When I come to the hive that had Chalk Brood, I also examine it more carefully. The Chalk Brood itself has cleared up, and the queen is laying plenty of eggs. The new larvae are developing properly. There is little sealed brood, however, and because many of the adult bees are old ones who were born last autumn, there will soon be a big drop in colony population as they die, their normal life span at an end. The decline is already indicated by the fact that stores are low in this hive. I feed the bees, medicate them and close them up.
The rest of the hives are normal. All of them have at least three frames of brood, some have more. Stores in all of them are adequate.
I carry the parts from the hive that died out back to the truck, replace my smoker in the metal carrying can, gather up the rest of my tools, fill out the record book, pull off my gloves and veil and leave. It has taken over an hour to work through these hives, but I will be able to work the other yards more quickly, because I have a good idea of what a typical hive should look like today, when the daffodils have just started to bloom.
I had planned my route so that by midday I would be at a beeyard on one of the upper branches of the most beautiful of Ozark rivers, where I like to eat my lunch. The bees are on a bluff overlooking the water, and some years ago I wedged a couple of old boards into the bluff to make a seat next to the hives. I walked to the spot carefully, because the hillside was covered with white flowers—delicate rue anemones (which have a lovely Latin name that slips easily over the tongue: Anemonella thalictroides), and bloodroots, Sanguinaria canadensis, with their orangish-red stems and flowers so tender that they bloom generously one day and drop the next. I unpacked my lunch and sat staring at the river while I ate.
This branch joins others downstream, and the cold spring-fed river it becomes is popular for fishing and floating. Last summer a friend and I spent two hot days canoeing on some of its prettiest stretches. The current is strong and paddling is not, strictly speaking, necessary, although steering is, for it is a tricky river. Late in the day we spotted a fine-looking gravel bar where we could pitch our tent for the night, but, according to our map, a regular campground was not far distant and my friend, who is a thorough man, wanted to check it out. The current swept us along and in a few minutes we pulled into the quiet creek off the river where the campground lay. It was surrounded by woods. The air was still and stifling, gnats and mosquitoes were everywhere, and camping spots were spaced at tidy, close, regular intervals. A long list of regulations and prohibitions was posted on a sign. We decided to leave our canoe tied to the bank and walk up a path we thought might lead back to the gravel bar to see if it would be a more cheerful place. The path quickly disappeared and, sweating in the heat, we slogged through a discouraging amount of poison ivy before we reached our goal. Yes, it was a beautiful place, unregulated and unruly. Wilder and cooler. We decided we wanted to stay there, but our gear was still in the canoe. We were hot, sweaty and did not fancy a walk back through the poison ivy so, with all of ten seconds consultation, we pulled off our clothes, left them in a pile and jumped into the river to float back downstream. The river was so cold it took our breath away and the current was so strong that the river seized us and tossed us about. I pretended we were otters. Almost as soon as we had plunged in, a strong rain squall began and it seemed that there was nearly as much water above us as around us. Our breathlessness, the cold wetness below, the warm wetness above and our loss of control to the river’s power struck both of us as funny and we laughed as we were tumbled along by the current. In no time we were at the mouth of the stream where we had left our canoe. We swam to it and pulled ourselves out on the bank. Now we had to paddle upstream in the rain against the strong current. Our clothes were back on the gravel bar, getting wet in the rain. Our only dry change was tucked safely inside a waterproof bag; there was no point in getting another set of things wet, so it seemed only sensible to hop into the canoe in the altogether and start paddling back upstream. My friend, heavier and a more skilled canoer, took the stern. From that position it was not immediately evident that he was unclothed; after all, men often go shirtless in the summer. Women seldom do and in my position at the canoe’s bow I was hard to miss. Nudity and even skinny dipping are not regarded in a kindly way in the Ozarks. The river we were on is supervised by the U.S. Park Service, and although most of my energy was consumed in paddling hard enough to make headway against the current, I did wonder briefly if nakedness was a punishable federal offense. As we got nearer our gravel bar, the rain still pelting down, the river narrowed and we began losing headway against it. We steered to the shore, clambered out and dragged the canoe the last yards upstream.
The rain squall blew on downriver, and our campsite was cool and lovely and bug free. In the evening the mists rose from the river. Before we went to sleep, we sat by our campfire and watched the moonlight reflecting on the water.
After I had finished lunch, I began work on the hives. I found one that had died out during the autumn—I could deduce that this was when it had happened, because wax moths had taken over the hive while the weather was still warm enough for them to multiply. Their larvae had ruined the comb, tunneling through it and leaving ropy webbing and frass. Tough white inch-and-a-half long cocoons were everywhere, tucked between frames and in crevices and niches throughout the bottom board, inner cover, telescoping cover and the hive itself.
There are two species of wax moth. The greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella, is the more common. The adult is an undistinguished, inch-long, night-flying grayish moth that may sometimes be seen flying around lights during the summer. It is worldwide in distribution, and is extremely common where bees are kept.
The lesser wax moth, Achroia grisella, has similar habits and distribution, but as its common name suggests, it is a smaller moth, only half the size of the greater.
Adult wax moths lay their eggs in beehives where their young will have a source of food, but in strong healthy hives the bees will kill and carry away most larvae and so keep them in check. As with cockroaches, ants or any other opportunists who would like to take advantage of the benign conditions inside a beehive, it is only when a hive of bees becomes ill or weak that wax-moth larvae can take over and destroy comb. A web-filled, wax moth-infested hive is a discouraging sight to a beekeeper, but in some ways the wax moth larvae are the beekeeper’s friends, because they destroy comb from weakened colonies and keep disease such as American Foulbrood from spreading.
Today wax moths are found worldwide, for they have followed the spread of honeybees. This was not always so. Before white men and women colonized this continent, there were no honeybees in North America and there were no wax moths, either. The early settlers brought the first honeybees from Europe, and they spread by swarming ahead of the whites. The Indians, who associated them with the invaders, thought them creatures of ill omen and dubbed them “White Man’s Fly.” The bees were spreading into a new habitat, and like any plant or animal who moves into a fresh ecological niche, they were unchecked by predators or pests. According to early reports, the wax moths, known then as bee moths, first began making their appearance on this continent in the early 1800s. Fifty years later they were widespread and causing concern to beekeepers, who did not understand much about them even though they had been common in Europe.
Writing in a report to the Essex County (Massachusetts) Agricultural Society, one Henry K. Oliver laments the moths:
They are paltry-looking, insignificant little gray-haired pestilent race of wax-and-honey eating and bee-destroying rascals that have baffled all contrivances that ingenuity has devised to conquer or destroy them.… He who shall be successful in devising the means of ridding the bee world of this destructive and merciless pest will richly deserve to be crowned “King Bee” …
Europeans had known about the link between wax moths and hive strength and health, because the two varieties of insects had been coexisting there as long as anyone could remember. Even Aristotle had written “good bees expel the mot
hs and worms, but others, from slothfulness, neglect their combs, which then perish.” But Americans had not yet learned this, and tested their ingenuity trying to prevent the moths from getting into their hives. One of the cleverest devices invented for this purpose came into use when it was discovered that adult moths only begin flying at dusk. Beekeepers reasoned that if the moths could be closed out of the hives at evening, they would never be able to lay eggs. Small gauze beehive doors, which could be closed at sunset, were made. Yankee cleverness automated the job by hitching the doors to a long, leverlike hen roost, so that the chickens could close them at day’s end, when they jumped on them to go to sleep, and open them at dawn, when they jumped off to begin their chicken days. Nowhere is it recorded how well nineteenth-century chickens took to roosting on beehives, but the wax moths continued to spread.
I put the empty hive on the truck, and when I got back home I took it apart and spread it out for the chickens to clean up. Chickens may not do well as wax-moth door closers, but they do like to eat the larvae and cocoons. After a few days, when they have finished going through the debris of comb and picked out each neatly wrapped cocoon from every crevice, I’ll gather up the hive parts, put fresh wax foundation in those frames that are still in good repair and then ready the hive for new bees.
I have heard that wax-moth larvae make dandy fish bait. I am not a fisherman, so I cannot report at first hand if this is true.
Honey sales business has taken me away from my farm and made me late in making the second round of the beeyards. I begrudge every day I am away from the Ozarks at this time of year, because these hills and riverbanks are so beautiful. I try to keep track each year of the succession of bloom of the wildflowers and flowering trees for the bees’ benefit … and for mine.
Bees’ vision is different from ours. Not only are their eyes structured so that they can see broken surfaces and movement easily and stationary objects less well, but their perception of color is unlike ours. I was at a state bee meeting once at which a federal bee researcher of renown, Dr. Eric Erickson, presented a slide show comparing the way we see the color of flowers with the way the bees do. Bees can see ultraviolet, which we cannot, but their eyes cannot receive the long wavelengths on the red end of the color spectrum. A flower that we call white looks blue to a bee. Brilliant ultraviolet nectar guides—straight lines pointing to the interior of a light-blue flower—shimmered deep blue in one of Dr. Erickson’s slides of a bee’s vision. It was striking and elaborate. But his next slide showed us the same flower as it would be seen by a human being—it was a simple, unadorned white blossom. The nectar guides visible to the bees are invisible to us. Since bees and their kin do not perceive red, plants with red flowers are bird-pollinated. (This is the reason that most humming-bird feeders are made of garish red plastic.)
I am always struck by the abundance of early spring flowers that we in our arrogant and homocentric way call white. My notebook, sketchily kept as it has been this season, lists harbinger of spring, rue anemone, pussytoes, spring beauty, toothwort, Dutchman’s-breeches, bloodroot, hepatica, white violets of several species, serviceberry and wild plum, all of which have bloomed before the first week of April and all of which are white. I try to imagine I am a bee, and think of them as blue.
The relationship of the flowers that need pollinating to their pollinators interests me more than I have time to allow it: I want to think about this a great deal. I am looking forward to being old. No one could expect an old lady to keep more than a hundred hives of bees, so I’ll be able to surround myself with flowers and animals. I’ll have a wildflower garden, for I’ll have time to create the special conditions needed for wet-loving and woods-loving plants to grow around my upland cabin. I’ll watch the flowers and learn their pollinators, see how they all fit into the community of plants and animals that live here.
I have read somewhere that early bumblebees pollinate Dutchman’s-breeches, and I should like to see them at work. I snatched some hours one sunny afternoon a week ago, and spent it down by the river’s edge in a glen that the river had flooded and left filled with sand. The Dutchman’s-breeches there were so thick that I had difficulty walking among them lest I trample some. I found a spot to sit, but all the time I was there I never saw a bumblebee. However, the Dutchman’s-breeches return year after year, and so, I hope, shall I.
Mixed with the white blossoms today are masses of greenish-yellow fragrant sumac—Rhus aromatica, an undistinguished sprawling shrub which grows all over the eastern part of the country. To people who are not beekeepers, most members of this genus—which includes poison ivy (Rhus toxicodendron) and the summer-blooming sumacs with their white flowers that ripen to red clusters of berries much loved by bluebirds—are considered trash plants at best. But to a beekeeper they represent good forage for bees. Fragrant sumac, the first of the genus bees use during the season, is a source of pollen here in the Ozarks. To the casual observer, it has an alarming resemblance to its cousin poison ivy (which bees also like), with three oval-toothed leaflets. But the habit of growth is neater, more compact than poison ivy’s; the leaves are smaller and dull, not shiny as poison ivy’s are, and they are aromatic besides.
I allowed myself a walk out back yesterday afternoon when I returned to the farm. The air was warm and fragrant with the perfume of flowers, and I hoped I was not too late to see the blooming of what Ozarkers call fire bush. All over these hills there are foundations of long-gone cabins—overgrown, rock-lined walls that show where families lived back in the days when the big timber was cut in this part of the country. In most of them, like the one on the back of my place, there are also flowers. Iris, bridal bush, and fire bush were planted, I like to think, by women who put them there to brighten their harsh homesteading lives. The fire bushes, tough shrubs that in other parts of the country are called flowering quince (Chemoneles sinensis) have spread, crowding out other plants. They do not bloom for long, but when they do they fill a sunny spot in the encroaching woods with a blaze of fiery pink. I try to keep the appointment with the one on the back of my place each spring. Yesterday I did. It has grown to house size, and the masses of blossoms were filled with bees wallowing in bright-yellow pollen.
With so many flowers in bloom I expected the bees to be in good shape on this tour of my beeyards and I was not disappointed. In addition to the medicine that I carried with me today for a second and final application, I also had several jugs of sugar syrup but found no hive that needed it. What I did find, however, were several hives in which the bees were superseding, or replacing their queens. It is common for bees to do this at this time of year, and in my check of the other hives in the week ahead, I expect I’ll see a number of other colonies doing the same thing. Some beekeepers believe it is a good idea to requeen their hives every year. I don’t agree. Those beekeepers kill the old queen and replace her with a new one from a bee breeder. It is argued that hives with fresh queens are less likely to swarm, and that bees with a new queen will be more productive. Aside from the decidedly cruel aspect of routinely killing perfectly good queens, I have found in the long run it is better to let the bees raise themselves new queens when they decide the time has come. They know their needs better than I do. I keep detailed records on my hives and know how much honey each one produces, and, as long as they produce well, I do not requeen them. There are many hives I have never requeened in the fifteen years since I began keeping bees. They have requeened themselves and are on their way to developing a strain of bees well suited for local conditions. I do not interfere with them, as long as they are healthy and productive, and I give them a new commercial queen only when they cease to be productive.
Queen bees, depending in part on how well they are mated, will be able to lay fertile eggs for one, two or even more years. Their only purpose within the hive is to lay eggs. They cannot even take care of themselves. The queen’s attendant bees feed, stroke, groom her and carry away her feces. The workers are, as a result, aware of her condition, and when
she begins to fail in health or ability to lay fertile eggs, they raise a new queen; the process is known to beekeepers as supersedure. To do this, they select a freshly laid fertile egg—one that would ordinarily develop into a worker bee—and instead of providing the larva that hatches from it with the usual worker-bee fare, they float it in royal jelly, a food rich in B vitamins which is produced from their own glands. It is this food that turns the larva into a queen. Usually, but not always, the egg selected for this special treatment is partway up a frame. The capped cell in which the queen pupates is not neatly flush with the other cells. It extends, looking rather like a peanut, down the front of the frames, where it is readily visible when the beekeeper peers down between them. It is called a queen cell.
Supersedure queen cells
Later on in the season, if the bees are in the mood to swarm, they will raise many queens; the queen cells are similar in appearance, but can usually, though not always, be found along the bottom of the frame hanging pendant below it.
When the virgin queen, a long, elegant, wasplike bee, emerges from pupation, she roams the hive to murder any other queens that the bees may have raised, in just the manner François Huber described on p. 56. She has a stinger, which she will use against other queens, but a beekeeper, if he wants, may pick her up safely in his bare hand. The worker bees will not allow her to linger in the hive because she is not yet mated, so they urge her toward the hive entrance. She then flies out on what is called her nuptial flight, to mate with the drones.
A Book of Bees Page 8
