Mark and the gang:

Anyone who has experienced moving bees at night, soaked wet in the dead
heat of summer, wonders how in the world the bees always find themselves
inside the veil and under the sticky coverall—-no matter how tightly
he/she has water-proofed the armor, an experience that will put an end to
moving bees at night in short order.

Night does not factor in here; rather, it is the shortening daylight hours
and the gradual temperature drop that do.  Although Mark indicated the
temp was 65 F, the little burgers knew the seasonal change and perhaps the
futility, speaking anthropomorphically here, of launching kamikaze attacks
at this time of the year.  Such phenomenon is especially common when the
temp shoots up, in a warm spell, in dead winter.  In fact, if you must
open the hives this late, you will notice that many bees will just bang
against the veil in a bluff rather than actually stinging although a few
will do that, but not as many as you would encounter in summer.  Had you
done the same in summer, I guarantee, you would have related a different
story.  Dropping temperature has demoralized and hence demobilized the
bees.  Remember bees are reptilians, their fang modified into a sting at
the wrong (?) end.  Furthermore, at this time of the year, the temp can
easily drop into 40’s even when the daylight temp had been in the 60’s or
70’s.

To say the obvious, fall is perhaps the most depressing season for
beekeepers, more so than winter since during winter we all know spring is
a-coming.  I am always anxious to hear Dave’s first report of coming
spring.  (As soon as the northwest wind starts to rake the leaves on the
ground, I feel depressed and already miss spring.  Don’t we all?)  When we
visit the apiaries in the fall, we sense this demoralizing lack of vigor
that permeates around the colonies and the bees, in particular, as if
someone had sprinkled cyanide over them or as if the bees were going
through this seasonal manic depression of bipolar disorder as some of us
do.   Frost works like DDT on bees.  On NPR [National Public Radio] I
heard a few days ago that the sun had gone down in this Eskimo town above
the Arctic Circle not to show up again till January 23, 2004.  Although
they do get the never-setting sun in summer, I wonder if I can survive
such Cimmerian landscape.  Wouldn’t it be great if we all could migrate to
southern hemisphere during winter so that we could keep bees year around?

Yoon

Shawnee, OK

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