Honeybee_ Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - C. Marina Marchese [48]
When I arrived at Eddie’s place, there were already a handful of beekeepers clustered outside, waiting to pick up tools, equipment, and especially queens. Eddie’s intimate shop could hold only four or five people, and the others were asked to wait in the yard. The conversation among the other beekeepers centered mostly on who’d been chasing after swarms that year and how this process sets back overall honey production. Eddie made it perfectly clear that we were not welcome to stop by unannounced and interrupt him while he was tending his own three hundred hives and making honey deliveries. He questioned each beekeeper about what was happening with his or her hives and how he could help them. I could tell he had been in this business a long time, and he seemed to know everyone there. A series of questions seemingly needed to be answered, so Eddie could diagnose each hive’s behavior. “When did you last see your queen? Did you see eggs? Are there any swarm cells?” he asked.
His wife, Anita, was always at his side, helping to pack up orders for customers. Anita was a worker bee who also was a queen. Like Eddie, she was a lifelong beekeeper, and together they were the founders of the Back Yard Beekeepers Association. Once, when I had stopped by to purchase some honeycomb for candles, she showed me how to roll it up to make dinner candles.
As I waited my turn, I noticed all the honey and bee-pollen jars that were neatly displayed along the side shelves. Eddie’s honey was famous around these parts, and he had been producing honey for what seemed like forever. Along with literature and educational posters was his popular book about beekeeping, appropriately titled The Queen and I.
As the last beekeeper left, Eddie turned to me and asked, “What can I do for you, doll?” This was his old-fashioned way of speaking to young ladies. Before I could answer, he said, “I know, I know, Mr. B sent you for a queen.” Feeling a bit like Dorothy before the Wizard of Oz, and attempting to hold my own, I again told him how there were no eggs present in my hive and I did not see the queen.
Eddie offered me one of his fine young queens for a small price. She was packaged in the familiar wooden queen cage I remembered from my first package of bees. He explained that the procedure for introducing her to the hive was also the same: place the cage between two frames and let the workers and attendants eat away the candy cork to free the queen. If all went well, her new subjects would accept her, she would mate with some lazy drones, and the colony would be saved from a slow death. I listened diligently, nodding in agreement with every word.
It was after five o’clock when I arrived back home with my new queen. I had to work quickly if I wanted to introduce my new queen to the colony before dark. So I suited up, lit my smoker, and opened up the hive. I removed one frame from the top deep to make space to hang the queen cage, sugarcork side up, closed everything up, and promised myself it would be fine. One week later I opened up the hive to find the queen was out of her cage and had already begun laying eggs. My hive was queen right again.
THE OVERWINTERING BEEKEEPER
In the course of the cold winter months, while the bees are clustering inside the hive, a beekeeper’s tasks are limited. If there are more than a few consecutive warm days,