Sticky Acres

In my effort to stock my pantry with free foraged food, I went back over to Sue’s house today to help her harvest her honey. Last weekend we’d placed an escape board between the honeycomb and the brood nest of her main hive to keep the bees off the honey. Which turned out to be a great thing…

…because Sue’s bees are complete jerks.

Last weekend, while we were smoking the hive, one of the bees flew out and stung me on the leg. Just like that. I hadn’t even touched the hive yet. As it turns out, I got off easy. Denice, a novice beekeeper, who was helping out, got stung about forty times through her socks and got zotzed in the crotch by one impertinent bug. (I know! So inappropriate).

Sue thought that she had a hole in her veil, because she’d been stung on the cheek during an earlier hive inspection. After she was stung on the scalp today, I did a thorough inspection of her gear and discovered her trouble. Her plastic bee helmet has ventilation holes in the sides that the bees were using as an entrance to get inside her veil. For those of you who have never experienced this situation, it’s as creepy as it sounds. You know that scene in scary movies when the police dispatch tells the young heroine who’s trying to avoid the axe murderer, “The call is coming from inside the house!” Well, it’s just like that.

That buzzing sound…it’s coming from inside your protective gear.

Obviously, Sue’s helmet was designed for beekeepers who manage big, commercially bred bees, because Sue’s feral, natural sized bees had no problem wiggling through the ventilation holes. Unbelievable. This major design flaw in a piece of standard beekeeping equipment shows how far from nature breeders and scientists have sized up the honey bee in the last sixty years. It’s the equivalent of designing a car seat for eighty pound infants, and this being the norm. I have the same helmet at home that we use for company. It sucks that Sue had to get stung to discover the problem, but I’m really glad I experienced this with another beekeeper, and not with a guest at my home. Both Sue’s and my guest helmet with be retrofitted with window screen and duct tape to prevent this problem from reoccurring.

At any rate, the escape board worked really well! There were only about twenty, very over-fed bees, lounging around inside their sticky prison. I’m going to borrow Sue’s escape board for my honey harvest later this month. It’s an ingenious tool.

After putting Sue’s hive back together, all three of us had to walk down the street to a neighbor’s driveway to get away from Sue’s bummed out bees. They followed us all the way down the block and buzzed us for a full twenty minutes before going back to the hive. Let me tell you, it’s very hard to act casual and not alarm the neighbors when they come over to ask why everyone is, you know, “just hanging out” in bee gear on the street.

Dealing with Sue’s bees made me grateful for my bees. They may not be great honey producers, but my grumpiest bees are mellow in comparison.

Sue gave me a pound of her Camp Waterloo honey as payment for my labor. That honey made it worth getting stung!

Saturday Menu
Breakfast: coffee, cinnamon raisin toast, oranges
Lunch: peanut butter (from pantry) and honey sandwiches on wheat bread, cherries, milk
Dinner: ham and turkey panini with (foraged from the refrigerator cheese, pickles, and mustard), fizzy lemonade (lemonade mixed with homemade seltzer)
Snack/Dessert: Frozen blackberries (from freezer stash) with leftover half & half