Okay. Hopefully I have gotten all the cheese out of my system so no one will have to endure anymore crappy bee-related puns. I like to apologize, yet refuse to actually change anything. This blog is basically a journal for my own benefit, but I figured I'd put it on-line so the grant-giving-powers-that-be could check up on me fairly easily and also just in case anyone wanted to read it.
So, if you are reading this, you are at least remotely interested in my research project (which still has no funding, but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. Ha! It's like I can't help myself. Sorry. Again.). If you are reading this and have no idea what my research project is about, you obviously just love reading about me. Either of those reasons for you being here are fine with me, especially the latter. For those of you who simply love me-long time!-I am going to learn all about some bees and beekeeping. I will be visually surveying and mapping mine reclamation areas in Eastern Kentucky specifically focusing on conditions that are ideal for beekeeping. Bees will serve as environmental monitors, providing data on chemical residues and contamination in the area as well as providing a means for sustainable economic development in the region.
Mine reclamation areas are, aside from being an affront to all that is good and right with the world, vast tracts of land that have been leveled during the process of coal extraction and then re-seeded with some fescue and poplar trees. According to the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act* of 1977 establishes criteria for reclaiming the land that have been laid to waste by the coal industry. In general, this means they are required to restore the land to it's "approximate contour" (give or take a contour interval...I don't think it's possible to describe what this means without getting angry. I'm talking Hulk angry.), stabilize and redistribute soil and topsoil, and plant some stuff. Anyway, now it's crap-land shaped like some kind of crazy big step pyramid that nobody uses. So the thought is that maybe the land could be used for beekeeping, which has fairly low start-up costs and could provide people in the region with an environmentally sustainable source of income which would help them transition away from a coal-based economy in the far, far future. The far, far future when coal runs out. And, People, it will run out.
*but everyone just refers to it as SMCRA or smack-rah, as in "It's a smack-rah in the face what coal companies have done to the mountains of Appalachia."
That's basically the background of this project. However, I know not a damn thing about bees, so I will be working with a wonderful and super-smart lady, Tammy Horn, out at her beehives for the next year-ish. Friday, June 1, 2007 was my first experience working with bees and it was actually pretty cool. We drove out to her family's farm in Versailles (for those of you not from Kentucky, it's pronounce "vuhr-sails", we're not uppity like the French) to check on the hives she was left by her grandfather. They are older hives full of crotchety, possibly aggressive bees so she warned me in advance that they were atypical. I think she was afraid that after this experience I would never want to work with the bees again. I'm not really afraid of bees, which works in my favor because bees, like dogs, can smell fear. So, while I wasn't nervous to begin with, she actually started to make me a little apprehensive about my decision to hang out with thousands and thousands of bees on a regular basis. As it turns out, there was no problem, I was more worried about hurting the bees than being stung.
Lighting the smoker was more nerve wracking than the actual bees. It's very unsettling to have flames suddenly shoot up at your head, especially when it is covered in materials that could totally catch on fire and have been secured in place with 72 zippers and 800 pieces of velcro. While this mesh-hood-jacket-mask ensemble is probably only 70% impervious to bees, it has the added luxuries of taking half a lifetime to put on and take off, and being stiflingly hot. Cocooning yourself in heavy canvas-like material in 90 degree Kentucky heat is, in hindsight, monumentally stupid, but you still manage to appreciate it when a kamikaze bee is prevented from attacking your eyeball.
The first two hives we checked were near the blackberry field. There were four colonies at this location, but we were only checking the two hives that she had recently re-queened. Re-queening a hive can often make the colony stronger and more docile. The first hive had two supers atop the brood box. (Each super contains about 10 frames on which the bees build combs for laying eggs and storing honey. They can way as much as 70lbs when full. The brood box is always on the bottom because it is larger and this is primarily where egg laying and queen preening happens.) The top super at hive one contained honey storage, and we found the new queen in the second super. We were able to see that she was laying eggs and the colony appeared to be healthy. At this hive I learned how to differentiate the three types of bees within a colony-queen, workers, drones-visually and in order to become more comfortable with the bees I was told to pick up one of the drones. Believe it or not, this is the part you actually want to read so you can make fun of me later. This is not verbatim, but the conversation went something like this:
T: Whenever you pick up a bee, you want to grab it by it's thorax.
Me: You can pick up a bee?!
T: Of course. It doesn't hurt them if you're gentle. Go ahead and grab one of the drones. It'll help you feel more comfortable with the bees.
This took me several tries because a) it feels weird and it seems mean to pick something up by its head, and b) I was afraid I would hurt or kill the bee-this turned out to be so far from the what the bee actually experienced.
T: Go on. Drones don't have stingers.
Me: (I finally pick one up) That's kind of awesome. What now?
T: Set it in your hand, let it walk around.
This didn't work so well because when I put the bee down it flew off, but I wasn't absolutely sure I wanted it wandering around on me anyway because...
Me: So, so it had some, like, white stuff on it's butt. Is that like bee poop?
T: Mmm. No. It probably ejaculated when you picked it up. That's where it's penis is.
Me: *horrified stare* ....um...okay...that's...uhhhhh....ewww
And that, my friends, was probably the most interesting and oddly foul part of my first beekeeping experience. Feel free to stop reading now-unless you want to keep reading, I won't stop you-because the rest of this post is simply a record of the rest of the day.
The second hive had three supers on the brood box. We didn't find the queen until we got to the third super and we went ahead and checked the brood box as well. The colony was adjusting well to the new queen, she was laying and everything appeared to be fine. I put frames back into the supers as they were taken off and I was a little overly cautious in my frame-replacing activities which made me pretty dang slow.
The third hive was on the other side of the farm by the clover field. It was small, only one super. Upon opening the hive we saw some maggots which were feeding on the pollen Tammy had put in the hive to supplement the bees' food intake. That was pretty nasty. She tried to get them all out, but they were wiley and disgusting. This hive was created when one of the others had gotten too big and was about to swarm. Since it was new, Tammy had to reuse some older frames that weren't in the best of condition and the workers had not been cleaning or rebuilding as quickly as she had hoped. We saw a lot of drone brood, but not very many worker brood cells which may have been due to the lack of clean cells in the frames. The queen was trying to lay eggs, but was having a difficult time because of the older frames. If this colony doesn't show improvement it may have to be combined with another, stronger colony if it is going to survive.
