother took her midday nap I would take some exercise. My midday walks led me up a familiar stretch of country road I used to walk as a boy back in the day I didn't have a lift to town five miles away. It was a lonely road those days, a busted up stretch of pavement where snow banks piled up roadside in winter and sweet clover grew in summer higher than my head. But no one was a stranger those days. And even if you were, drivers would still lazily lift a hand and  forefinger in greeting as they leisured by. Many memories as I walked along. It was this stretch of road where I was adopted by a yellow and orange tabby kitten I named Winnifred although Winnie, I later learned, was not a "Winnie" but a "Fred."

Years later I traveled the same stretch by bicycle, a boy's full-sized Columbia 36"wheel bike my parents purchased second hand from a party in a neighboring town. The money most likely came from my allowance but I have no memory of it. In its day the Columbia was a top of the line model, replete with a buzzer style horn that never buzzed and a headlight that never lit. The balloon tires tended to go rogue on sandy stretches of road and throw its rider in the dust. Our relationship was one fraught with flat tires and a considerable amount of walk and push.

My walk took me a mile or so up a gentle grade to where the road crossed a canyon in which I hunted groundhogs in the spring and quail in the fall during my nimrod days. The day before I noticed a scattering of early sunflowers (American balsam root) on a west facing slope, their cheerful, golden faces announcing spring.

When I was a boy and the sunflowers bloomed, I would hunt the hills for spring wildflowers, gather some, take them home to my mother, and present her with a wilted fistful of spring. Today six decades later the sunflowers beckoned again, an invitation to search the sagebrush slope for the first wildflowers of spring. Why not, I thought, as I spied a game trail that tracked down slope to the roadside. I struggled up the trail, grasping branches of sage for support, pulling my way uphill. My feet seemed to catch on every little twig, wander into every badger hole, trip me up on uneven ground. Stopping often to catch my breath, I stumbled my way through the brush to the patches of sunflowers, peered beneath clumps of sage for sprigs of new grass where I knew the wildflowers would be. And there they were, not many, as it was a bit early for them, my favorite wildflowers, their beak-like blossoms perched on fragile stems:"shooting stars," (Dodecatheon pulchellim) our favorite name for them although other gatherers called them bird beaks or bills because of the dark purple, pointed bases extending from swept back pink petals. These striking little dainties belong to the primrose family. A careful search of the area yielded only a couple dozen, far from the days of fistfuls. I had hoped to find delicate "baby faces"(Lithophragma glabrum), tiny white doilies with reddish navels but they were nowhere to be found. I did not want to make the two mile return trip on all fours, so I quit my search and stumbled back the way I'd come. Just as I was about to negotiate the game trail descent, I happened upon a few stalks of bluebells (Mertensia longiflora) which I plucked and added to my sparse handful....

Which I delivered to my mother a half hour later. To see the smile on her face was well worth my struggle in the sagebrush. I'm fairly certain my fistful of spring reminded her of the wildflowers she sought and plucked herself when she was a girl. For this gatherer the flowers were those of memory, too, but if I told you I gathered them with the ease I did in childhood, instead of from a seasoned three score and fifteen years, it would be a bald-faced lie.