Today in the quiet center of the afternoon I ventured again into the inner sanctum of the hive which I had dismantled 13 days ago.

That previous experience, chronicled on May 7 in this blog, was distressing: In seeking to rectify the bees’ habit of building wild comb all through the hive box, I had to cut away comb that was new and as fragile as snowflakes. There were larvae in that comb I’d cut that day, helpless and white and glistening like little jewels in their hexagonal settings. Many of those larvae fell and perished as I handled their nursery, and I really hated the destruction I was causing. After that, I attempted to string the intact chunks of comb to the foundationless frames with orange sewing thread. It was a pretty sketchy business all around, and I was left haunted by the question of whether foundationless hives were even going to be possible.

Today, almost two weeks later, it was with huge pleasure that I found the plundered hive restored to order by the bees. And now, thanks to my sewing thread, their concept of order coincides sufficiently with mine. I’m able to lift out one frame at a time, without all the frames being stuck together with wild comb. There is capped brood, and larvae in various stages, and new eggs — and this time I didn’t have to destroy any of it.

Hurray for foundationless beekeeping! It’s wondrous, being able to witness what the bees create inside their secret castle. The comb I had previously damaged is all repaired and built out in exquisite curving sweeps. It’s got ripples and hidden caves to it still, even while it more or less follows the plane of the wooden guide. Here is a photo of one of the outer (less populated) frames, still trailing its orange sewing thread. On the right, you can see that the chunk of comb I had just bound loosely in place has now been securely attached to the wooden floor of the frame.

baskets of gold: one of my bees bringing pollen into the hive

The bees carry pollen into the mysterious darkness of their hive, mostly to serve as a protein source for feeding the “brood”, or larval bees. The larva, mere helpless curls of living matter, secrete a pheromone which causes adult bees to go out and gather pollen to feed them. If there’s more brood, then more worker bees are dispatched. In an especially busy nursery situation, even some of the housekeeping bees will be spurred by the magic of pheromones to develop rapidly into foragers, in order to meet the pollen demand.

I’ve just started learning about bee pheromones, and it turns out that they’re one of those fantastically subtle astonishments of nature — carried on invisibly right beneath our very noses. Scientists have recently begun to uncover the incomparable complexity of the honeybees’ chemical communication system. Bees have 170 receptors for different odor compounds, and at least 15 different glands for secreting the array of pheromones which regulate life within the hive. Some pheromones affect the bees’ gene structure, and some affect the bees’ endocrine system or maturation. These impossibly minute bits of substance float through the air and can be received in some cases by bees at a distance of 60 meters.

The more I learn about pheromones, and about how certain ones cause longterm changes in the bees’ genetic, behavioral and neurological systems, the more I wonder about using smoke when opening a hive. Even though beekeepers have calmed bees with smoke for hundreds (thousands?) of years, bee colonies today are far more fragile than they once were. The purpose of smoke is to “mask” the alarm pheromones put off by guard bees when the hive is disturbed; however, this is accomplished by temporarily damaging the incredibly delicate pheromone receptors on the bees’ antennae.

Pheromone release and reception are what make the individual bees into one large complex group organism. They are the engine driving the entire social and physical organism which is the hive. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to deliberately introduce into the hive a substance which interferes with the bees’ most crucial sensory organs. I’d rather just suit up really well and take my chances with a few irritated bees.

references:

http://www.pnas.org/content/100/suppl.2/14519.full

http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/sanford/apis/apis97/apaug97.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee_pheromones

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070830150008.htm

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/blogs/bees/stressed-bees-47111209

http://grozingerlab.com/

She sits there all day and all night, except for one brief outing each morning to consume and excrete. Underneath her are a dozen eggs, warm from long hours of her body heat. The straw they rest in is warm, too. If her instinct holds out long enough, if we’re able to move her and her chicks to a separate enclosure before the other hens kill them, then we’ll have our first batch of homegrown chickens to raise. We tried setting her up in a specially constructed broodnest in another enclosure, and she wasn’t having any part of it. She fretted and pecked at the wire and ignored her new nest until the eggs started getting cold and we gave up and released her. She raced back to the chicken house with all her feathers standing on end and dove into her familiar old nest box. I accepted defeat and carried all her eggs back to put underneath her again. She pecked my hand whenever I reached in, so I had to curve my hand around each egg to protect it.

…still takes my breath away.