A Book of Bees by Sam Potthoff

Author:Sam Potthoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504042451
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Upper hive body on cover, showing empty nuc and bottom hive body, with combs leaning against them

Even though their mood was good, I tried to work as quickly as I could to bother them as little as possible. I continued to check through the frames, looking for the queen. I pried each frame loose with the hive tool, and then lifted it out with the grips, carefully checking one side and then the other.

The queen is longer and more slender than either worker bees or drones. She walks in what can most accurately, if anthropomorphically, be described as a purposeful way, so the best technique to use looking for her is that of the gestalt. I try to take in the entire frame side at a glance, relying on the eye to pick out the anomalous shape and motion of the queen among the hundreds of bees rather than looking at each part of the frame separately. As one learns to shift from sequential focus to a state of open and alert awareness, the eye gradually gets better at spotting a queen.

The queen was not in the bottom hive body, but I did find a few frames of fresh nectar and pollen there, and, in between them, two frames of eggs and larvae. I set the nectar frames aside and returned the frames with developing brood back to the bottom hive body. As long as I was taking apart the entire hive, I wanted to fill the bottom hive body with as many brood frames as possible, leaving the empty ones above—a tactic that might deter this hive from swarming later on.

The queen had to be in the upper hive body, the one that straddled the inverted cover. I examined the inner cover to see that she was not walking around its underside, then began removing frames, starting with those on the outside. There were many more bees in the upper hive body than in the lower, so I had to be more careful that I didn’t miss the queen. On cold or windy days, the bees bunch and cluster on the frames as soon as they are pulled out, and on such a day the queen could be in the center of any one of the clusters. As a result, when the weather is poor she is usually impossible to find. But yesterday there was no wind, and it was warm enough for the bees to be spread no more than one bee deep on the frames. The top hive body still had last year’s honey in its outermost two frames, and once I was sure the queen was not on them, I put them on the ground beside the ones from the bottom hive body. The seven remaining frames all contained brood, and it was on those I expected to find the queen. She was not on either the first or the second, but I did find her on the third. She was walking along sedately, looking for

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