You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

A PACKAGE OF BEES

The phone rang. I rolled over in bed looking for the clock. It was midnight. I let it ring and settled back into my pillow. It continued to ring. It was the Spring of 1970 when telephones rang until the caller hung up. “Why won’t they hang up?” I thought. “Possibly it is an emergency. Maybe my mom.” I reached for the receiver. A man’s voice responded to my groggy hello “Is this Tod Lundy?” he asked. “Yes.” “Did you order a package of honey bees?” “Yes.” “This is the US Post Office. Your bees are here and they are getting out of their package. Will you please come get them.” “It’s midnight.” I protested. “Doesn’t matter. We will open the post office for you.” “OK I will come.” “Come to the loading dock in back.” the man responded and hung up.

I dressed and went to the refrigerator to take the spray bottle of sugar syrup which I had prepared for the package’s arrival. This syrup is a simple sugar solution half water, half sugar. I also took bee keeper’s gloves.

As I drove across Lawrence Kansas to the Post Office I rehearsed the process for collecting my first package of honey bees. And reflected on my admiration for honey bees, for their social structure in which each individual worker has a sequence of rolls which are performs faithfully until after a short life of 4 to 6 weeks they die. Some die of old age, some die after stinging another animal which is harming the colony. Or, as in my case, helping the colony. They don’t know the difference. I also must admit that the idea of owning a colony of 20,000 females, all working for me, was very appealing.

I drove around to the back of the post office and entered from the rear loading dock into a room with long tables and postal workers bent over them sorting mail. Some of them glanced up as I entered. A man, anticipating my arrival, approached as I walked in, spray bottle in hand. He eyed the spray bottle but did not ask, and lead me to a table which was at the opposite end of the long room from the other postal workers. Upon it sat a wooden box, about the size of a shoe box. Two sides were screened. There were only those two screens between me and 10,000 loudly buzzing, apparently agitated, and hungry bees. A few stray bees were flying around the outside of the box giving the appearance that they were escaping. Rather than escaping, they were bees which had stayed with the box, near their queen, through the several day journey from Georgia. The postal worker stood back, intently watching me. I sprayed the sugar syrup on the screened sides of the box. The two of us watched in amazement as the bees suddenly became quiet while a thousand tiny tongues lapped the sugar syrup from the screens. I picked up the box and left the post office with the stray bees flying close behind.

I had prepared a hive for the arrival of the package of bees. It was mounted through an open window and against the screen of our ground floor living room. I had cut a rectangular hole in the back of the hive and through the window screen. It would seem that the bees could fly freely into our house. However, over the screen, and corresponding to the hole in the hive, I had mounted a plexiglass viewing box. In this way we could sit in our living room and observe the inner workings of a honey bee hive.

Before placing the box of bees into the hive I checked to see if the queen had been liberated from confinement in her separate queen cage which was suspended inside the box of bees. She was separated from the 3 pounds of workers during shipment so that the workers would have time to become attached to her unique pheromones and adopt her as their queen. If she had been shipped in with the foreign worker bees the workers would have killed her. She was no longer confined to her separate cell. She and the hungry workers had eaten the sugar plug in the queen cage liberating her. The package had an opening covered by a thin piece of plywood. I loosened the plywood and placed the box into the hive between frames of honey comb foundation and a special frame containing syrup. The last step was to lift the plywood panel off the package and quickly cover the hive. After the bees were safely in the hive, I went back to bed while the bees explored their new home.

This arrangement of a honey bee hive in your home was a source of many enjoyable interactions with friends. We would reclined on our a six foot long bean bag couch and admired the activities of the hive through the viewing box. On one special occasion, a friend brought his daycare children on a field trip to visit honey bees. The little kids gathered on that big red bag of Styrofoam pellets and watched in amazement the inside of a bee hive. It was an especially fortuitous occasion, because as they watched a bee performed the “waggle dance”on the plexiglass. I explained that it was telling the other bees where they could go to find flowers.

A WILD COLONY

I continued to keep bees when living in Portland Oregon. 20 years later when I moved to Astoria again I acquired several hives. But bee keeping become increasingly difficult. Mites and herbicides were taking a toll on hives and I lost several before giving up bee keeping. I sold my hives, keeping one. I was not quite ready to give up completely. I had hoped that a swarm would miraculously come and take up residence in my one remaining hive. None did. Or at least no honey bees occupied my empty hive. Last Summer a queen miniature yellow jacket found it and her colony built a hornet hive inside. At the end of that summer they vacated, leaving the hive empty again.

I did not want to keep bees in the way I had before with frequent hive examinations. Medicating them when mites were found in a futile attempt to keep them healthy. The thing I dreamed of was that there was somehow a swarm of honey bees that could survive with out human intervention. I knew of such a hive of feral Italian honey bees that had taken residence in a hollow tree in the forest on the hillside above our Astoria home. It had survived for several years buzzing back to life every spring. It was a defiant exhibition that a feral Italian honey bee colony could survive on their own. They needed no beekeeper, and no medications. They also did not suffer the yearly pillage of their hard work when their honey is stolen. I planned that if a swarm moved into my empty hive, I would not disturb them with medication and I would not take their honey. Thus leaving them as wild honey bees in a man made hive. I was disappointed that after five Summers, no swarms took up residence in my hive.

In the afternoon, of a day in the third week of June, Carole came home from one of her daily walks in the woods. She approached me at my desk with an excited expression. She held her phone out and showed me video of the wild honeybee tree. It was a busy scene with bees industriously coming and going. A good sign that the bees had survived another winter. I thought “That’s nice”. She then took her phone back changed the image and handed it to me a second time. I expected a second video of the hive tree but instead to my delight the video was of a swarm of honey bees dangling from a branch of a maple tree. I jumped up from my chair exclaiming “Lets go get it!” However, there was not enough time left in the day to prepare for the delicate task of successfully capturing a swarm of honey bees. My concern was that if we waited until the morning the swarm may have flown away. We decided to take that chance and to go the following morning.

I set about organizing our swarm capturing gear. I prepared sugar syrup and found a spray bottle to apply it. The syrup is sprayed on the swarm before doing anything else. The sugar syrup makes their wings sticky so they can’t fly, it also feeds them as they lick it off the other bees. I collected bee bonnets and apiary gloves, a hand pruner, a lopper in case the branch was too high to be cut with a hand pruner. The last item was my bee basket which is a large woven reed basket with a lid which my son brought home from Kenya. The basket has the shape of an onion. To get a sense of its size, with the lid removed you could drop a basket ball into it. It is the perfect shape and size to handle a large swarm of bees and has done so on several occasions.

While collecting my gear I was thinking about how a swarm of honey bees occur. Swarming is the means by which honey bees reproduce colonies. The process starts in early spring when the queen bee resumes laying eggs after a Winter hiatus. As the population of the hive builds. The workers extrude a few longer cells in which new queens are nurtured. The new queen will emerge at about the same time that the hive has become over crowded. Soon afterward, the old queen and roughly half the workers in the hive leave to form a new colony. When a swarm emerges from the hive it usually lights on a tree or other nearby object. This is called a bivouac. From here scout bees fly off to find a suitable a location for the swarm to build their nest. The swarm will stay in their bivouac for one to four days before flying off to their new hive location. The bees in the swarm would have drank as much honey as they could hold before leaving their parent hive. This honey is intended to sustain them through the process of finding a hive location and building sufficient comb to raise the next generation of workers. It is a situation with many risks for the swarm’s survival. A suitable location is one which provides shelter from winter rain and wind. It must also have adequate space to house honey and pollen storage needed to survive through the winter. Such places are rare in the forest. Not finding a hollow tree or other protected space, bees will build their comb on a tree branch. Such colonies are certain to be destroyed the following winter. This swarm looked small in the photo. If so, it would be especially unlikely to survive even if it were to find a suitable location.

The thing which made this particular swarm was especially attractive to me is that it emerged from the feral colony which we had observed for over thee years.

A colony which had demonstrated its capacity to survive without human intervention. A colony which has not been decimated by Varroa Destructor Mites. This was the best possible swarm for my intention of leaving them to be a wild honey bee colony in a man made hive.

Carole’s photograph had shown the swarm was dangling on a small branch of a maple tree on the hill side above a blackberry patch. If the swarm was too high for me to spray with syrup, there was little chance of capturing it. Years earlier, I had tried to capture a swarm without first spraying it with syrup. By the time I had cut the branch, upon which the swarm had clustered, the air was filled with honey bees, and I was left holding a bare stick.

I was worried about this and the many other things which could go wrong as I loaded our gear into my truck and drove to the parking lot at the trail head leading to the swarm. We picked up our gear and started the half mile hike to the place Carole had photographed the swarm. As we walked we encountered another couple who asked “What are you doing with all our gear?” When we explained she exclaimed, “Honey bees swarm?” Being intrigued they tagged along to watch.

Eventually we reached a point on the trail, near the hive tree, when I first saw the swarm. It was still there. It was 200 feet ahead of us and only 30 feet from the honey bee tree. I felt a sudden combination of relief and excitement. I called out “They are still there!” My mind was filled with the realization that we may really have genuinely independent feral bee colony in my vacant hive.

The swarm was small. There were fewer bees than one receives when purchasing a three pound package of bees. It would require a lot of support for it to be able to survive. Honey bees live about 4 to 6 weeks in the Summer. Most of the bees in the swarm were probably halfway through their life cycle. It takes time for them to build brood comb and 21 days for the next generation to incubate. There was barely enough time to build comb and raise more bees before the workers in the original swarm had died. If this occurred there would be no workers to attend the brood and repopulate the colony, causing it to fail.

Not knowing what to expect, the other couple stood back a safe distance. I set to work quickly using hand pruners to cut a path through the black berry brambles to the swarm. I was pleased to see that the ground under the blackberries did not fall away as steeply as I had thought. The swarm just within my reach to spray it with syrup. I was so excited that I neglected to take the precaution of putting on my bee bonnet or gloves. I took the spray bottle of sugar syrup and gingerly approached the swarm. I gently sprayed puffs of syrup on it. With each puff the bee cluster would swell as if alerted to danger and then settle down and to licking up the syrup. I covered the entire exterior of the swarm with the sticky liquid. The bees were hungry and immediately preoccupied with the syrup. This quieted them and made their wings stick together so those on the outer layer of the swarm could not fly. The swarm was now almost mine, however I could not reach high enough to cut the branch above the swarm. The swarm clung on a small branch off of a larger limb. By walking a few step up my trail through the blackberries I could reach the end of the larger limb. I grasped it and pulled it down. This dropped the branch with the swarm just enougn that I could reach and cut it. However I had to be careful not to cause any abrupt movement of the swarm. While the outer bees could not fly, they could fall off the swarm it shaken. If the outer bees were to fall, the inner bees and the queen could fly away. I would not only lose the opportunity to capture the swarm but the swarm would loose half of its workers and certainly would perish. Careful not to shake the swarm, I grasped the limb and worked my way hand over hand, holding the limb down until I reached the branch with the swarm. It was now low enough that I could take hold the branch above the swarm with my left hand. With my right hand I took my pruners from my pocket and snipped the branch with the swarm from the limb of the tree. The limb sprang up. But the swarm was held steady. I carefully carried it up the blackberry path to and place where the open bee basket and Carole waited. We gave a sigh of relief as I lowered the swarm into the basket. None of the bees flew away and I was not stung. Before closing basket, Carole carried it over to show the couple, who by this time, had approached more closely. Concerned that bees would fly out I put the lid on the basket to secure our swarm for the trip to its new home.

We then packed our gear for the hike out. I carried the basket of bees like a trophy bearer in front of the parade consisting of Carole and the other couple who helped her carry our gear back to the parking lot.

We drove to the location of my abandoned hive. We took it apart to clean out the yellow jacket nest from the previous summer. I installed fresh frames with foundation and a syrup feeder, leaving a gap in the center of the hive where three frames would usually go. I then removed the lid from the bee basket, inverted it over the gap in the hive and shook the honey bees and stick from the basket into the gap. Many bees remained in the basket. I placed the open basket with the remaining bees in front of the hive, hoping that they would follow the scent of their queen and go into the hive. I returned that evening to check. They were all inside. The big risk now would be that they would not like the accommodations, reform their swarm and fly away. We had that happen, it was a huge disappointment.

The bees did not leave. Over each of the following weeks I refilled the feeder. When six weeks had passed it was time to open the hive, replace the three missing frames and check to see if the queen was laying eggs. I had expected them to build out cells on the frames with foundation that I had provided, but instead, When I lifted the hive top it was exceptionally heavy. As I raised it above the hive I could see why. Having only known the wild hive environment these bees had built natural honey comb in the space intended for three frames. It was three rows of honey comb which reassembled the comb which would have been on the three frames. The primary difference was that they were hanging from the hive lid rather than the frames. This would have been a big problem if I intended to service the hive in the future. But since it was to be a hive of feral bees, they could build it any way they wished.

We could see that this comb contained brood so the queen had survived the swarm capture and transplanting process. She was busy laying eggs. I trust that the workers will catch on to the efficiency of using the frames with foundation once they have filled all the spaces in the hive where natural comb can be built. We closed the hive satisfied that they were going to stay.

Over the summer, I continued to provide them with syrup in hopes that the colony would survive. I tracked their prospects by observing how quickly they consumed each quart of syrup. Then their use of syrup suddenly decreased. I became concerned that the hive was failing. In an effort to track the population of the hive, I used the timer in my cell phone to mark 60 seconds during which I count the number of bees returning to the hive. At first that number was in the teens. Over the three months of Summer this number gradually increased. Three months later, that number had risen to forty bees returning per minute. I was then confident that, after a shaky start, that this colony will be successful. It is rewarding to know that a self sufficient feral Italian honey bee colony is humming in my back yard. This is especially gratifying, believing that if we hadn’t captured it, and nursed it with syrup through the summer, this unique swarm would not have survived.

END