"Winterizing"

The bees are "winterized"—their entrances reduced, mouse protection added, and sky-blue sheets of Styrofoam insulation placed atop and along the false back of every hive.

Two of three look good to go. The third seems a little quiet, but time will tell. All three hives have been left their honey; I didn't harvest this fall and it will be interesting to see whether, with nothing stolen from them, they make it OK. So much depends upon the weather; the weather, luck, and whatever secret strengths or deficits reside inside those mysterious wooden hives with their brilliant clusters of thrumming beings.

Geese are passing overhead now, not just daily, but hourly. And so begins the countdown to winter which, for me (and for the bees?) is really just a countdown to spring.

Recent Things

Recent Things (Joni Mitchell Brackets)

"See the geese in chevron flight, flappin' and a-racin' on before the snow...they got the urge for going and they got the wings so they can go..."—Joni Mitchell ("Urge for Going")

Corn dog on the fly.

Pink corn.

Acorn takes the high road.

Birdhouse in which wrens spent the summer...
...and a mouse spends the fall.
Tomato plants covered at dusk on the night of first frost.

Snake skin in the bee yard. (Note outline of eye and jaw on the left portion of skin.)

Grass shadows on a great book by Jim Harrison.

A mushroom I thought was the shiny cinnamon polypore but now I think isn't.

Ambivalent leaves of staghorn sumac.

A tiny nest.

Grouse crossing!

"Hey farmer, farmer, put away the DDT now—give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees—please."—Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"

Recent Things

Pumpkin.

Glam caterpillar on fennel.
Honeybee on zinnia.


Bumblebee on sunflower.

A neighbor's strange enterprise.

Rat-hunting target practice?

Bumblebee & borage.

Harvest.
Grandpa Ott morning glory.

The Pesto Factory.

Sencha and Wren conducting a Field Study.

Daddy Longlegs & old Mason jar.

A really big shoe (and a really long worm).

Aster. A most September-iferous flower.

Bulbs, Bees, and Muddy Acts of Faith

The weather is finally turning cold (or cold-ish) and hard frost has come, weeks past its due date, zapping the remaining color from the fields. Pink milkweed blossoms are just a memory now, blown to the wind on silken white horsetails that spring from cracked brown pods. Incandescent goldenrod blossoms have gone to cloud-like seed. Jewelweed, burdock, and all the other flowers the bees worked so diligently all summer have died back or become, truly, ghosts of their former selves.

Thankfully, the borage in the herb bed continues to provide a bit of sustenance, and with daytime temperatures continuing to provide days warm enough for the honeybees to venture out, the borage blossoms are where it’s at, bee-wise. What a gift to see and hear the honeybees work in these last days of October. What a strange and haunting gift.

This weekend, our answer to the sadness of autumn was to plant spring bulbs. Wren and I got 100 Siberian squill bulbs and 200 crocus bulbs in the ground after hours of digging around in the cold mud. Both bloom in early spring, and should provide a welcomed pollen source for the bees once the weather is warm enough for them to start flying and before an abundance of other pollen sources have become available.

I remember the indescribable thrill, last spring, of watching our newly hived honeybees feverishly working the measly bed of ten or twelve crocuses in front of the house. I am hopeful that at least one or two of our three colonies will survive the winter, if winter ever comes. And I’m eager to visit with the bees next spring and see them making use of the squill and other gifts of garden and field.

Planting these bulbs, for me, is a leap of faith: that spring will come again, that our bees will live to see it, and that we’ll have the time and presence of mind to immerse ourselves fully in the mesmerizing wonder of it all.

Portulaca Honeybee

Autumn has been gentle so far, with no hard frost as of yet and none predicted for the upcoming week. Though there's been significant die-back of the bees' forage plants, there are still a few decent stands of goldenrod and a great deal of aster to continue provisioning the bees for winter. The weather has been balmy and the bees have been foraging intensively in their continuing effort to pack away as much nectar and pollen for winter as they can. (My beekeeper mentors tellme a colony needs at least 60 pounds of honey to survive the winter; an inconceivable amount of work when you consider the size of a honeybee. Happily, all three of my hives appear to have attained the necessary stores.)

This weekend, I observed the bees foraging on borage, sunflower, black knapweed, ornamental (late-blooming) milkweed, zinnia, squash blossoms, and salvia, along with aster and goldenrod.

I was particularly intrigued to see a bee working the portulacas I planted early this summer near the front of the house. Though I have seen bees scope out these flowers throughout the summer (and occasionally collect dew drops from the petals), I've never seen a bee gather nectar or pollen from these plants—probably because better options abounded. But with the forage menu diminishing daily, this busy bee put aside any scruples she may have had about delving into the portulaca and literally immersed herself in the task, till she was dusted from head to tail with pollen.

Aster

We, and the bees,
are lucky. Autumn
is being generous to us.

Fall/Of The Honeybee Drones

We have been warned that first frost may come tomorrow night. If it's a killing frost, it will be a big deal for the bees—the precipitous end-stop to the nectar-gathering season, the end of life, in a sense, as the bees have known it.

You can feel the intensity of the shifting season at the hives; it rivals anything that came before, or it so it seems. Several species of goldenrod are giving nectar in abundance and the bees are working the blossoms like wild.

I took a walk deep into the gold and purple field yesterday afternoon. A beautiful, crisp autumnal day of shining sun. Apples red in the trees. Monarchs rising and falling on the currents of the breeze. The honeybees, it seemed, were everywhere. Dozens and dozens of them working every stand of goldenrod. A few working the white and purple asters, and one rugged individualist foraging the very last of the black knapweed. No detail overlooked, nothing going to waste.

With these final days of gathering in anticipation of the oncoming cold comes the inevitable time of consolidation for the colony: the eviction, the mass murder of the drones.

This morning, I was startled to see a bee drag a big white drone larva from the hive. I then noticed other drone larvae on the ground nearby. The bees are cleaning house—they know they won't need drones during the long, cold winter. Those honeycomb cells can be put to better use storing the food the workers and queen will depend on during the months of no flowers, the months of weather too cold to explore, scout, forage, fly.
The workers are also kicking out the adult drones. At this point, the unfortunate drones represent nothing more than freeloaders, consumers of nectar and honey so carefully stored in the hive to provide the hope of winter survival. The drones are a liability the colony can no longer afford. Here, a daddy longlegs consumes an evicted drone.
I'm fond of the bumbling, good-looking drones, and in my strong desire for stories with happy endings, I wish things could be another way. Fortunately, I'm not running the show here. Nature takes a bigger view and has imbued the honeybee with the immeasurable efficiency and practicality of the hive-mind. These creatures who spend their hours gathering sweet elixir from the flowers certainly cannot be accused of taking a sentimental view of life.

Here's a particularly good looking guy biting the dust.

And here's an action shot: a worker beating up on a drone. The worker is on the right, the drone is on his back—he's defenseless. He has no stinger and no hope of being allowed back inside. Before long, he will perish of cold or hunger or, perhaps, of a broken heart.

In The Life of the Bee, Maurice Maeterlinck writes vividly of the otherwise happy-go-lucky drones' response to "the massacre of the males":

"The great idle drones, asleep in unconscious groups on the melliferous walls, are rudely torn from their slumbers by an army of wrathful virgins. They wake, in pious wonder; they cannot believe their eyes; and their astonishment struggles through their sloth as a moonbeam through marshy water. They stare amazedly round them, convinced that they must be the victims of some terrible mistake; and the mother-idea of their life being first to assert itself in their dull brain, they take a step toward the vats of honey to seek comfort there. But ended for them are the days of May honey, the wine-flower of lime trees and fragrant ambrosia of thyme and sage, or marjoram and white clover. Where the path once lay open to the kindly, abundant reservoirs, that so invitingly offered their waxen and sugary mouths, there stands now a burning bush all alive with poisonous, bristling stings."

Autumnal Musings

Autumn has definitely come to Hooterville, complete with an explosion of aster and the first hesitant dropping of maple, birch and chestnut leaves.
It puts one in a reflective state of mind. As pretty as it is this time of year, I'm always sorry to see summer end. Yes, it's 90 degrees today, but it's still autumn! I know it, and the bees surely know it.
They're working hard gathering nectar and pollen off the aster, jewelweed, and goldenrod. These plants are providing the remaining nectar flow of the year—the last flow the bees have available to them before winter restricts them to a long period of waiting in the hive. It's truly a race against time, against the hard frost that will nail the remaining flowers and end the flow entirely, forcing the bees to survive the winter on whatever they have stored up until that point.

This girl's pollen baskets are packed, and she's entering the hive to store what she's collected. Then she'll go right back out again and collect some more.
I did a "hive dive" (inspection) of Rebel Rebel the other day. Things were looking pretty crowded in there and I wanted to see what was up (especially because—did I forget to mention it?—Hive Orange swarmed last weekend, just in time for my mother's visit!). During the visit to the hive, a little honey dripped from my hive tool and these bees were quick to gather it up. I love how pretty they look when they do that! Like girls at a soda fountain in an Archie comic book.

One curious bee decided to check out my record-keeping notebook. There's always so much to see and do in the hive that I have to write everything down right then and there to keep track. The record-keeping helps me follow the many changes that occur in each hive from week to week, as well as my own actions and the results of those. There is so, so much to learn. I hope my brain is big and wrinkled and grey-mattered enough to handle it all.


The notebook comes from a great letterpress printing studio called Foxglove Press.