Bee update May 27, 2011

Friday evening I checked on the bees at KW Farms.  I was worried because I had called Trudi a few times to ask about the bees and she hadn't returned my calls.  I know farmers in May are very busy, so that was understandable that she wouldn't have a moment to make a phone call.  She did get a chance to call me Friday morning, but said she hadn't seen any bees on her new flowers that she planted.  I prepared myself for the worst, which is to say, I prepared myself to find an empty hive box.

A few minutes after Trudi's call, I received another call, this one from my doctor with results from some lab tests earlier in the week.  She wanted me to come in for more tests and transferred me to the scheduler.

How are these two phone calls related?  I will attempt to explain how my attitude towards these bees and towards my health are related.

But I'll contextualize it with yet another digression. 

Card making.  Two years ago, I started making greeting cards with my friend Ellen and some other ladies.  This hobby drives me crazy and yet teaches me patience.  I sit with these women, gluing bits of paper together, lining up stamps to be centered and straight.  And then I silently curse at myself when the bits of paper get crinkled, or the stamp is off-center and crooked.  I glare at my creation, thinking how a kindergartner might have done a better job.  Then we pass around examples of our work, and the ladies comment on the beautiful color combinations I chose, or the neat way I did X, which they had never seen before.

My point is that I have a tendency to focus on the negative first, to critically analyze, before appreciating the whole, or seeing the good parts of the big picture.

I did this behavior when I first opened the hive.  Here is what I saw:

So, yes, there are bees, but very few bees.  Damn, I thought.  They're dying.  They're weak.  Bothe Kretsinger, Trudi and John's son, was with me so I talked in a stream-of-consciousness way as we examined the hive.  (I may very well have talked to myself had I been alone, I'm not afraid to admit). As I talked through my anxiety, my fears, I started to realize a few things, started to observe the positive things going on in this hive.  For one, the bees were putting away some honey.  This is an excellent sign.  There are flowers from which they are foraging.  A second positive observation was that they were mellow, "queenright" as beekeepers say, meaning that they weren't freaking out/spazzy because the wasn't a laying queen sending out the right pheromones. 

Once I started to see the positives, I started thinking from a positive frame of reference.  I did some math.  Since I installed the bees on May 7th, no eggs could have been laid prior to that date.  It had only been 20 days, and worker bee gestation is about 21 days.  So, the very first bee eggs laid would just be hatching later this week, while the worker bees who navigated the swarm process would have had to have been older, fully mature-winged bees, meaning they were nearing the end of their life cycle, and starting to die.  It would make sense that there would be a window of time, this week specifically, when good things were happening in the hive (wax production, honey production, thousands of eggs being laid and tended to) with a general decrease in the overall number of bees and bee activity.

Bothe with the bees

As I drove off from the farm, I wept.  I was so happy to see these bees, so afraid that they were dead or dying, so focused on the negative that I forgot to look to the positive, to the things going well.  I worry too much.  I put too much emphasis on the success or failure of every hive, that it means *I* am a success or failure. And since I have this tendency to see the negative first, I forget about the successes of these three weeks of life, and instead focused on imminent death, the things I should have, might have, could have, done to make things better for the bees.

So, back to the test results. It's good that I see my doctor every year, that I take good care of myself.  It's good to have follow up tests, and do whatever will be necessary. These are the positives, from which I can base a positive frame of reference for whatever will come next.