Mean Carnies

[doodlemaier]

Chuck called just before I left for his place in Ft. Valley to let me know that the low water bridge into the beeyard was under a swiftly moving foot or two of water and that we'd postpone meeting up with Frank until later that evening. I realized that I had left my basket o' hive gear back in the Annandale house and asked chuck to reserve a spare veil for me.

A quarter after 5PM, I got there late (as usual) but they were already going through the first of four hives Chuck pulled through winter. Glad I didn't hold up the works as I was mainly interested in simply photo-documenting the processes - marking queens that the colonies had reared on their own and dealing with splitting up a colony that had gone queenless and now had a laying worker. As it turns out my 3rd set of hands was precluded by a bee that gained entry into my borrowed veil and stung me in the lip just inside my mouth. POW! Of all the beestings I casually brush off, this felt like a kick in face, I guess, because of that bundle of nerves located directly under our noses. It set off a 20 minute long achoo-za-palooza. Once the sneezing abated Chuck sent me up to the cabin to fetch the complete bee-jama suit. Upon my return Frank and he were going through the next hive, mostly just routine inspection. I struggled to get the veil zipped onto the jacket. A bee or two heckled me mercilessly through the process, even 20 yards outside the gate of the beeyard. I had been well marked with the target pheromones that draw the ire of the rest of the colony. I never did manage the double zipper hat n' hood closed, I sat out the splitting of the queenless Carni's, the ill-tempered colony that Chuck usually reserves for last inspection. The for boxes were divided up and placed over another couple of hives divided by a single page of newspaper that will give the disparate colonies time to integrate.

Back at the cabin, with an ice cold beer to rest against my throbbing upper lip, Frank showed his the equipment he uses for rearing queens - a simple pick like impliment for capturing the 3 day old egg, and a frame with a couple additional bottom bars, the middle of which had a dozen or more small plastic cups inverted along the bottom edge. He uses a little royal jelly gleaned from queen cups to "glue" the eggs he harvests, one each into the inside edge of the plastic cups and that frame goes back into a nuc for another 16 days, or so, until she hatches.

It takes a steady hand. That much I got. How to determine a 3 day-old egg from say, a 4 day old egg, I still don't get. What one does with a dozen or so virgin queens I still don't get. Warré says, in "Beekeeping for All" something about leaving queen rearing to specialists. Needlesss to say, I'm not that much closer to raising my own queens.