Aug 6 - BEES!

So we got these bees..

Back to the bees in a bit. First, HI! Hi Mom! Hi Dad! I know we haven't video chatted in a while, and sometimes see missed calls from you. I am not dead in a ditch or devolving into a gypsy street performer / drug user. I'm doing things that keep me busy. Today, right now however, I am not that busy. If you are around ima try to call and give you the VIRUTUAL REALITY tour of my new abode. But if I miss you today rest assured im doing well, am happy, active, and my housemate sasha asked me if I was getting younger because I look younger than I did last month apparently (I have a tan maybe?).

So the bees. We have some beehives in teh yard. They have been empty since I moved in, but once upon a time housed a colony of honeybees that made delicious honey. Its a top-bar hive - as the name suggests there are bars at the top which the bees attach their comb to. Different than the typical rectangular box hives that most people think of when thinking of domesticated bee hives. Domesticated might not be the right word. Managed by humans maybe.. but they are bugs that live outside in a colony large enough to fight off full grown grizzly bears who could totally eat me to the bones and still be hungry (for honey probly, which the bees would fight them over far more effectively than the meat popsicle that is me). I expressed interest in teh bees when I moved in. My lifelong "thing" with ants (starting as a murderous toddler and evolving all the way through to sophisticated entomologist  marvelling at how hives during the carboniferous period would have been unbelievably awesome) was certainly a contributing factor. Ants are great, and bees are similar (plus honey) so it was kind of a natural progression. Keeping bees is far more acceptable than keeping ants ("hey baby, want some sweet sweet honey" vs "hey baby, want to come back to my place and see my ant colony?"), and the bees can fly and sting and will be much more effective when trained to battle my enemies ("Muhahaha").

So there was this girl / lady with a hive for sale. She was moving and needed to get rid of it in an obscenely short amount of time. The rule of thumb with moving bees is "2 inches or 2 miles" but nothing in between because the foraging bees return to the original location if the surroundings are familiar enough, and then never find their way back to the new location. To combat this one must "reset" the hive - by keeping them contained in the box for a period of 2-3 days and putting foreign objects (cloth / leaves) in front of the entrances. The obstacle lets the bees know that their surroundings have changed and they need to adapt. I am good at learning via reading internet and did it lots. Later that evening we went to get the bees, with a plan of sorts. They were in a box, with another box on top. The bottom board and boxes are all held together with bee wax, so its not the most structurally sound thing to move... especially with thousands of irate bees trapped inside. Specifically 30,000 or so. Thats the number I got when I asked how big the hive was. It took 2 of us to move it into the car (very very carefully) and the ride back was.. exciting. Every turn, stop, and acceleration tilted the hive which was in the back seat next to me. I steadied it best I could, but couldn't help imagining thirty thousand angry bees buzzing around the cab Sasha's car. We got them home and put them near their final place in the yard. The box was very very heavy and buzzed.

The plan was to keep them in there for 3 days, though I had concerns about heat and ventilation. After that we would have their new location set up (didn't want to put the hive directly on teh ground cause moisture and mildew so we needed to build a stand). Then, we would move some of the honeycomb and bees to the other top bar hive, with the intention of splitting it (30 000 was max capacity-ish for the box it was in, which added to the potential heat issue).

The next morning I rigged up some blankets for shade and used a spray bottle to keep the blankets and hive cool. All seemed okay. The humm of wings from inside was a bit worrying - knowing they use that as a way to circulate air on hot days, but they were not too hot so everything seemed to be going ok. That night it was decided we should move them to another spot in the yard - something that seemed like a good idea as the other spot was nearer their final location and *should* have provided more shade. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

Second day with the bees locked in, and there were a number of other flying insects buzzing around the hive and amassing at the bottom entryway (which was sealed with a wooden bar and burlap). Many bees and wasps. First I thought they'd found a way out, but soon realised there was honey leaking out, and the other bees and wasps were there capitalizing on the free honey. The side of the box was hot, having received a large dose of morning sun, and worst of all, we had placed the hive literally on top of an ant-hill. The ants run most of the yard, but with the inciting honey they'd set up lines going right into the hive and were harvesting at full steam. We needed to act fast, ventilate the hive. I tried to make a stand, but instead harassed Jessie - another house mate who was at work where he does carpentry stuff - to ensure he'd be back later and could help build something more structurally sound and fancy than what I could have done (power tools for the win).

Eventually we got it all done, and the bees into their new home. Someone opened the hive before their final move - it was the first experience of air thick with bees. Not angry, just irratated and buzzing like a million tiny chainsaws. Honey continued to leak - either because of melting or ants cutting holes in the comb. When I finally pulled away some of the burlap sealing the bottom entryway I found dead bees, coated in honey. I considered the possibilities like Schrödingers cat: could be MANY dead bees inside, some dead bees, or only a few. It would have to wait a couple more days while they adjusted to their new space to open it up and know for sure.

When the day came, Homero and I (yet another house-mate - his dad is a bee-keeper, so he knows some stuff) opened it up "just to take a look". Immediately I saw something that made my heart sink: MOLD and dead bees. The top box was full of corpses and flecks of mold. It needed to come off and be cleaned. The whole hive needed to be cleaned.. dead decaying bees just make more mold, and there were too many dead for the hive to clean on its own. The "air thick with bees" of a few days before was a light rainfall compared to the dense, angry mass that blocked out the sun that day (see pix / video on fb). It was very tough. It was very very hot, and made worse by the need to cover exposed skin from being stung. The bees though were in good spirits - its almost as if they knew what I was helping. I moved the top racks of comb to the pre-existing empty top bar hive (with some mcguivering cause they didn't really fit), cleaned it, then started on the bottom box. Also known as the "brood box" because its typically where the queen lives does most of her stuff. It was the worst. The origin of the mold and dead bees a couple inches thick lined the bottom. It was heartbreaking, and I wanted to stop but I knew it needed to get done, and any time I took to cool off or get some water was additional time where the bees would be in distress. I put the bottom bits in the now cleaned top box, and put it all back together leaving out the mold and a few thousand dead bees. Im sure now that it was prexisting mold as it couldnt have spread or caused that much damage in the short time it took us to move them, though the added stress certainly didn't do any good.

I would like to take a moment now to talk about wasps - they are evil bastards. The two kinds I dealt with were yellow jackets and black jackets. Yellow jackets are common, yellow things that you'd remember from pick-nicks and who (as I was shocked and disturbed to witness) have an insatiable appetite for live honeybee abdomens. The other kind, black jackets, are large, and pretty much black. Their exoskeletons are very thick and strong. They take some force to crush, and are harder to kill, but are far more interested in stealing honey then eating honeybees alive, so were slightly more tolerated. I  killed more wasps those first few days then the rest of my life combined.  Wasps don't have a barb (like on a fishing hook) on their stingers like bees - when bees sting their stinger is torn off and they die shortly afterwards. Wasps can sting repeatedly because they have no bard / are evil, and also have massive mandibles for biting and cutting (unlike honey bees who have a little mandible and long tongue for drinking nectar / honey / kisses). The bees individually were no match for the evil, evil wasps - so I did what I could to defend the hive. Even Sasha, who initially refused to kill wasps with me citing his "not wanting to use up all his karma by killing" helped me to defend when he saw them eat a poor little honey bee who had fallen on the ground. Her name was Lucy, she will be missed.

So now the bees are all back in their original hive. They stopped going into the hanging bar one (maybe because the queen was in the other one), and once I'd cleaned out the other box it was safe to restore the hive to its (almost) original state. There are still wasps, but only yellow jackets and they are not going inside any more. The queen might be in there somewhere. There were several combs where the bees were a couple thick - which may indicate the presence of the queen or failing that a "queen cell" where a new queen would be raised. In case its not apparent: I like the bees. It was horrible to have to deal with all that death and mold but helping the hive, learning about them, and continuing to learn about them has been has been a very rewarding (not just in honey) and incredible experience for me.

Other un-bee related news:

Had a meeting with a principals casting agent - didn't want to represent me after a mediocre interview.. no loss though because I was really put off by his horrible organizational and communication skills (its almost as if he didn't realise the interview goes both ways). Got an extra / background agent last week (out here you need an agent to get even background work) and am booked to be on set as a blurry background performer tomorrow and Friday, then have a meeting with another principals agent on the weekend, but they are all the way out in North Vancouver. They are a modelling agency making a move into acting stuff.. so.. my background in modelling / tan might pay off (yea shutup).

And what else.. lots of stuff! I need to write more often so that when I finally get to it there isn't a novel sized post that takes a long time to read. Hopefully this was not to long and you've made it to the bottom of the page. Good job! Im proud of you. Good job reading all my words. Go get yourself a tasty snack.