Monday, May 23, 2016

Sallying Forth to Disaster or Greatness or at Least the Great Unknown

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. The spring continues. The garden, or parts of it, have germinated. I am expecting a 3 pound box of bees this week.  I started this blog 4 weeks ago. Then, as you know, current events intruded into our esoteric pursuits and there were limericks to write about the carnival called the primaries that had parked itself in our Hoosier driveway. I couldn't look away and ignore the easy targets as they sashayed into our collective conscience.

Since then other earth shattering events have occurred in central Indiana. The frost that we had on the morning of May 15. I warned you. You were warned. Do not take the flannel sheets off of the bed until Memorial Day. But someone did not listen. Someone did not listen. I will not go all mid evil on you and publicly shame you; no 3 days in the stocks on the public square for you. Simply go off in your private shame and swear that you will leave your flannels on until Memorial Day next year.

So the bees arrived three weeks ago to fill the hive that I had purchased last summer. It had been sitting outside the old henhouse where I would see it everyday as I turned into the driveway as I returned from a long day at work. That daily reminder pointed to a commitment that I could no longer back out of. Treasure had been spent. I needed to learn about bee keeping. I have been interested in bee keeping for a long time. I gave up thinking about it 20 years ago. It just seemed too complicated; mites, black foul brood, Apistan, queen excluder, honey super, honey extractor, queen cells, drones, sudden colony collapse, scout bees. What the heck? I watched in fascination as the neighbor guy brought one of his hives to the farm "because an organic farm would be a safe healthy place; free of  harmful pesticides for his bees." I was surprised when I could walk up to the open hive while he was working it without a bit of fear. Bees were flying all around my head. I had no protective gear and I wasn't worried at all.

That fall, I remember feeling terrible that my turkeys had used the hive for a night roosting spot. Turkeys, being the clumsy animals that they are, knocked the cover off just in time for a 1 inch cold rain to pour in the unprotected hive and kill the colony. I put the idea of bee keeping far away. My life is too chaotic for the structure of bees. We are working on two different wavelengths; two different planes of existence. I am PigPen the bees are the Lucy of Sharritt land. While Lucy and PigPen can coexist on Charles Schultz world, somebody's gonna get hurt in the land of Sharritt.

Then two years ago, in September a small swarm split from a hive someplace close by and used a small cherry tree sapling that I had recently planted in the front yard. That sentence described some very unusual things. First, I saw a swarm. I had been on this earth for 51 years, 1/3 of my total 150 year expected life span (read other of my blogs) and had never experienced a honey bee swarm. Oh sure, I had convinced a swarm of wasps to sting the crud out of me after 10 year old me had used a stick to bang on the shed where they lived. I was surprised. I tried to say that I was sorry. I didn't know that shed was their home. It appears that wasps aren't great reconcilers. They are Old Testament, wrath of God, creatures. They came out of that building with vengeance on their mind. It was eye for an eye time. Five stings on the lip and a PR seven second 100 yard dash later, I was prepared to never see a swarm again.

But I did see a swam again; a swarm of honey bees. They had congregated around their queen on that branch in our yard; a collective catching of the breath, while the scouts went out to find a place to rent; the new hive. This brings us to the second very unusual thing described in the first sentence in the previous paragraph. The bees had swarmed in September. Bees come out of the winter. Their stores of honey are low. They haven't been producing brood; there is no food available to feed their young. No, they are laying low, hoping that the food holds out for spring and the pollen and nectar flow. Then one day, spring leaps upon us. Food is everywhere, maple pollen, crab apples, apple trees, tulips, daffodil. While you reach for the Zyrtec, the bees are getting down to business. With all of the food, they are making babies. The next thing they know    that 2 bedroom bungalow just won' do any more. It is much too crowded.

Faced with an intolerable situation, the bees send out scouts. Through bee magic, they create a queen. Then one day, half of the hive escorts the old queen to a tree limb where they lounge around while the scouts find a nice condominium to move into. The new hive will work hard the rest of the summer to build the hive, raise brood and store enough honey to get through the winter. That takes time. September leaves them no time. It was a bit depressing knowing that that group of bees made a fatal mistake. They were not going to make it through the winter. A week later, the scout bees reported back and the swarm made its move. What possessed those stupid bees to make the leap in the wrong season. Maybe the abundance of sunflowers that I always plant on August 1st in my annual race against the frost confused them. They saw tons of pollen waiting for them. Maybe, they were in the slow but steady wins the race camp. They kept plugging away. Getting their hive stronger and stronger and they weren't bursting at the seams until late in the season. Perhaps, they suffered a setback early in the spring that was not of their making, but they persevered, overcame and full of renewed optimism sallied forth on their great adventure.

That is the way of sallying forth. We do it with great optimism or big naïveté. If we knew that winter was coming, we wouldn't split our resources and numbers in September to sally forth into certain doom. If I knew that bee keeping was a difficult task and probably doomed to failure without constant vigilance; vigilance that I haven't shown in the past, I would never have bought a 3 pound box of bees just to see how things turn out. We know that the frost gods will frown on our sallying forth with Egyptian Cotton Sheets before Memorial Day and then complain about how cold it is on May 15th and that the tomato plants were frost killed.

Yet again, if we didn't sally forth, we would be stuck in our overcrowded hives and never thrive in another setting. I would never have the opportunity to become a fair to middling bee keeper. And you wouldn't be able to complain about a few cold evenings in mid-May before summer really gets started like you always do.

Take Care

Roger