those days are gone

I cornered N. today at the store while he was trying to shop. As it turns out, many people from this year's workshops have gone through a similar experience with their hives. (I dearly wish more people would have participated in the Facebook group, or this blog. Bunch of iconoclasts.) N. suspects the strain of bees, but I don't know. I'm reading the same sad tale from beeks all over the southeast. He said, "Can you imagine what it must have been like to keep bees in the 70's, before all this?"
It must have been a dream. A walk in the park. It must have been like casual sex, before AIDS.

I peeped into the hive last night after dark, just like you knew I would. I can't resist. There were no bees. Just a lot of hive beetles. Now, I'm sort of dithering. If my bees are now living in a tree, or maybe the studio walls, should I keep feeding them? They seemed hungry. Or should I let them go, let them learn to live on spanish needle and cypress vine, lantana and goldenrod? Do they need the support? Is it fair to ask S. to keep the feeder full while I'm on vacation? How much dang syrup would I need to make for 9 days? (1 quart/day x 9, well, okay 2 gallons plus... call it three...that's a lot of sugar...) Like I say, dithering.

...but not gone?

I cleaned out the hive box yesterday. When I came home from work and opened it, there were maybe 6 bees inside, just stubbornly licking out the last traces of honey. I filled the feeder--why not, I already had the syrup made--and then totally dismantled the hive.
A lot of bees showed up at the feeder, not 10 minutes after I filled it. I set the hive back up and gave them all the combs except the worst infested, which I gave to the chickens. Then I noticed I'd set the box backwards, and many of the bees were trying to find a way in at what used to be the entrance. So I picked it all up and turned it around the way it used to be. After watching a bit more, I set the combs back in one end of the box, about 8 bars, with the follower board to close it up. I should mention I did all of this naked. That's how hard core I am. The only trouble the bees gave me is that some of them really like to drink the sweat from my face and that can get ticklish.
I refilled the feeder again this afternoon, and spent some time trying to track the bees leaving the feeder. They go up and over the house--and then I can't see them anymore. There are still a lot of them going in and out of the hive box.
This evening when I put my ear to the box, there was a perfectly audible hum. Again, I don't have the faintest idea what's going on. Are they moving back in since the hive is clean? Or are they just finishing robbing out the old combs?
I'll keep feeding. I will try to resist opening the hive. I'll observe and report.

Gone

Something made me peep into the hive this morning. I guess it was the feeder I hung out yesterday afternoon, barely touched. The bees are gone. Nothing but dry empty comb, beetles, moths, and one drone still looking for some last bit of nectar.
There were so many bees a few days ago, and not enough corpses in the hive to account for them all. I think what was left of Beedicca swarmed out. Long live Beedicca.

Update

This evening after work, I refilled the syrup feeder, cleaned out a pile of chewed wax and beetle larvae (Audrey has developed a taste for shb grubs and now attends every hive inspection), and took a few pictures. There are a lot of really active, hungryhungryhungry, light gold & black striped bees, drinking syrup faster than this hive ever has, even when they were 3,000 strong and new to the neighborhood. I'm no longer seeing the black bees. Whoever these bees are, they are eating everything in sight. Not aggressive, but very busy.
I saw--but wasn't fast enough to squish--a wax moth. It was clunky looking but fast, and kind of booger colored (not unlike its unappealing offspring). Also, a bumble bee dropped in to see what was happening in the hive. I took some pictures of all the activity. In one photo, after viewing it enlarged on the monitor, I saw a bee with a particularly majestic behind. I'm thrilled to think I have finally seen the queen--posted the pic a couple places to elicit some expert opinions.
The bees seem healthy and hearty--just incredibly hungry. I will have to put up a lot of sugar syrup for the housesitters to feed while we're away at the end of the month.
I keep forgetting to mention--for the last two weeks, I've been adding roughly 1 tbsp celtic sea salt per gallon of syrup, for the minerals. The bees seem to like it.

Mysteriousness

Saturday afternoon, Jordan and I opened the hive to see what's what. I had no intention of actually messing with the bees, but we finally got our camera functional and I thought it would be fun to take some pictures.
There were maybe 50 bees in the box. So very few. The first bar, which had up till now had the cleanest comb, now had a huge caterpillar trail chewed through it. Back in the center of the hive, though, next to the giant monolith of cross comb I'm calling honeyopolis, there was a brood comb, one that I'd frozen and returned, now packed with honey and capped.
Of course, despite my intention not to mess with the bees, I ended up cleaning out the slimed honey, dead bees and beetle grubs that had accumulated at the back of the hive. Jordan got some nice shots of things, and then I refilled the hummingbird feeder with sugar syrup. Later in the afternoon I put another coat of paint on the new hive box. While it dried, I wandered about the place. I happened on some bees, over by the south side of the house. They seemed to be looking for something. Continuing around behind the house, I saw that the hummingbird feeder was just swarming with bees. Lovely gold and black ones, just sucking that syrup down. Hundreds of them. I got a nice shot of them.
Now all these pretty gold bees are hanging around the hive. They seem perfectly welcome, and come and go as they like. Where did they come from? Are they the field force, returning home hungry? Are they the swarm that absconded in July, come home to eat some nummy lemongrass scented syrup? Did Beedicca move her brood nest into Honeyopolis, where I can't fuck with it, and hatch out a hundred new workers? Did this weak hive and the tempting food source lure in a wild swarm? I opened the hive today when my sister was over, to see what we could see, and opted to take away the front bar, with the wax-eating caterpillar in it. There were no bees,and no honey, and no nothing but pests in it. I put that puppy in the freezer. All the bee crew were hanging around the middle of the hive--there and the feeder.
I'll be picking up another 10 lb bag of sugar tomorrow, and attempting to finish the new hive. Stay tuned.

A new hive box

Hive inspection today:
Despite freezing each broodcomb for at least 24 hours, today there were still a lot of shb larvae, and even more wax moth caterpillars, which are a disgusting, horrible color and destroy the combs from the inside in a very creepy way. There was also a gross, smelly pool of sludgy ruined honey oozing all over the hive floor, with bees drowning in it and shb grubs swimming. Things were bad enough that I removed and destroyed four bars of brood comb. I left 3 more in the sun all day, in hopes that would kill the remaining grubs, but it did not. Those bars are now back in the freezer, leaving the bees with two combs at the very front of the hive which so far they have managed to keep clean.
During the inspection and cleaning, I saw some bees doing what Jordan calls the "I know where the queen is" dance. Do they really?
The bees cleaned up a lot of the good honey from the damaged combs, in a reassuringly purposeful way.
We (mostly) built a new hive box today. It will have a screened bottom, with a removable board to close it if need be. I'll be trying to finish that up tomorrow. We are thinking the only way forward is to shake or brush these bees into their new box. Jury is still out on whether we will be able to relocate the box in what we hope is a better spot. More homework is in order.

Goldfish

I'm listening to Eve Ensler talk about the power of the girl cell, ,and I want you to know that because all I want to talk about this morning is my little fish. That's what the Sanctuary is all about. There's hard work to do, there are hard things to think about, there is ugliness and horror and betrayal all around us, but here in the Armadillo Sanctuary, I spent the morning collecting mosquito larvae to feed the goldfish.

Goldfish are the white mice of the pet world, anonymous and doomed. So ordinary, so commonplace, and this one is an especially unprepossessing specimen. He's the sole survivor of a dozen, scooped randomly out of a feeder tank, 12 for $2.29, purchased to feed to a friend's lungfish, who was staying at the Sanctuary while his people got a new house. One by one the others went comma shaped and stiff, and I'd drop their little carcasses into the lungfish's skanky tank, and although you would never see him move, in moments they were gone. This one lived, though it wasn't the biggest or prettiest. Puny, raggedy, pale gold, with fungus-gnawed fins and a crooked spine from malnutrition, he hung on. He learned to do the feed-me dance whenever I walk by. He's got the bowl all to himself, now. Now, he's my project, like a fish bonsai.

I change his water about every two weeks, scrubbing the sides clean with salt, and I put a big spoonful of celtic sea salt in every water change. That cleared up his fin rot. I feed him bits of peas, spinach, and zucchini, and that has straightened his vitamin-deficient crooked spine. And on my days off I cruise the yard for mosquito larvae, which I painstakingly collect and decant until I've sorted them out from the leaves and debris, then pour into his bowl. I won't deny it's satisfying in a tiny way to feed bugs I hate (wonder if he's big enough to eat shb grubs yet...) to a fish, and he takes his feed-me shimmy to new artistic heights when he sees them coming. He's kind pf pretty now, in an ordinary, maybe archetypal way. Gold-colored and fish-shaped. That sort of pale yellowish no-color has gone a bit richer, a bit more metallic, like brass. He's still only two inches long, but he will devour as many mosquito wrigglers as I can catch, and I like that. It's so eager.

If only everything was that simple.

And by the way, don't miss the Eve Ensler talk. It made my soul do the feed-me dance.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_embrace_your_inner_girl.html

My Good Dog

First the bees:
I returned 3 bars from an overnight stint in the freezer, and now I'm sure I've frozen all the brood comb except the very front bar, which the bees have kept clear of beetles. It finally dawned on me that carpenter ants were congregating in the dark space behind the follower board, because they like the dark: and I took away the bars covering the back part of the hive. The hive proper is still pretty snugly closed by the propolis-caulked follower board. It seems to have worked--there haven't been any more ants since Monday.
There are still beetle larvae crawling around on the floor of the hive, with bees in hot pursuit. I hope that my freezing tactic has killed all the eggs to date. If the larvae can't escape the hive to pupate, perhaps the infestation will burn itself out. I didn't see a single adult beetle as I worked the hive today.
I have started seeing some very dark colored bees. Most of my girls have been sort of golden buff with black stripes, but these new bees have darkly striped abdomens with very little lightness. I have no earthly idea what I'm seeing. They seem to be fully accepted as part of the hive. Are they the result of some wild genetics brought in by the new queen I hope is still out there?
They started taking the syrup Tuesday, with some enthusiasm. I stirred a teaspoon of Celtic salt into this batch, for the minerals, so maybe that's what they like.
Apart from offering food, I'm going to leave the ladies alone for a while. Perhaps they can sort themselves out.
It hasn't rained for several days, and this led to an unexpected consequence today. We're keeping Ginger, the chick Michelle and family raised, in a chicken tractor by her lonesome until she gets big enough to run loose. At present, she's still a convenient snack size. The latch on said tractor has not been working right because of all the rain: the wood swelled, and the latch didn't line up correctly. It wasn't a problem; since the door was so swollen, it stuck firmly shut. Today, while we were at work, it dried up enough--apparently--that it just fell open. Jordan called when he got home, to ask if I'd let the peeper out, which of course I had not. She was missing.
I can't really express how awful I felt, to think that this baby only lasted 4 days at my house. How could I possibly tell Michelle? and the girls---??? I'd already horrifed them by handing them some eggs to hatch and then blithely stating that we ate all the other eggs, which they took to understand that we routinely eat baby chicks.
Jordan called and sprinkled food and looked around the yard--for those of you that have seen the yard, you'll understand how daunting it is; "yard" doesn't quite capture the jungly, swampy feel of the Sanctuary--but Ginger didn't show. When I got home, I did much the same thing, still no Gin. I showed Camille the coop, and asked her where my chicken was. She got a good smellerfull, then went zigzagging around the yard, nose to ground. It looked aimless, at first, but after a moment I realized that's pretty much how a chicken walks around, so I followed. Camille tracks at a relaxed saunter, so I can keep up. Before long, most of the other chickens and a couple cats were following us around, too. We're a team. I kept calling, my best Michelle imitation, and then Camille stuck her head under a log and wagged her tail. And there was Ginger, all in one piece.
Such a good dog.