It's Raining Here in California!!
Anytime it rain's this OLd Drone gets happy and most all beekeepers get
excited. I have danced with beekeepers, grown men, more then once out in
the first good pounding rain of the season and none here are Greek. It
rained almost 2 inches last night and today, I am happy. You see we
don't get that much rain here, less then 10 inches each year and it only
comes for a few months each year during our winter season and we all
know that to experience that bumper wild flower honey crops of old we
need lots of rain, more, much more then our normal allotment. We also
know from experience just about thirty days after a good rain there will
be new bee pasture somewhere within our operating range of 100+ miles
for our bees and our green season will be on. Floods that set records
are ok with us in spite of the damage they do to our hives and homes.
The best year ever experienced here found every beekeeper with a boat on
the back of his truck as standard equipment when checking bees. Many
hives washed away, and some homes were flooded. Today we all have 4
wheelers, but every time I get a new one it stops raining and the truck
wares out before I get to use the 4 wheel drive part. When a beekeeper
loses a yard of bees in a flood instead of crying in our white beards we
all rejoice with him and his personal sacrifice for the rest of us. Talk
about an Irish wake, I don't know if that helps but all here know that
heavy rains and floods as miserable as they may be are signs from high
above that good things are coming for the bees and beekeeper.
There is nothing I have prayed for more or harder then just one more
good rain, admittedly, most of the time my prayers were not answered for
such a bold selfish request is not considered good netiquette between
my God and myself I have been told. But thank you God for this rain and
just keep sending more and spare those who get too much.
Anyway it is raining and I should be paying bills, not dreaming about
beekeeping, but the rain has given me renewed hope for a better season
next year and I am feeling like sharing some of the fun things I have
seen in my bee yards the last 40 years. For some reason I was thinking
back on a time that I got caught short out in a bee yard, (could be
something about that 2nd box of HONEY NUT CHEERIOS), and was forced to
seek relief in the bushes about 50 yards up a gentle incline from the
the bees I was working in. As I hunkered down waiting for nature to take
its course I heard a "pop" overhead, about the same decibel as the noise
we all learn to make as a kid by moving our tongue fast from the top or
our mouth to the bottom. I looked up being careful not to fall back into
my unfinished work and just in time to see a baseball size comet of bees
heading straight for my position...but they missed and landed at my feet
and I used my finger to move the bees apart, they were all drones and
there was a queen no longer a virgin with a drone still connected to
her.
As the years passed I returned to that sight many times maybe 50 yards
from one of my bee yards to watch the drones mating with the queens at
just about out of arms reach. I am sure they were the prescribed
elevation found by others from the bees hives to be the normal but
because of the elevation of the ground that I viewed them from it
was possible to get up close and personal, a bee perverts dream you
might say, and watch the antics of the drones clashing with each other
and the queen, sometimes racing after a hapless bird that strayed into
their flight path. Almost any day there was a swarm in the yard, you
could in the warm afternoon see this activity and hear the noise of
the drones wing beats and the last pop of the lucky or unlucky drone
that gets to mate with the queen.
Later on I read and talked much with bee researchers at several
university's and federal research stations who had spent much time
studying these "drone congregation areas" trying to find out how they
could be identified. I don't think we know much more about that other
then it may be more complex then just odors, magnetic fields, and the
like, or a combination of factors that makes one location far superior
for queen mating then another. But these sites are very valuable if you
rear queens and I piled lots of nucs in this area because they mated
well which was not the norm for the area in total.
One thing that I have seen that has never been reported as far as I know
is a "swarm congregation area". Years ago in a cherry orchard now
occupied by homes I use to set off a pickup load of bees maybe
48 hives for shaking into bulk packages. I shook these bees several
times starting early in the prune bloom and into the end of the cherry
bloom, maybe every 7 or 8 days for a month or more. I would always have
to bring empty hives to catch the swarms that were just about in every
tree within a hundred yards of my hives. I never took less then 120
hives out of this location and sometimes more, also there was a hobbyist
I ran into years later that confessed to me how he also took an
additional 25 to 50 swarms from this orchard each spring when I was not
around. In this case he sure was not getting my bees.
The rest of the story is that the hives I had in this orchard because
they were shook seldom showed more then one or two that even looked like
they swarmed, and I am sure these were only replacing failing queens and
did not swarm. I also had several thousand more hives within a few miles
of this orchard that I kept shook down and they seldom would cast a
swarm. I can only conclude there was something about this orchard, its
soil or just it position that attracted swarms to it from beehives miles
away. Your guess is as good as my own, but the last year I kept bees
here there were new homes as far as you could see and I often wonder if
they are today each spring plagued by swarms of bees looking for a home.
I would bet some smart beekeeper makes a good living charging the home
owners to remove the bees, probably the same guy who thought he was
catching my swarms..
ttul, the OLd Drone
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(w)Opinions are not necessarily facts. Use at own risk.
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~ QMPro 1.53 ~ ... That the still murmur of the honey bee
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