And the Rubber Dodo Award Goes to...Mrs. Sarah Palin!

This just in from The Center for Biological Diversity:

Sarah Palin Earns Prestigious Rubber Dodo Award

The second annual Rubber Dodo Award goes to... Sarah Palin. The Center for Biological Diversity honored her with the 2008 award for her valiant efforts to protect her state's oil industry -- sacrificing the well-being of our earth, our climate, the polar bear, and numerous other warming-threatened species in the process. Starting in 2006, Palin worked hard to block the government from protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act -- and when the bear was declared "threatened" anyway, she sued, joined shortly thereafter by her oil-industry friends. According to the Center's executive director Kierán Suckling, Palin's lawsuit will put her in the history books as perhaps the only person ever to have accused the Bush administration of excessive use of the Endangered Species Act.

The Center's Rubber Dodo Award is reserved every year for the person in public or private service whom we feel has done the most to contribute to endangered species' extinction. Last year, we gave the award to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.

Check out the full Dodo Award press release here.

Dodo. Palin. Dodo. It's just so perfect in so many ways.

The Conspiracy Against Locally Grown Produce

A farmer's perspective on the bureaucratic and economic barriers to delivering fresh, wholesome, locally grown fruits and vegetables to your table.

Swarm Saga, Pt. 4 (Home at Last)

The next day, there was good news and bad news.

The good news was that the U.S. postal service (for once) came through, with a surprisingly quick delivery of the hive.

The bad news was that getting the bees into the new hive was going to be a challenge, since the bees hadn't taken at all well to the temporary hive I'd fashioned out of an Office Max (OM) carton. By that morning, honeybees were merrily camped out on the front of the box in mass quantities, and had established several mini-civilizations in the gaps between the tarp and the box, and under the box, and along the concrete blocks on which the box was positioned. Lord only knows where the queen was in all that mess, or how I was going to get these disparate subpopulations into a single hive body.
Avoiding the inevitable moment of truth, I busied myself with preparing the new hive. I started by drilling three upper entrance holes in the front. (These entrances, along with the long narrow front entrance along the bottom of the hive, provide ventilation—an underrated issue in beekeeping—and give the bees a way to exit the hive for brief cleansing flights on warm winter days if snow has blocked the main entrance.)

Next, I began the pleasant task of applying dabs of melted beeswax to the guide bar on each top bar to provide an invitingly scented bee environment, and to encourage the bees to build their comb nice and straight along the top bar. (It's important to be able to remove each top bar to inspect the hives and carry out certain manipulations that promote the colony's well being over the course of the year. If the bees build their comb out of alignment with these bars, it becomes impossible to move the bars without destroying the comb and undoing lots of bee-labor, thus setting them back in their quest for overwintering capability and longterm survival.)Each of these top bars will go face down along the top of the hive, with the guides facing downward.

Last but not least, I added a drop or two of lemongrass oil to the interior of the hive body. Apparently, this scent has been found to encourage honeybees to accept a new hive body, reducing the incidence of absconding. (Which, by the way, is quite different from Colony Collapse Disorder.)

I set the newly prepped hive outside in the sun, scrawled the name Rebel Rebel on the top cover, and waited until dusk. I'd been told that hiving at this time might further increase the chances the bees would accept the hive. I guess the thinking is, once they spend the night there, some level of attachment is created, especially if the home is a suitable one. And it probably goes without saying that a delicate procedure like hiving a swarm is best accomplished in fading light with minimal visibility. Not.

As dusk approached, I transferred one honeycomb and one comb of brood from Hive Orange into the new hive body to help the bees get started in there and provide some sustenance during their initial adjustment.

My able partner-in-swarmcatching-crime, Karen, had returned to the city, so I was on my own for this final phase in the swarm hiving process. I carried the new hive body to the bee yard and positioned it on the ground by the OM box and the legions of AWOL bees, who reminded me of nothing so much as a mob of deadheads trying to find their way through the parking lot after a particularly long-winded Grateful Dead concert.

I then brushed, shook, cajoled, directed, herded, ushered, scooped, hand-delivered, and, yes, dumped as many bees as possible into the new hive from their myriad locations under the tarp, between the holes in the concrete blocks, and within and without the OM box itself. I removed the OM box from its spot on the concrete blocks and lifted the new hive into position on the concrete blocks (Honeybees' GPS is finely tuned; the new hive had to be located just where the old hive was in order for the bees to orient to it properly.) I then closed the top, and went home for a much needed glass of beer.

As you can see, in spite of all their lollygagging here, there, and everywhere around the OM box, it seems the bees had (to some degree) accepted their temporary home by beginning to build comb on the lid—a sight I found inexplicably poignant.On the other hand, they'd begun doing the same thing under the tarp, so who knows what would have happened if they'd been left to their own devices there?

The next morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find the bees still in and around the hive. Many were clustered on the exterior, but by now I was getting used to that sort of behavior.Like the wonderfully enigmatically wild animals they are, the bees are going to do not what the books say they will do, nor what you expect them to do, but whatever they are moved to do. In this respect, they remind me very much of house cats.

For the time being, it seemed all was well with Rebel Rebel.
But the time being is, by definition, a painfully fleeting thing. The very next day, following a brief, respectful and clearly premature inspection of the hive, bees started pouring out the front entrance in waves and flying tumultuously skyward in a behavior disturbingly reminiscent of swarming. I couldn't blame them. They were understandably antsy and anxious and seeing my face yet again must surely have upset them. Learning Curve Lesson #799: Leave the bees alone, will ya???

I never did see whether the swarm-like throngs returned to Rebel Rebel, but after that incident, it seemed to me, there were fewer bees in the hive. Did some actually leave and, if so, had all-important queen departed with them? Did they all return once I was out of earshot and simply create the appearance of fewer bees because they were now getting organized with comb-building and nectar-gathering? As a new beekeeper, I am still in the earliest phases of learning to interpret my observations; I look forward to the day when I can better the connect the bee-dots.

Even with its (seemingly) smaller work force, the Rebel Rebel bees have been working hard at building comb, gathering nectar, and trying to build things up in there. But the ranks looked small and I wondered whether they'd be able to pull together the critical mass needed to build up their population and honey stores to a level where they could survive a long, cold Northern winter. To us, the season of snow and subzero temperatures seems far away, but for the bees, in a sense, it is just around the corner, with an unthinkable amount of work to be accomplished between now and then.

Swarm Saga, Pt. 3 (A Forcible Reunion)

I was up at dawn the next morning to check on the progress of the two groups of bees. Needless to say, in spite of all my wishes, hopes, and dreamlets—the two contingents had not merrily reunited overnight, but remained in their separate spots: half the colony in the Brother Fax Box clinging to their severed branch, the other half in the Office Max (OM) box I'd designated as the bees' temporary hive until the real hive arrived from out west.We were getting nowhere fast. Having interrupted the bees' natural swarming process, I felt a responsibility to try and get everyone together in the OM box and put an end to this stalemate. The probability was that I'd failed to get the queen in the initial hiving and that, instead of residing the OM box, she was with the second part of the swarm, in the Brother box.

Determined to set things to right, as competent rural people say (or so I've read), I marched back to the shed, put on my beek suit, marched back to the bees, whispered a few niceties to them ("Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me."), opened the OM box, and, as gently and effectively as I possibly could, dumped the thoroughly unamused Brother box bees into the OM box. Then, my left leg shaking uncontrollably as before, I closed up the OM box, placed a tarp over the top, and stomped back to the shed. (I did all this without my swarm-catching partner Karen's able help, just to assure myself that I could do it. This was psychologically important, since Karen would be gone by the time the real hive arrived and I would be on my own for the final hiving process.)Once inside the shed, I could hear the buzz of several distraught bees clinging abjectly (so I thought) to the back of my bee suit. Feeling badly for all I'd put these brave bees through, I stepped outside and returned to the hive so the girls could rejoin their colony. Aside from guilt about repeatedly bothering the bees, I felt the colony needed every bee it could get. I slowly removed my veil, unzipped my suit, and began gingerly removing it so as not to jar the bees on my back.

One millisecond after my hood was off, one of the clinging bees zoomed around from behind with the speed, professionalism, and precision of a fighter pilot and stung me on the chin—nothing abject about it. It was kind of funny and I couldn't help but side with the bee; I so deserved that!

I was shaken, but felt that I'd now done everything I could to get the colony together, in one place, while we waited for the real hive body to arrive via US Mail. I began to pray to the US Postal Service as a drought-ravaged farmer prays for rain.

Unfortunately, the bees didn't seem too happy in the OM box. They hung out on the front of the box in mass quantities, and began to set up little clusters in the gaps between the tarp and the box, and under the box, and along the concrete blocks on which the box was positioned.
It was going to be Big Fun getting them all into the real hive once it finally arrived.

Swarm Saga, Pt. 2 (Mission Accomplished...Not!)

Yep, me and Karen were feeling pretty damn proud of ourselves after ketchin' that swarm....(Man's dominion over nature, etc.)

I was riding on an abundance of post-swarm endorphins, happy to find that my left leg had finally stopped shaking, feeling very King Bee.Karen was fine-tuning her "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" Beek-in-Flight moves.
Yet all was not entirely rosy. At least half the swarm appeared to have re-clustered in the sumac from which only hours before we had so painstakingly and incompetently removed them. (And here, I mean the royal we, since Karen bears no responsibility for any of this insanity.)

OK, so all those bees that landed on my suit and on the ground and in the air—plus any of the scout bees that were off premises looking for a good home far, far away from Gerry Gomez Pearlberg during Swarm-catching Attempt #1—all of these bees were now back on their branch, perhaps with the all-important queen, without whom the colony is doomed. Sigh. It was fun the first time, so why not do it all again? I felt terrible, but the colony had to be united. A bee colony is a superorganism whose survival depends on the sum of the parts.


In a painful case of deja vu all over again, the Brother fax box was brought back out from the shed and placed under the sumac in which this most unfortunate honeybee clan had cast its lot. This time, we clipped the branch on which they rested and gently laid it in the Brother box. The bees were pretty calm this time; too blue to protest, I guess. Or perhaps they appreciated the gentle treatment.
We placed the Brother box directly in front of the Office Max Recycled Copy Paper box, in the hope that a happy reunion would ensue.
The Brother box contained a rather astonishing number of bees. It was amazing that I could have missed or misplaced so many of them in the initial swarm-catching effort. Learning Curve Alert #79!

I had a funny feeling the queen was in the Brother box...in which case, everyone would probably leave the Office Max box and go into the much more exposed (and vulnerable) Brother box to rejoin their hive mother (who, in a Chinatown-like twist, is also their sister...but let's not go there at this time).

We decided to give it overnight and see what the bees decided to do. But before departing, I posed proudly by the box. I really need to stop doing that—it's bad beekeeping luck!

Because as you see, we still hadn't accomplished our mission! (Yes, it's political allegory, all right.)

This last group was easy to grab, and we added it to the Brother box and left the bees to their own devices.

But first, one last pose with the honeybee popsicle.


To be continued...

Swarm Saga, Pt. 1 (I Take A Notion)

This is the story of how not to hive a swarm of bees.

Last week, on the Summer Solstice, the bees from both Hive Orange and Green Hive took to the road. One swarm left without saying goodbye, but I was lucky enough to get to see the other swarm take to the skies with a collective roar before landing in a small sumac in the bee yard.
The sumac was a temporary home for the bees whilst scouts went out in search of a better home—a nice, hollow tree or some other suitable spot to set up shop.

Seeing the swarming process was a thrill. Once settled in the tree, the bees became so quiet you wouldn't even know they were there. An astonishingly powerful force of nature, yet so vulnerable and humble.

Initially, my intention was simply to let them go their way and lend their numbers to the feral honeybee population. Several factors, including the bees' relatively accessible location, soon shifted my thinking toward the idea of trying to capture the swarm. I'd already ordered an extra hive body from my top bar hive supplier, though it hadn't yet arrived. That wasn't ideal, but with the new hive winging its way through the US postal system, I expected it in a matter of days. The notion of catching and keeping the bees in a temporary setup seemed to take on a life of its own. "Why not try it?" my local beekeeper said when I called to ask his advice, sealing my fate.

Somehow, catching a swarm seemed the next logical step in the beekeeping adventure. Plus, it sounds so damn cool: catching a swarm. Let's face it, in spite of all my deep ecology philosophizing, I share that horrible human urge to tinker with natural processes better left to their own devices.

By later that evening, I'd begun to think it might be possible to make it work. My intrepid friend Karen was visiting for the weekend and seemed game for the adventure. She took the shots below.

First thing the next morning (4 a.m., actually), Amateur Hour Carpentry had re-opened for business and there was duct tape, screen mesh (for ventilation), and corrugated cardboard everywhere. We built a temporary holding box for the bees and prepared to capture them. (The advice I'd received was to temporarily house the bees in a cardboard box with a separate, fitted lid—like the kind office paper comes in. But I didn't have one of those boxes and didn't want the swarm to up and disappear, so we created this initial holding pen out of an old fax machine package. Why catch a swarm of bees in just one step, when you can do it in three?!)

The calm euphoria before the decidedly non-euphoric storm. As you can see, the cluster was very quiet and subdued—no problem getting close without protective gear...so long as you don't bother them.

Spraying the cluster with sugar water to calm them before seriously bothering them.
The open box was placed under the cluster, the branch on which they'd gathered was inelegantly shaken, and bees fell by the hundreds into the box—and on my suit, and on the ground. By this time, there were many bees flying around in a rage—or was it a feeling of fear and betrayal?
The box of bees was closed...

The bee-brush Samba—an attempt to remove some of the bees trying to sting me through my jeans. Who could blame them?

Back in the shed, my bee suit removed, I have a delayed reaction to the self-inflicted trauma of being surrounded by thousands of flipped-out bees and decide that there's a bee on my neck that wants to kill me. I freak, but Karen assures me it's just a bit of torn cloth from my bandanna. She takes this picture to prove it, but for an hour or so I have paranoid delusions of bees crawling on me.

We rush to Office Max and buy a ream of paper in order to acquire the proper type of box. A minor drama ensues regarding the location of the recycled office paper (why do they make it hard to find that?!). Another small drama ensues about the time it takes to check out (forever!), though we are the only people in the cavernous store in a ghost-town of a mall for which acres of pasture were paved (and people wonder why all the pollinators are disappearing).

Finally, we're out of there and back to Amateur Hour Carpentry so the box can be screened for ventilation and entrance holes drilled to allow the bees to come and go (and forage) while we wait for the real hive to appear.

The bees are transferred into the new box.

And the box is placed on the same stand where the real hive will be located. Bees have very sensitive navigation equipment and would have trouble making the transition to the real hive if the location was suddenly changed.

Mission accomplished, we're feeling pretty good. Karen gives the bees some sugar water to cool them off and rejuvenate them a bit. We're both relieved that, after two transfers, the bees are now set up and can relax in their temp home. We're Swarm Catchers, and we're feelin' mighty fine!

Except for this....


To be continued....

They Call Me Swarm-Catcher!

Not a very good swarm-catcher, but a swarm-catcher nonetheless. (Not sure if I succeeded in catching them, or simply waylaying them en route to bigger and better things.)

I just might be eligible for the Least Elegant Swarm-Catching In Beekeeping History Award and will confess all the inglorious details soon. On the other hand, I have experienced the exhilarating terror and fascination of the swarm-catching adventure. It was Sensurround x 25,000+---the approximate number of bees (and I am being conservative here) I managed to provoke out of a peaceful, silent, minding-its-own-beeswax swarm.

The photos below were taken by my intrepid pal, Karen, who worked with me throughout the whole process and did some great documenting. Below, you see me spraying a little sugar syrup on the outer part of the cluster to calm the bees down a bit before startling the living hell out of them by violently shaking the branch they were so happily resting on into a large box awaiting them below.

Moments later, their peace disrupted, I found myself enveloped in a torrential rainfall of bees. Many landed in the box as planned; many more wound up in the air and, as you can see, madly tried to dissuade me from my folly. It was frightening, but also transcendent to stand inside a force of nature in a well-made beek suit. I must also take my hat off to my cheaply made Old Navy bluejeans which protected me remarkably well from the justifiably defensive onslaught.

That thing covered with bees on the right side of this shot? That would be my arm.
Yes, I wound up with a few minor stings—and honestly, it was good to get that over with, because I'm not nearly as nervous about getting stung now. Also, I have learned that the real problem with bee stings is less the pain of the sting than the murderous itch that reminds you for days on end not to hassle bees. Actually, given how obnoxious my incursions were, I think the bees went easy on me and once again showed their essentially nonviolent temperament.