This winter we had a short week or so of extremely cold weather. My bees had been periodically out in the month before we suddenly plummeted down to zero and below, but I didn’t see them again after.
So on a warmish day I sighed, gathered my sadness into a small ball, and went out to look in the horizontal hive, hoping I was wrong.
But I wasn’t.
No winter cluster, keeping warm down in the center of the hive.
I didn’t have the heart to clean out the hive; I just shut the top and decided to take care of it later.
Which I didn’t do.
Because I didn’t want to think about it.
Everybody loses bees, everybody. It’s part of the deal if you are a beetender (or even just a happy bee friend, like I am now). And of course, it’s much, much more common in recent decades, as bees struggle to survive amid heavy pesticides, toxins, and other troubles.
So I pretended I would do something about it. Eventually.
I halfheartedly watched in March, as random bees came to investigate my hive. I knew it would be robbed of the rest of its winter honey by neighboring colonies, and I wasn’t surprised to see them coming and going.
Except that over the next few weeks, there was a lot of coming and going. And it seemed more organized than I was expecting. Bees were coming in with pollen. Everybody I saw around the hive seemed to belong, and they were all intent on their jobs, displaying the hard-working honey bee ethic I’m so familar with.
And now I’m 100% sure of it: a new colony has moved in!
It’s 8:15 pm, and I’m sitting with my laptop writing this in front of the open window in my bedroom, and I can still hear them hard at work, finishing up for the day, even though the crickets have already taken up the night chorus.
I still need to go into the hive this week and see if there’s anything I can do to help, see if they need frames or a mouse nest cleared out, but…
I’m a bee neighbor again. Yay bees.
I love this! And we have more happy bees on our flowers and flowering shrubs than I’ve seen in years. This makes me happy!
Wonderful! If you had told me 20 years ago that I would be this attached to bees, I would have called you crazy. But I absolutely love them, and have enjoyed learing how to be a good bee keeper and bee neighbor over the past decade.
So glad for you! We lost our three hives in 2020, and had been a strong colony for 9 years. I hate not having bees, but they are too expensive now for us to dive in again.
They really *are* expensive. I had no idea, when I got into it. Which is why I’m pleased that our hive drew a swarm, and I didn’t have to do a single thing. Although I have good beekeeping neighbors and one had already offered to get me a split for our hive if I’d asked. And truthfully, one hive is so much easier to deal with than the 10 or 12 we used to have…