on swarm season
I don’t tend to worry about something bad happening to me and causing untold trauma to those around me. My lack of worry is exactly why I’m 20 feet up a ladder wearing pants that need hemming and sandals, leaning uncomfortably far to my right, scooping handfuls of bees off the trunk of a cedar tree, and plopping them unceremoniously into a Tupperware container. Their slight, hairy bodies feel soft against my hand as I try to gently sweep them free of the almond shape they have formed around a branch and each other. The tall metal ladder protests my movements with a metal groan/squeak as the crossbar digs into my upper shins. I’m trying to hold on with my legs and manoeuvre with my hands, pushing my hair back out of my eyes through my bee veil and am only partially successful. It’s hot enough that some of the hair sticks to the sweat on my forehead, which, it turns out, is handy for trapping hair and frees my vision. I fall into a rhythm: spray bees with sugar water to keep them from flying away, hang spray bottle on branch to my right, scoop top layer of bees off the swarm cluster and try to get them into the container. Then I pick up spray bottle again to spray the bees in the container to try to coax them to not fly off while I unceremoniously dump more of their sisters in with them, hook spray bottle back to the branch. After I do this a few times, I take the long trip down the ladder to empty the container into the new hive box located below me.
When the wind gusts, the branches around me sway and bend, but the bees do not move. Tightly gathered into their swarm, they cling to each other, and they won’t move unless their queen does. These trips up and down the ladder are futile if I don’t get the queen and unfortunately for me, she is up higher than I can seemingly reach. I’ve just been stung for the third time. Shrieking, I shake my hand, knocking the spray bottle to the ground as the electric burn races through my hand and into my arm. I sigh heavily. “What, you get stung?” my dad calls from below. As though there could be any other reason for someone to shriek and fling a spray bottle from twenty feet in the air. I look down and see him shaking his head, “You should wear your gloves!”
“I’d rather get stung than wear gloves and not be able to feel things properly with my hands, misplace my grip and fall of this crappy ladder and die,” I mutter, climbing back down, carefully placing my footing so I don’t lose a sandal, balancing the container of bees in one hand. “Dad, can you get the stinger out of this one?” I offer up my hand. It already feels warm. It will swell and itch annoying within the hour. Until I get the stinger out, the remainder of the bee’s venom sack, will continue to pump its poison into the space between my thumb and pointer finger—the bee herself having given her life to protect her colony. You have to scratch or scrape the stinger out. To squeeze them is to dump more venom into the wound. Back on solid ground, I plop the near-empty container onto the hive box. “Honestly, short of cutting the top of this tree, I don’t think I can get them.”
“Well,” my dad says slowly, so that it comes out as ‘we-elle’, “I’ve tried. You’ve tried. They’re near impossible to get when they’re wrapped around the trunk of a tree like that.” He gestures to the box on the ground. “They’ll all end up back in that tree before you can imagine and then they’ll fly off and be gone, poof.”
“Do you want me to try again?” I ask him, pulling my arm through the side of my veil to move my hair back under the hat portion, pushing everything backwards. Bee veils pull everything forward, including your hair, even if it’s been secured with multiple bobby pins or elastics or headbands. I am forever pushing mine backwards so I can see. I will go back up if he wants me to, but I don’t really want to. I’ve already been up and down that ladder dozens of times. I’m four stings deep at this point and my hand is already throbbing and warm. I need some allergy medication and an ice pack, neither of which will delay the inevitable swelling and itching that comes with an overactive immune system. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been stung; I hate it afresh every time. Scooping and relocating bees without the ability to get up any higher in the cedar means I’m getting stung for no reason. But the lure of capturing the swarm is too strong, so I always try.
“That’s $200 worth of bees in that tree.” Dad mutters to himself before looking at me, “maybe we should cut the tops off the cedars.” I’m not sure if this is a statement or a question.
I untie my veil and pull it over my head, “You know, it would be so much easier with two people up a tree. I just don’t have enough hands to spray the top layer and scoop them in and seal it off, while also spraying the next layer before I get stung. It’s so much harder than when they’re on a branch.”
“You’re just gonna have to grow more hands.” He says as I sling my veil over my arm and stoop to pick up the spray bottle. “And learn to wear your gloves!”
“I don’t like gloves!” I yell back over my shoulder as I trudge with my gear to the honey house to store my stuff amongst the empty frames and boxes for the next time. And then I go get some allergy medication out of my bag.
…
Swarm season usually arrives in the form of a text message accompanied by a photo. After a cool and rainy spring and a relatively wet early summer, it has finally started to warm up and the sun is out. My dad has the first swarm of the season, a generous size group of bees clinging to a bough, draped over and partially in, a deep white hive box, nestled between several frames. It is clear from the picture he has the queen there somewhere, as the bees are already off the bough and into the box. He has gotten them out of a cedar tree, and I didn’t even get an invitation to help. Soon he will put a cover over them, closing in the beating of their wings and hearts, and move the newcomers into our bee yard, secured with an electric fence against bears and skunks and other honey-interested animals, and they will begin to orient themselves to their new space and begin foraging for pollen and nectar to make honey.
The swarms themselves happen because hives get too crowded. You can only bump into your neighbour so many times before you start dreaming of a larger space. I think it’s adorable that honeybees let out a little “whoop, whoop” when they bump into each other, but just like humans, overcrowding leads to crankier hives and the bees get tired of the conditions and begin making queen cells to develop a new queen. Not long before the new queens hatch, the current queen will abscond from the hive with about 60% of the current workforce. These are the swarms we have been catching and rehoming. In the old hive, now devoid of a queen, the workforce carries on as they wait. Eventually a queen will hatch from her cell, kill off any other queens that emerge, and she will take flight to mate with various male drones from different colonies. The lucky male consorts quickly find themselves rendered asunder—their genitalia ripped from their bodies, their lives spent, and their purpose fulfilled. Anything for a queen. Any hive without its head of state will dwindle and fail. Both bees and beekeepers alike know it must be rendered queenright to chance survival. The queen is the creator of the next generation of bees, at a pace of about 2,000 eggs a day.
n xx