Catch-up of Doom 5: Real Life 2: The bees

[oloriel]

On a happier note, even though it was a long winter, bad spring and weird summer, my bees appear to be thriving. I have two colonies again, one fully-fledged one (grown from the swarm I got last year) and one fledgling one.
They won't give me much honey, due to the long winter, bad spring and the fact that everything flowered at once (= too much for the bees to handle), but they're doing well otherwise. The fully-fledged colony is still in more brood than it should be at this time of year. That makes sense to me, as the seasons are all tardy this year. They have hardly any pollen left so I expect them stop breeding soon, anyway. At any rate, there appear to be very few varroa mites in that colony. There are more (that is, numbers that are unfortunately "normal") in the fledgling, but that's probably my fault because I didn't change the drone frame as regularly as I should have. >_>

And the irrational fear of bees that befell me after Felix' birth appears to be abating at last.


Today I spent over an hour "in the bees" - I had originally meant to do the usual late summer works: Remove excess honey, clean up old frames, treat hive with formic acid against varroa mites. The honey isn't quite ripe yet (that is, it's still containing too much water; you could already use it for mead or baking, but it wouldn't keep as smear-on-your-toast kind of honey), so after going through the whole hive, I decided to leave it for another week. That's a bit of a gamble, I suppose - these bees are doing funny things that aren't in the textbook all the time, so I half expect them to store the honey elsewhere as soon as they stop breeding - but harvesting all the honey just in order to have it ferment wildly would be a waste of time, too.
It is, as I said, not much honey anyway (my estimate, but I am very bad at estimating, would be around 5 kg, which is ridiculous: Even in Bergia you should get about 15 kg in a normal year), barely worth the effort of harvesting, cleaning the centrifuge, putting it to work, then cleaning it again. But it's my first honey in two years, so I'll probably go for it anyway. Maybe I'll do it like the ancients and just cut it out by the comb, I dunno yet.

At any rate, I spent over an hour "in the bees" (direct translation of the German phrase), and I literally was surrounded by bees everywhere - the hive in front of me, the spare box next to me, and of course the bees from the fledgling hive got curious as soon as they caught a whiff of free honey. I worked with smoke, but at some point, the trick stops working: At some point they've all filled their bladders and want to start evacuating. In theory, most of them are actually physically incapable of stinging at that point because of their full honey bladders and because they're in "find new home" mode, so only the bees that act as guards still have functioning stingers - but of course, you can't see which ones are guards and which are mules. Besides, it's all fine and well in theory, but try to tell that to your amygdala when it's taking over because AAAAH ALL THAT HUMMING AND BUZZING YOU'RE GOING TO BE STUNG BY BEEEEEEEES!
I was, of course, wearing a suit and gloves and veil - the fear hasn't abated that much yet - but I managed not to run away, not to drop anything, not to run in circles while hysterically trying to beat down any innocent bees that were resting on me, etc. etc. Which is definitely progress.
I did say very silly things to the bees in my most reasonable voice - Mädels, warum baut ihr auch immer so 'ne Scheiße? Jetzt entspannt euch mal, Mädels, ich räum doch nur auf, gleich habt ihr wieder eure Ruh - but hey, maybe they understand German after all. (They're mixed carnica and Buckfast. On a side note, I keep confusing the two terms! See, you can visually differentiate them because Buckfast bees have a sort of reddish coloration around what would be the butt if they were human. (They're thus lovingly called Rotärsche, red arses, by some beekeepers.) Carnica are brown. But because there's a Quenya word carnë which means "red", I keep being convinced that the carnica must be the red arses. -- In the real world, the name is based on the Austrian state of Carinthia. Wow, up to now, I had no clue that Kärnten is Carinthia in English. That's awesome. Sounds like a fantasy kingdom. BUT I DIGRESS.)

Needless to say, even though I spent an hour moving shit around, removing honeycomb the bees had built in places where it wasn't supposed to be, removing propolis in huge batches because it was sticking EVERYWHERE, all this while being surrounded by hundreds of pissed-off (or maybe confused, I cannot tell from the sounds they make, I NEED A BEE-HUMAN DICTIONARY PLS) bees, and disturbing their peace and quiet on a windy summer day (wind is not your friend when you're "in the bees", as it will alert the bees more swiftly to the fact that oops, hive breach, investigate/defend -- it was calm when I started, then suddenly started to get all breezy until I was done, and now it's totally calm again - I am taking that personally!) - anyway, I did all that, and I wasn't stung once.
(I have been stung by a bee once this year, but that was in France, and the poor critter had erroneously flown into my trouser leg while I was a-walking through a buckwheat field, amused by the fact that the French word for buckwheat is sarrazin. But that's another story for another time.)


I'm not doing quite doing things according to the textbook, I'm too nervous for that yet - but then, my bees aren't sticking to the textbook either. But I'm getting things done again, and that's a good start. And hey, 5 kg of honey (if my guesstimate is correct) are better than nothing.
So, yeah!