At 10:57 PM 8/15/97 +1200, you wrote:
>"Pete Illgner" <[log in to unmask]> wrote to me asking about
>an article that appeared in the New Zealand Beekeeper magazine back
>in 1986 about bees after an earthquake.  He would, I'm sure, be
>interested in any stories or information any of you might have re:
>beekeeping as it relates to earthquakes/volcanoes.
 
Earthquakes, mites, Egyptian bees, wee got them all.......!
 
Lots of earthquakes here in California, and as a young man I had a bee yard
directly on top of a shallow earthquake fault not knowing it at the time.
 
I just assumed that everything naturally got out of plumb with the world
given enough time as none of the fence lines were ever straight that I had
seen up to then, and the old barns and building were always in need of
shoring up, that was just the way it was.
 
Anyway several years before as a child all us kids had ran several times
out from the local flea house, the church, all us kids attended for ten
cents every Saturday morning to catch up on Flash Gordon and the latest
horse opera, I knew what earthquakes were. We had earthquake drills
starting in nursery school and I always brown bagged it and ate outside
through high school just in case one hit at lunch time as I did not want to
miss it, or get trampled in the rush to get out of the school lunch room.
Anyway we have lots of them and you never get use to it but sometime it is
funny afterwards.
 
Back to the bee yard on that fault.
 
One spring about 1:00 PM two young beekeepers were working in a bee yard
taking tall hives apart making increase and replacing old queens with new.
The bees were stacked up with full shallow supers of spring honey and much
pollen and brood. It was shirt sleeve weather, and a good flow was still
on, the air was full of bees coming and going, drones were out looking for
virgins, the hives were humming along with the birds and the occasional
scampering of small rabbits in the bush. Several swarms were hanging in the
bushes, and one or more took out for them as we worked away. It was slow
and heavy work trying to identify the hives that needed queens, or could
donate brood and such.
 
It was a warm day with big puffy clouds low in the sky, a type of day that
we often call "earthquake" weather here, but we took no special note of
that as we were both enjoying our work.
 
All of a sudden I felt faint and had to grab on to the nearest hive to keep
from falling down. I really don't know what I thought at that moment,
maybe I was coming down with the flu or should not have had such a big
lunch, but something was wrong because I could not stand up without holding
on to that hive. I sheepishly looked over the top of the hive to my friend
who was working the hives at the other end of the yard and would you belive
he also was holding on to one of his hives for dear life. It had become
deathly quit, not a bird singing, not a rabbit rustling in the bush, not a
bee in the sky.
 
We soon both realized that it was nothing more then a heavy roller and
could had not lasted more then a minute or two, and like a old steam engine
picking up speed within minutes all was back to normal, no damage
that we could not straighten out, a few supers ajar and tops off of the
hives we had already worked. All in all it was a good day for bees in
Monterey County, California that spring long ago as I remember it well.
 
ttul, the OLd Drone