Bee Souls

I got interviewed a few weeks ago by a woman who is writing a book about urban beekeepers. I showed her my hives, showed her where they made a home in the wall of my house and answered her questions about the mechanics of beekeeping. We got to talking about communicating with insects and I told her about how I had invited the bees to come pollinate my vegetable garden last year and a week later 20,000 of them showed up and moved into my house. She sent me an email thanking me for my time and had one more question for me:

Do you think each individual bee has a soul? Or is there one soul per hive?

I loved that question. So gentle.

Here is my answer.

I think that everything has some kind of soul, but I don't know what it is, where it is or why we have one. I guess I believe that everything is connected and made out of the same stuff and that stuff keeps working its way through the universe in different forms. And I think it is possible to recognize these common elements in other beings or objects and to feel connected in that way. I also sometimes think that our physical life is a metaphor for something larger.

As far as the bees...they seem to act as a group with one mind and one purpose and many bodies to carry out that purpose. But the same could be said of humans if we looked at ourselves from a distance. I know that I am sad every time I accidentally squish one bee or cause it to sting me and die, a tiny life extinguished. suffering. pain. I prefer not to cause it. So that makes me think that i am reacting to the soul of the individual bee because I have sensed it there. I feel a very strong presence when one flies into my house or buzzes around me. Whether that is me anthropomorphizing the bee or actually feeling its soul, I do not know. I try not to be arrogant about other creatures and always assume they have their own destiny and life to lead so I try to respect it and make way for them.

Second Swarm

The bees swarmed a second time this week. Peter H. saw them flying around the fig tree and had us all come out and check the two football sized swarms hanging in a low branch. We suited up and gingerly shook them into a cardboard box, then carried them over to their new home. Luckily, we had a spare deep box with frames and wax foundation ready to go. Peter H. and Charley quickly built a bottom board and cover. So now we have five colonies. One has a queen for sure, but with the other four we will have to wait and see.

Native California Bees

I went to a presentation on native bees in California given by Gordon Frankie, UC Berkeley entomologist and director of the Urban Bee Project.

There are at least 1600 species of California native bees, 81 of which have been identified in the Bay Area. They pollinate 1/3 of our vegetable, fruit and nut crops and most of our wildflowers. They are solitary, not social like honey bees. They make nests in the ground or in fallen logs or living trees.

He brought along a case of labeled specimens on pins, which always makes me sad, but the variety of colors and forms was quite amazing. Some were iridescent green and yellow, others looked like beautifully polished wood.











You can read
this article from the March/April 2008 issue of Orion Magazine by Matt Jenkins and this fascinating article on Buzz Pollination by Sue Rosenthal in Bay Nature magazine. Bumble bees pollinate flowers not just by walking around and collecting the pollen on their bodies, but actually grab hold of the anthers and vibrate the pollen off. I love nature!

Cold Wet Moldy Bees

While I was away in Florida there were two weeks of intense wind and rain storms in San Francisco. The colony that first got me into beekeeping experienced a major setback during these storms. Somehow, the waterproof cover leaked and left the bees with a soggy cold wet home. This colony had been going like gangbusters in the summer and fall, but today there were just a few depressed bees loitering around the entrance. I opened up the hive and was sad to see that about 60-70% of the bees were gone and blue mold was covering the brood comb.

Outside the hive on the ground were hundreds of waxy white brood, tossed out by the worker bees. I reduced the hive down to one box and managed to find 10 frames that were not too moldy. I felt terrible for the creatures having to live in the cold wet hive for the duration of the bad weather. I hoped that they would recover. I opened the stronger hive and took out two frames of capped brood and stuck it into the weaker hive hoping it would boost their population fast enough for them to make a comeback.

I did manage to get a few frames of capped honey the smaller hive would not be needing.

Kitchen Honey Extraction

Honey is heavier than wax.  I had a jar of globbed up honey and wax left over from the extraction  explosion I wanted to work with so I stuck it in the oven on low all day today and checked on it every so often.  Eventually, the wax rose to the top and the honey sunk to the bottom of the jar.  Then I spooned the wax out onto a tin tray where it hardened almost instantaneously.  My kitchen was a dripping sticky mess by the end of this process but I did get about 5 more jars of honey out of it.

First Honey Harvest

We harvested about 5 pounds of honey from the larger colony this week and took it over to Peter's house to have him show us how the extraction process works. 


The frames I carefully wired together in the summer were now full of drawn comb filled with honey and capped with wax. Each frame was "uncapped" with a hot electric knife.  The hot blade cuts through the wax caps and exposes the honey below.  We placed each uncapped frame into the extractor, a large steel drum with a lid that whirls the frames around and flings the honey against the sides of the drum. Unfortunately, my first wiring job was not secure enough to withstand the centrifugal force of the extractor and the wax and honey blew out of the frames and globbed all over the insides of the drum.  The whole point is to tidily separate the honey from the wax, not mash it all together, so the first extraction was not really much of a technical success. But as far as honey...success.

We ended up having to pour all the honey into a strainer anyway to get the wax out that had mingled during the extractor explosion.  I think Peter could have done without all the mishaps, but we were all focused on how tasty the honey was.

Bee Line

Bee line, originally uploaded by Doxieone.