Smoke and Mirrors

My second time interacting with the bees was much less chaotic.  I lit the smoker and filled it with pine needles.  (I recently found out that some people recommend preparing the smoker even before hiving your first package.  Too late for that).  I suited up. I slowly puffed smoke into the doorway of the hive then lifted up the outer cover and puffed smoke in there as well.  When I finally opened the hive it was perfectly organized, nothing like the frenetic mess I had created when hiving the poor ladies.  They were busy as bees working hard to draw out their honeycomb.

And let me tell you – in just a week they had done a ton of work.  They had built out several frames, and filled in the open space left by the queen cage with burr comb (see picture below).  I felt very bad removing it because they had clearly worked very hard at it.  It was a beautiful pearly white marvel of engineering.  I saved it and will melt it down into a candle or something later.  After removing the burr comb I checked for eggs – the place was chock full – our queen is definitely a fertile Myrtle. (Myrtle!  That would have been a good name!).

So overall a much better experience.  I think it was partially because the bees were busy and orderly, and partially because the smoker really works wonders.  It’s like a snake-charmer’s flute.  When the smoke billows out onto the bees they immediately retreat downwards into the hive.  When reflecting on this later my thought was, “oh my gosh I hope I wasn’t roasting my bees alive”.  (I have read in several books you can smoke the bees too much, or literally burn the bees if you have too much fuel in your smoker.)  I felt very guilty about that for a few days until I lit the smoker again and felt the temperature of the smoke coming out of it.  It was warm, but certainly wouldn’t roast the ladies alive. (Thank goodness.)  For those who are curious, the idea behind the smoke is twofold – first off it triggers an instinct in the bees to gather up as much resources as possible, so they can move their colony if necessary.  This causes the bees to gorge on honey to take with them if they need to move.  The second principle is that the smoke interrupt’s the queen’s pheromones.  These pheromones normally provide the communication the hive needs to function as a unit (“Build comb here”, “Bring in fresh water”, “We need more pollen”, “Attack the intruder”).  The smoke breaks down communication in the hive, particularly the alert/attack pheromones that the queen emits when she realizes someone is ripping the roof off of her home.

Oh and we finally named her.  The queen that is.  Since I can’t name all my pets I decided to name each colony for it’s queen (she does all the real controlling inside the hive anyway).  So this one is named Rosalinda.  Don’t ask why, there is no real reason. Other options were Waltraud and Tricia, two of our grandmothers’ names.  After reflecting on it a while, we decided our grandmothers might not be overly enthusiastic to learn they are namesakes for thousands of bees…

Long live Rosalinda, long live the queen!

PS – The next video should be up tomorrow.