Crisis Mediation

Well. Last evening I had a crisis with the bees.

I'm a new beekeeper, and I started working with the local club about a year ago. I acquired two bienenvolk, (two colonies) which stood under some trees on a nearby farmer's land.

I was to learn the craft from the new president of the club, a guy who has been keeping bees for about 6 years, who had taken the job over from a long-standing older guy. Last spring, he showed me how to remove the sugar frames and put in empty frames for the bees to fill with new honey. Normally, I would have anticipated that when he worked on his own bees, which stand next to mine, he would phone me up and tell me to be there, so I could again see what to do. But he never calls me, and since I don't know when/where/what, I don't pester him with calls, either. At last I got a hold of him, last night.

I don't speak his language like, brilliantly, which he knows. But nevertheless I always feel or felt that he would rush the instructions, and then act like I was a dumb cow when I asked about something again. Because that was my experience. I experienced his instructions the way Charlie Brown experiences how adults talk: wah WAH mwha WAH WAH mwha wah wha, with a little bit that was clear about: drone frames...brood...sugar...blah blah bibbity blah.

So he described again what to do. After asking for a couple repetitions, I pretended to understand, thought I would get it, after all, I'd seen it done once in my life...and with this clarity I went out to visit the bees.

I was supposed to scrape away all their work and remove the frames containing sugar that the bees made from sugarfat that they were given last autumn and replace with empties that they will fill with honey. I opened the hive. Like a monster I scraped away the wax and new honey they had made, in order to reach the frames. When I reached them, me trembling with rage and tears by now, I could not tell which frames were of capped honey, which were brood, and which were capped sugar. So I had destroyed their own honey cells for nothing, and they were now furious. And I had opened the hive for nothing. I just stood there and wept in pure frustration. I can't believe they didn't repeatedly sting my sorry ass, thighs, arms and head.

I set everything back and apologized to the bees and stormed home. It's a good thing I couldn't reach my beekeeping teacher, because he would have gotten a sting from my native tongue, filled with fury that is more than partially owed to yours truly.

Because. All I want is that my bees are comfortable, healthy, able to raise their babies in peace, and make honey for themselves. The local training here says that bees can't eat their own honey because they will become constipated and explode. I'm not kidding, and it's not a failure of language--this is what they have been taught and continue to teach. Its a remarkable bit of old time wisdom, when you factor in evolution and everything. How ever did the bees get along without humans feeding them 200,000 years ago?

I am not a honey farmer. I am not interested in robbing the bees' honey and replacing it with the inner filling of twinkie snack cakes. I want to raise bees because I want to support pollination. That's all. And I've been taking some very occluded direction from honey farmers. Honey farmers who open up the hive all the time, bang the frames with violence to shake the bees off, and spend all their time killing healthy native queens and buying and trading foreign queens like little boys with fancy marbles.

But I took the teaching, because I was not trusting that I could learn it another way.

Still weepy, I got on the phone and failed to reach my 'teacher.' Then I phoned my friend Suzi in England. She talked me down off the ledge. She knows, and she taught me in twenty minutes what failed to get through otherwise. She told me what I already thought I knew, but had forgotten: to listen to them and they will tell me what they need, if they need it. How could I have forgotten?

The only reason to take anything away from a functioning hive is to give them more room for what they want to do. So in August if they've made tons of honey, I might remove the outer honey frames, leaving them plenty of their own, thereby giving them more room to store more honey again. Very elegant. Very simple.

Thank All That Hums that she was there. She is a wise, wise, woman. It was so great to hear her voice. She also makes fabulous drums of local Dartmoor deer skin and iron rings forged by a blacksmith. Thanks, Suzi.

What is your will? What is their will? The bees are intelligent, they have their own way of doing. I want to support them in their will--not impose farming on them. I won't do it, anymore. I finally got it, in one rage filled evening. My will is their will. It reminds me of the story of the loathly lady.

One of Arthur's Knights agrees to marry a woman who looks hideous because she promises in exchange to give Arthur some magical information which will save his life. On their wedding night, the knight finds this loathly lady has become beautiful. She is beautiful during the night, when they are alone, and repulsive during the day, when the world might judge them. She asks him, what would he rather have: as it is, or beautiful by day and ugly by night? He answers with the greatest wisdom: I will support you with what you want. Your will is mine. And immediately she sheds her ugliness and becomes gorgeous 24/7. It was the correct answer.

My new teacher will be my friends and also Michael Bush, of Bush's Bees site. Much of what he says is refreshingly authentic.