Feral bees, feral gringas

There are thousands of them. Thousands. All with a specific job, all decided by one corpulent lass with tremendous olfactory powers. Her belly too dilated with eggs to do any other work outside of processing progeny, the queen relies upon her many many daughters to keep house. She is a woman trapped in her eigth month of pregnancy, but for somewhere between two and eight years. This is not to say that she exales WATER! or FLOWERS! and the entire colony rushes after the same goal. Its more nuanced than that. Each worker bee’s role in the colony changes throughout her lifetime. The young, inexperienced bees are relagated to the poop deck, cleaning cells and feeding the brood, for their first week or two of life. As they become more adroit , the bees are promoted through the ranks, hopefully to one day reach the rank of field bee, directing their search for pollen, water, and tree resin by the position of the sun and sense of smell.

Despite their fey social structure, apis mellifera does have one weakness: nighttime. While their five eyes are able to adjust to the dark interior of the hive, outside of the hive they lose their way without the light of the sun. Try it: any bee caught outside of its hive at night will dauntlessly fly at a flame or flashlight. Awareness of this aspect of bee biology is indispensible to bee keepers. Hives are only moved at night when, after blocking the entrance with some wax, bee keepers can rest assured that all of the thousands of its denizens are tucked away inside. Enervated by the darkness, especially pugnacious hives can be more easily harvested.

In Chimeo this week, we took advantage of this in the first honey harvest using our newly arrived suits. About half of our group already has a hive or two, which they had previously managed with improvised or ancient equipment and protective gear. Combined with the end of a mild winter that smacks of a strong harvest, established bee keeps were thrilled to try out their new equipment on the spring harvest. On Wednesday, Freddy and his son Benito harvested thirty kilos from Freddy’s tremendously bravo hives, only sustaining three stings as opposed to the usual dozens. Freddy will sell his honey to an invalid Frenchman named Enrique who lives near the Paraguayan border at 30 Bs per kilogram. To put this in perspective, that’s as much as a Bolivian day laborer earns for eight-hours of work, and it will buy you almost two kilos of meat or four kilograms of flour.

I had the opportunity to try the suits out for myself on Thursday with my comadre and main homegirl Ana when we harvested one of the two hives behind her house. Her husband Cecilio was in the fields for the day, and Ana was proud to be completing the first all-female harvest. In the late afternoon we began the easy part: removing the mature honey panels from the honey super. All of them were fat and ripe, capped with perfect white wax, and where one wooden panel was missing, the bees had constructed their own complete white wax panel which I had the pleasure of removing by hand. We hustled the panels in a covered dish into her kitchen, where we decapped the mature comb and spun it in a centrifuge provided by a previous PC volunteer. When all nine panels had been sucked dry, it was time for the hard part: putting the panels back. When a bee keep arrives to take honey, the bees are startled. A man at gunpoint. A kindergartener on her first day of school. In a desperate attempt to save some of their riches, they gorge themselves on their honey and are rendered as drunk and incompetent as a gringo on Thanksgiving. The dry panels must be returned as soon as possible after they are harvested, however, to keep the bees from swarming in search of a bigger home. Upon returning, the bees have regained their equanimous wrath.

In an attempt to avoid their bee anger, Ana and I decided to replace the panels after dark, hoping to find thousands of benign and quiescent workers patiently awaiting the return of their wax. We were in part correct. So many clung to the inside of the top of the box that I could hardly lift it. Heavy and sticky with buzzy life. I strained and eventually lifted the box and placed it face-up on the ground. There they all were, lining the sides and floor of the honey super, lost without wax to mold or cells to inspect. They were impotent and impetuous, and using a flashlight and a brush, we had to find a way to politely move them to make way for the panels. It’s a strange feeling, to gently arrange these tiny creatures, which given the opportunity would end their lives in an attempt to end mine. Part of you just want to slam down the marks and run away, while the more vengeful ventricles of your heart want to squash them all for that time they entered your mask and stung you four ties on the nose. And then run away.

But you don’t. You have to watch out for every one of your thousands of money makers. With some fancy flashlight work we eventually fitted the panels back into the honey super, however the roof of the hive was another story. I recently hurt my back and simply couldn’t lift it. I had to shake off thousands of lives onto the leafy ground and hope that theyd viscerally follow their noses back into the hive. Despite our efforts, I found myself awake at four a.m., unable to sleep with worry about Ana’s bees. What if they remained there, cold, blind, freezing on the forest floor, a heap of formerly productive stripes? What if I had harmed their lovely productive colony? How did this strange relationship even evolve- they tried to kill me while I robbed them. And now I am losing sleep over them. Its is a sweet and viscous disfuntional love affair.

Since the harvest with Ana, Chimeo has seen the beginning of dozens of tumultuous relationships as we run up and down the mountain capturing wild colonies to fill our boxes. A few times each week I head out with a few fellas and ladies to chop down whatever tree has been found to have a colony tucked warmly inside its hollow trunk. Then, with the buzzing woody innards splayed out before you and tthousands of engry bees knocking at your mask, you must select some bee babies, some honey, and put it in the bee box, their new bee home. Finally, the hard part: finding the queen. She is distinct, but she is one of thousands. You have to learn to read the movement of the bees to find her, to follow their movements and reactions to know where to look. Under which mess of legs and thoraxes to dig. Once she is found and jailed inside of the box, the rest of the colony will follow her inside. The entrance to the box is then closed off with wax until the colony gets used to its new home.

This is my favorite part of bee keeping for its adventure, its uncertainty, and the knowledge that I will never, ever capture a feral colony when I return home. While in Bolivia and especially the chaco wild swarms regularly fly overhead and the forest is littered with colonies, Ive been told that wild bees are all but nonexistant in the US. Considering the importance of their polination practices, their absence to me seems strange. Worrisome. Until I return to that odd and contradictory and beloved place called home, however, I can be found gleefully ambling about the forest with an axe over my shoulder and a fearful insect love in my heart.


My half of Bolivia is currently in day eleven of a civil strike, holding my captive in Villa Montes, but as soon as I can get back to Santa Cruz I will be uploading some sweeeeeeeeet capture fotos. I know you can hardly wait, but try!

Love,
Jacqueline