(The new virgin queen of East Egg, August 2018)
I picked up my first hive late in the evening. East Egg came from a Randy Oliver nucleus, or mini-colony, bred for both mite resistance and gentle disposition. I’d put my order in months earlier, the day that Trump was elected, an act I didn’t realize then as defiance. That I’d support matriarchy in any way I could, including a colony of bees.
What I wanted then was solace. I also wanted distraction. I wanted to fulfill a lifelong goal of keeping bees. I’d always wanted bees, but my ex husband had been resistant. But he was gone–he’d left me, and with that went any excuses I had for not allowing myself the space to which I deserved.
Even then, it took me a couple years to do the research, take the classes, and order the bees so I could be well prepared to husband a hive.
The word “husband,” first recorded around the year 1000, originally meant “male head of household,” whether married, single, or widowed. “Husband” didn’t mean a married man until the year 1290. In that same year, the word “husbandry” came into being as a noun for “management of a household and its resources.” In the 1300s, the word “husbandman” came to mean a farmer or tiller of the soil–so the word “husbandry” expanded to mean farming and agriculture in general.
So here I was, for the first time in my life, husbanding. Husbanding myself. Husbanding the household. And husbanding chickens and now bees.
I was no longer a wife. And I no longer wanted to be a wife ever again.
I was going to be a husband.
The box of bees was sealed shut when I picked it up. It buzzed. It was full of life. Heavy. We carried it carefully–CAREFULLY–into the car, and drove it carefully–CAREFULLY–home. And we placed it on a hive stand. We unsealed it. We walked away.
The next morning, I couldn’t help but peek in. I lifted the cover off the box. There they were–five frames of bees, surrounded by an additional five empty frames that the bees would fill with more brood (baby bees), honey, and pollen in the coming weeks and months. I named it East Egg. It grew. It produced honey. It kept mite counts below 6 throughout the year, without any intervention or treatment. It was so strong going into the winter later that year, that it emerged this Spring with a catastrophic mite count of 46–it had robbed a bunch of hives and brought home mites.
I treated it with an organic treatment. And the mite counts dropped again. I cherished its magnificent queen. Took pictures of her whenever I spotted her. Sometimes the bees stung me–and while I suffered from large localized reactions, I didn’t really much care. I loved what that hive meant to me, and I kept at beekeeping. I was a husband.
I was helping bees grow and prosper. I was learning about the different roles of the female workers–how they start as nurse bees, move to cleaning the hive and caring for the queen, then move to guarding the hive, until the final phase of foraging. How tidy–that the last stage of work took them out of the hive, where most of them would end up dying.
The few males–the drones–I ignored. They didn’t sting. They were there to serve the purpose of passing the genetics of the hive on. Nothing more. Every time I talked about bees or opened up the hive, any worry I had–dissipated.
When the apple trees blossom around the Spring equinox–bees are prime to swarm. Swarming is a way of reproducing, as half the hive leaves with the queen to a new home. The remaining bees raise their own queen from the eggs left behind. But in the city, you don’t want to do this. To be more exact, your neighbors would not appreciate you doing this.
And also–why let your bees swarm when you can create an artificial swarm (a split) and make sure to give them a good home?
I split East Egg. In other words, I took a few frames out of East Egg (two frames of capped brood, one frame of eggs, one frame of honey, and the rest empty frames) and put them into a new box, and thus a new hive. This split had bees and eggs and capped larvae–and no queen.
Without a queen, the worker bees made a queen from the eggs. East Egg now had an offspring of sorts, and the queen of East Egg, a daughter. She was a rare ebony colored queen. I named the new hive split Bree, and she went to live in Sonoma County.
But then–tragedy. East Egg started to dwindle. It had been a very very healthy and large colony until May. Five boxes tall! A full box of honey going into Summer.
But somehow, East Egg never capped the honey. I was so busy with other hives and a rare vacation to Hawaii, that I neglected to go down into the deep box to double check brood–even after I didn’t spot any eggs in the second box.
Something happened to the queen right after the split. I know this now, because I made a chart of the hives I managed this year, according to their growth. You see, East Egg started taking a dive after I made Bree in April. But I didn’t notice.
I saw the queen, but didn’t notice anything wrong–and because she was alive, I figured all was okay. Here she is, on May 27, post-split.
Doesn’t she look okay? Right? Look closer. There’s a mite on her shoulder. I remember making a note to check her again the next time I opened up the hive.
By now, she’s stopped laying–reading my notes now, I know.
You see, bees normally supersede a failing queen. I often call my bee colonies “The Borg,” because they work as a cohesive unit. The queen is beholden to the workers, and the workers are beholden to the queen. The worker bees build a queen cup if they sense something wrong. They raise their own queen. And the queen usually lets that happen, knowing her own demise. But not this queen. She tore apart every queen cup.
She didn’t let them make another queen–and so I thought all was okay. But in June (June 16 to be exact), I took a closer look. There she is, the queen. Looking injured–see her peeling thorax?
In the end, I had to kill the queen, when I saw how injured she was. It was awful. Later, someone asked if I’d preserved her–dunked her in some alcohol. And if I ever have to kill another queen bee, I’ll do that. But no. I stepped on her in an inglorious end.
Out of loss and setback comes opportunity.
So I decided to use this as an opportunity to purchase a Randy Oliver queen.
I bought a Randy Oliver queen. Placed her in the hive where the candy plug would be eaten away in a few days. The candy plug never got eaten away by the workers. Strange. I called my mentor, and she said to go ahead and remove the candy plug. I did. And the bees? They killed her.
I had no idea at the time, but the hive had laying workers. At the time, I thought the queen was newly injured just a week or so earlier. I thought the queen had only recently stopped laying eggs. (A queen can lay about 1500 eggs/day). But in hindsight, she had stopped laying in May.
Laying worker is when a hive goes queen-less for long enough (3 weeks or longer), the worker bees themselves start laying eggs. They do this, because they do not smell queen pheromone, and they do not smell egg pheromone.
The eggs laying workers lay are unfertilized, so they are haploid, and become drones. In a sense, this is the way a dying hive still sends off its genetics into the world. The brood pattern is uneven and spotty, unlike when a queen lays–she lays in a solid swath of eggs.
And so for the next 6 weeks, I put in a frame of eggs from another hive, hoping that the smell of fresh eggs would suppress the laying worker situation.
East Egg persisted. I inserted frame after frame of eggs from Tangerine Hive each week. I think I put in a total of 8 frames of eggs over six weeks. (Tangerine Hive, meanwhile, had a gorgeous queen that was a laying machine).
It persisted. Like, nose above water, persisted. It got invaded by wax moths. I took frames and put them in the freezer to kill the larvae, and substituted clean frames.
We kept going. All I wanted to do was to keep this hive alive through the winter. It was important to me. I was a husband. I was husbanding. I was helping matriarchy survive.
By 6 weeks, East Egg was assaulted by robbing bees. Strong hives will rob other hives. They will send great numbers of bees to a vulnerable hive and rob it of its honey. And oftentimes, the robbing bees will kill the bees inside the hive. I imagine East Egg did this last winter to other hives.
There was a cloud of bees above East Egg–I wondered if it was some sort of odd swarm. I didn’t think of robbing, because I’m pretty diligent about keeping a robbing screen (it keeps outsider bees from going in the hive, while allowing the home bees to go in and out freely) on my hives. Out of curiosity, I rushed outside in a bee suit. Despite the robbing screen, the hive got robbed out through a tiny notch in the inner hive cover. I hadn’t even considered that notch. It was a tiny notch.
And there, on the ground, was a small pile of bees. Inside that pile: a new queen.
East Egg had managed to make a new queen–had managed to break laying worker. As a beekeeper, I learned that persistence can pay off. That laying worker might take 6 weeks to suppress. That an additional hive is of great help. That bees need community. That a notched inner hive in Berkeley is a dangerous thing.
As a beekeeper–or husband of bees, I’m trying to unravel this mystery. I refrained from talking about East Egg all season, because I felt I had let down those bees. I felt I had been a bad husband. But in the end, I never left them. And they never left me. They fought until the end. And so did I.
The top picture–is a picture of the virgin queen. She’s tinier than a mated queen. She was the last one standing, because the female workers protected her, clustered around her. I’m standing too, because of all the women in my life.
This is so fascinating and beautiful.