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."

A Disquieting Inflorescence

No, it's not a posthumously published Edward Gorey story, but a ubiquitous scoundrel of a plant named burdock. You may recall that in the recent Got Milkweed? post, we explored the risky nature of pollinating that flower—talk about unsafe sex!

Well, burdock puts milkweed to shame when it comes to pathological tendencies. Three years ago, an innocent looking burdock blossom savagely murdered a beautiful young hummingbird at the edge of my garden and earned my eternal wrath. Since then, I've done all I can to eradicate it with a scythe. It's great exercise!

It's also a Sisyphean undertaking. My bemused neighbors occasionally catch me in the act and shake their heads. "You'll never get rid of that stuff," they say, unaware that I've got a vendetta to fulfill and more than enough Italian in my blood to make good on it. However, as one who at least aspires to mental hygiene, I ritualistically transform the bitter herb of revenge into the sweet heirloom tomato of environmental correctness by building mountain-high compost piles out of the burdock's elephantine leaves and massive stems. Again—good exercise!

The irony is that burdock would be a great weed to have around if it didn't have such murderous tendencies. The roots are edible (I've had some wonderful Japanese preparations and I know it's popular in old-world Italian cooking). The flowers are a pretty purple. And come to find out, the honeybees and bumblebees really like it. So what's not to like?

The problem lies in the tiny, Velcro-like barbs that surround the base of the flower. (In fact, the man who invented Velcro reported having gotten the idea from observing these, or similar, plants.)

Although most pollinators seem to make their visits to the flowers without incident, plenty don't. Between the horrifying hummer incident and a bird skeleton I found stuck to the dried flowers one winter, I am so over this plant!
As if the above-mentioned incidents weren't enough, the other morning, I found a bat struggling to get free from a burdock flower. I ran home, threw on my beek suit and gloves, got my "surgical equipment" and freed it, but its wings had been torn and I believe it perished after I left it, still clinging upside-down to the burdock stem—one of the most forlorn sights I've come upon in a long time.
Afterwards, in the interest of further building my case against this pernicious plant, I conducted a brief census of a patch of burdock and found 2 stuck honeybees—one practically mummified, the other still alive but beyond assistance.
I assume the evolutionary excuse for this barbed structure is dispersal. The idea would be that the dried, seed-rich flower adheres (temporarily) to the leg of a deer, say, and is transported to another area, thereby extending its range. Just so we know it's not being mean for the hell of it.

The thing is, it's a pretty good-looking plant and it clearly appeals to the local pollinators. So let's for a moment simply enjoy these images of burdock at its best.
A bee's-eye view.

Inviting-looking pollen available to all who chose to provide pollination services herein—but watch those barbs!

An old girl (note tattered wings) with pollen-dusted head.

Coming in for a landing....

A lovely bumblebee virtually saturated in fairy dust.

The great chronicler of honeybee life, Maurice Maeterlinck, spoke eloquently of the sadness we often find alongside nature's beauty, abundance, and joy.

"...all things in nature are sad, when our eyes rest too closely upon them....At the present hour the duty before us is to seek out that which perhaps may be hiding, behind these sorrows; and, urged on by this endeavor, we must not turn our eyes away, but steadily, fixedly, watch these sorrows and study them, with a courage and interest as keen as though they were joys. It is right that before we judge nature, before we complain, we should at least ask every question that we can possibly ask."

Words to live by...with scythe firmly in hand.

honeybees = "the soul of summer"

Thumbing through Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee tonight, I came upon this lovely bit of unabashedly enthused nature prose, and thought I'd share.

"The bees give their honey and sweet-smelling wax to the man who attends them; but more precious gift still is their summoning him to the gladness of June, to the joy of the beautiful months; for events in which bees take part happen only when skies are pure, at the winsome hours of the year when flowers keep holiday. They are soul of the summer, the clock whose dial records the moments of plenty; they are the untiring wing on which delicate perfumes float; the guide of the quivering light-ray, the song of the slumberous, languid air; and their flight is the token, the sure and melodious note, of all the myriad fragile joys that are born in the heat and dwell in the sunshine. They teach us how to tune our ear to the softest, most intimate whisper of these good, natural hours. To him who has known them and loved them, a summer where there there are no bees becomes as sad and as empty as one without flowers or birds."

Rebel Rebel's Queen

Last week, during a "check in" on Rebel Rebel, I was fortunate enough to see (and hear!) the queen. Below, you can see some of the workers gathered around her, kind of encircling her. She's the larger "redder" bee below them. This stance, whereby the bees face inward toward their queen, is one of the easiest ways to spot a queen. Maeterlinck describes this encircling as looking like a grandmother's brooch, while a more recent book describes it as a daisy, with the workers as the petals and the queen at the flower's core.
Here's a better shot of the queen as she makes an all-too-brief appearance, only to be subsumed again moments later by her attentive and protective compatriots.

A Calm Interlude

With the swarm busily establishing itself in the new Rebel Rebel hive—no longer a swarm, really, but "kept" bees—my attention once again turned to the more relaxing beekeeping-related pleasures I'd envisioned when first taking up this pursuit: photographing the bees on flowers, learning the names of forage plants I wasn't already familiar with (who knew there were so many kinds of clover?!), watching the bees come and go in the bee yard, trying to spot "my" bees on my daily walks through the fields, working my way through Maurice Maeterlinck's captivating book, The Life of the Bee, and consorting with the locals.
During this relative lull, I also built a delightfully low tech solar wax melter to convert bits of culled comb into gobs of that wonderful, aromatic substance known as beeswax. Using materials at hand and applying my Amateur Hour Carpentry can-do spirit, I had my melter built in twenty minutes.

Take one tin can and add some water (for the melted wax to suspend in). Create a sieve using a paper towel.

Place comb on sieve. (The comb I'm getting now is small; I'll use a bigger container once I begin harvesting larger pieces of comb. This year, I am leaving the bees everything I can so they're well provisioned while getting established. Next year, there may be honeycomb to spare. If so, we will eat the honey and melt the comb.)

Place can with comb in an insulated container—in this case, an old styrofoam box I got at the Park Slope Food Coop.

Cover with glass (or, in this case, an old plastic cutting board).

Let the sun shine in!

After a day in the hot sun, my solar wax melter had yielded a sweet-scented nugget of gold reminiscent of a lunar crescent. The moon, we now find, is made not of green cheese, but of beeswax.

One of the neat things about beeswax is its color variation. Here's a comparison of the results of my first two "meltdowns." (If only all my meltdowns were this productive!)

In time, as pieces of off-center comb are culled and honeycomb is harvested, there should be a good supply of comb to melt down. Then we can start making lip balm, hand lotion, candles, and maybe even crayons. Who doesn't like a good, homemade crayon?

By the way, beeswax is secreted from the honeybee worker's abdomen during the comb-building process, yet another in the bees' seemingly unending store of fabulous talents bordering on the surreal.

On Brains, Beauty, and the Spirit of the Hive

"What is this 'spirit of the hive'--where does it reside?"

In his poetic, philosophically rich treatise on honeybees, The Life of the Bee, Maurice Maeterlinck asked this question regarding the mystery whereby 60,000+ honeybees in a colony carry out innumerable tasks in a highly effective, coordinated manner; locate and share data on the ever-shifting array of available nectar sources; decide when to swarm or supercede an old queen; coordinate defense of their colony; and, through countless incremental acts of cooperation, specialization, and communication, achieve the goals of reproduction and survival.

Watching the colony from the human-outside, one begins to suspect that the underpinning of this ameobic mind-body-spirit is a vast communication network that makes the Internet look quaint and the Psychic Hotline look like Amateur Hour.

Maeterlinck was grappling with these questions in 1901, and pretty much everyone who has written about honeybees before or since has wound up doing the same. It's impossible to watch a colony in action without perceiving a deeply complex mind at work. And, as humans entranced with power and hierarchy, it really messes with our heads to think of "queen" and "workers" without making all sorts of assumptions and projections about who's running the show in there.

Having been at this beekeeping thing for only a few weeks, I don't pretend to have the faintest clue about what's going on in the hives. I am watching the bees, reading as much as I can about them, and savoring the mysteries they pose.

I was pleased to come upon the article below on honeybees behavior and colony dynamics this morning. It describes some interesting new research on honeybee behavior, plus a quick overview of honeybee basics like the "waggle dance."
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Undergraduate research shows leaderless honeybee organizing from PhysOrg.com

Undergraduate education generally involves acquiring “received knowledge” – in other words, absorbing the past discoveries of scholars and scientists. But University of North Carolina at Charlotte senior biology major Andrew Pierce went beyond the textbooks and uncovered something previously unknown.[...]

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Of course, the article contains the annoying (requisite) pronouncement that, "Bees do not have large brains and are not capable of complex thought like humans." To which I say, Their brains may be small, but they're still outwitting the scientists trying to figure them out!

It seems most every article about how "complex" or "intelligent" an animal is includes the comforting caveat that "they're not as smart as us"—because we humans are just SOOOO smart! (It makes us feel bad to consider the possibility that intelligence takes many forms and expressions that we, in our supremely limited way of seeing things, simply fail to appreciate, recognize, or understand.)

That's what I like about the honeybees—they make us look kind of dumb.