A Divine Beekeeping Comedy
How Not to Mark a Queen
Joining the ranks of the treacherous is a milestone for beekeepers. Most people begin beekeeping to help save the bees and do not treasure the idea of one day leading a rebellion to dethrone a queen. Regicide, or “requeening” as we beekeepers call it, is not something we beekeepers take lightly, but sometimes it must be done–and sometimes it will be done, as if by divine accident. Had the title not already been taken erroneously by Dante for a decidedly unfunny work of so-called literature, a “Divine Comedy” would have been an apt title for the story of my first accidental regicide.
The story begins, as most beekeeping stories begin, on a stifling day inside a cotton bee jacket. How the queen got inside my bee jacket is a matter of no debate–she just scurried up my wrist. I was not trying to kill her; I was merely trying to mark her–to place a little blue dot on her with a paint pen—to make her easier to locate during future hive inspections.
The ability to mark queens swiftly and adroitly is a skill I’ve always admired in other beekeepers. Now I’m a lot more proficient at handling and marking queens, but in those days I was neither swift nor adroit and usually began any marking attempt with a pep talk to psych myself up.
Plucking the queen off the frame, when she is surrounded by thousands of her daughters, all of whom have stingers, can intimidate even the bravest of fingers. Personally, I have never considered any of my fingers particularly brave–and sometimes they seem openly mutinous in their desire to tremble and disobey my orders. After several failed attempts to pluck the queen off the frame, her royal highness scurried into hiding within the teeming masses of her offspring. Eventually, I did indeed relocate and corner her. From the corner of a bee frame, I managed to dislodge her and corral her into my hand, which then presented a new dilemma: how to relocate her from the palm of my enclosed hand to the more restrictive space between my finger and thumb without her flying away.
While I was preparing another pep talk, the queen managed to escape my loosely held fist and scurry up my wrist to seek cover in the sleeve of my beekeeping jacket. I tried to contort my arm in such a manner that I could peer into my sleeve to pinpoint her proximate location, which was made difficult because my veil shaded the view into the already shadowy tunnel, so mostly I had to rely on my arm hairs to detect and track her evasive movements. Generally, fiascos like this are not something they prepare you for in beginning bee school.
Thus, I had to use my own instincts and wherewithal to solve the problem of the queen bee rounding my elbow. I believe my underlying strategy was sound, albeit the execution of the strategy was a bit clumsy. I decided to disrobe inside the cab of my small pickup truck. I hoped the cab would provide a secondary enclosure in case the queen decided to take flight once outside of the confines of my clothing. Trying to peel off a sweaty bee jacket in the cramped quarters of a small four-cylinder pickup truck is a challenge in and of itself, but without the use of of my dominant right hand and arm, which I temporarily disabled because the queen felt like she tickling my right tricep, I likely resembled a lunatic struggling to escape from a straight jacket.
Once I was finally free of the garment, I began a thorough search for the queen in the folds and pockets of my bee jacket, but to no avail. I expanded my search to the long crevice of the bench seat; I then twisted myself into a pretzel to search under the seat; I then folded myself into a quesadilla to search behind the seat. The queen was nowhere to be found. At this point, I began to wonder if I actually was a lunatic and had been suffering from a heat-induced hallucination.
The queen had simply disappeared. For many years the whole ordeal remained a mystery in my mind, on par with the great mysteries of disappearing ships and vanishing planes in the Bermuda Triangle. It wasn’t until many years later, when a fuse went out in my truck, did I finally solve the mystery. Inside the little fusebox, under my dash, was the shriveled and seemingly mummified corpse of a queen bee. Somehow she had managed to crawl up and into the electronics behind the dash where she must have followed the wiring to the fusebox and crawled through an empty fuse placeholder into her tomb.
Every time I change a fuse, I now pay respects and remember my first accidental regicide.
Classic. Reminds me of our first swarm we tried to capture. In the hours it took us to gather what was needed, read up on techniques, watch videos, we were finally ready. Unfortunately, so were the bees. We were both suited up and approached the swarm...right as they left for a new and better home. Cindy yelled, go get 'em! I ran after them. Only when I was a hundred yards up a steep pasture did it dawn on me that this was not going to happen. I slowed my run and turned around and went home as the bees crested the hill. They don't call, they don't write.