Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [90]
Chapter 9
Six-Legged Language
The Battle between Impatience and Procrastination
SUDDENLY, a lot of bees seemed to be flying in and out of our garage. There has always been a space of about a foot between the top of the wall and the roof, so it is not an enclosed building, but while I was used to seeing insects, our cats, and the occasional possum or raccoon making use of the opening, for a couple of days a steady stream of humming golden-bodied workers went back and forth at one corner. Needless to say, no flowers grow in our garage, so I wasn't sure why I was seeing half a dozen or so bees buzzing overhead every time I went to get my bike.
I told my husband. They're just bees, he said. Don't worry about it. I wasn't worried, exactly. I just was a little leery of what the increased traffic might portend. And on the third day I noticed a baseball-sized clump of bees surrounding a beam inside the garage near the opening they had entered. Uh-oh, I thought. They're swarming.
After a suitably pointed "I told you so" to my husband, I knew just what to do. I called Kirk Visscher, who is a professor of entomology at my university and an expert on bees and beekeeping. "Help," I said. "We've got bees." Kirk drove over to our house with a portable hive constructed from boards, which he set out at what we hoped was a tempting yet suitably lengthy distance from the beam, and our garage. With a little luck, he assured us, the bees would move their operations into the hive and he could take the colony to use in his research back on campus.
Luck, however, was not with us. A day later, the clump had grown to the size of a small football, and honeycomb was visible when the layer of bees shifted. Kirk returned, this time with the age-old beekeeper's equipment of a funnel and smoker. He gently pumped the smoke over the cluster, which had no discernable effect on the bees other than to make them hum in what, at least to my ears, was a rather agitated way. I backed up into the driveway and asked Kirk exactly what we were trying to accomplish, since having a garage full of annoyed and active bees did not seem like an improvement over having one full of reasonably quiescent ones.
"We're just trying to convince them that this wasn't the great place they first thought it was," he said. Like moving to a neighborhood you later discover has bad air quality or a lousy school system, I guess, only without the complication of already having filed the paperwork and commencing escrow. Whatever the rationale, in another day the entire swarm had suddenly decamped, as if they had never been, except for the telltale irregularly shaped sheets of fragrant honeycomb attached to the beam. Presumably, the bees had left for a more permanent home, whether in a tree cavity or some other fortunate beekeeper's hive, but at any rate sufficiently far from our garage.
Honeybee swarms are the colony's way of reducing overpopulation. When a colony grows large, the worker bees nurture new queens, and the old queen, along with perhaps half of the workers, goes off to establish a new hive somewhere else. Initially, the pioneering bees and their queen settle in a mass like the one inside our garage, while scout worker bees go out and look for a new place to live. For centuries, enterprising humans have taken advantage of these temporary swarms to capture a new colony and place it into a manufactured hive, as Kirk had attempted. While