It is bee season in south Georgia. What does that mean? Well it means looking at a lot of boxes like the one above.
Bees reproduce by swarming, by making new colonies. A new individual bee is nothing without a colony. When a colony is doing well enough to fill its home they start to change their roles. The queen lays eggs in specially prepared queen cells. When they are sufficiently advanced, usually about ten days, the workers stop feeding her and she gets smaller and restless. At some point she takes about half the colony and leaves to find a new home while the ones left behind nurture the new queens, one of which will take over the egg laying task.
Beekeepers use this to make new colonies on their own schedule. We watch the spring build-up and then step in to make artificial swarms. So I’m out there opening giant bee boxes completely full of bees. I find the queen and set her aside. Then I make one or two, sometimes three new colonies from the brood (pupating worker bees) and honey, move them a couple of miles away so the workers don’t find their way back to the old location and put a new queen in them, usually in the form of a queen pupa supplied by a queen dealer with a specified hatching date.
Finding the queen in a box like that pictured above ain’t easy, can you see her? It takes an unusual level of concentration and awareness, the smell of fresh nectar all around, the buzz of a disturbed colony, the occasional sting and distractions like keeping track of the stage of the honey flow, pollen levels and keeping an eye out for pathologies.
This makes for hard work, especially because it usually goes on in a heavy honey flow. The frames are full of nectar, your gloves get sticky and full of stings and the usual structure of the hive is disrupted by all the honey coming in; the queen can be in all kinds of places she might not ordinarily be as she looks for new places to lay. One holds frame after frame at the right angle to scan it for the queen, making mental notes of the strength of the hive, the location of pollen and brood, trying not to think about the wonderful spring going on all around, the wrens, warblers and vireos singing and whether there might be snakes hiding under the pallet.
We went for a hike in the Okefenokee Park and, as usual, had an excellent day. The first thing was the new tame hawk in the parking lot. It must put up with a lot of gawking and camera clicking. We saw wild hogs, a fine buck fox squirrel, sand hill cranes, turkeys, bluebirds and all the usual suspects. Still no red-cockaded woodpecker. Brad says you have to get to them right at dawn when they spring into action. Ellen says: Not likely.






I didn’t leave the gravy out this time in case of more owls (see previous entries). The cat has been leaving the owls alone and concentrating on flying squirrels (again, see below). One of them I did catch in my pajamas, it ran right up my leg until my jumping up and down and yelping got it out again when I grabbed it and let it go outside. He brought another one in last night and I let him eat it because we suspect that he’d been catching the same one over and over and they were developing a dysfunctional relationship.
Today, for the second time in a week it was a flying squirrel. Usually they’re easy enough to catch but this one had extra vim. Last week’s managed to run up my leg inside my pajamas so perhaps I was a little hesitant with this one. Audubon says they are easily tamed “to the hand” in less than half an hour. Evidently this one was behind on it’s Audubon reading because once I caught it I was thinking of taking another picture and it started in on my hand with it’s rodentine incisors. Thus it was considerably less than half an hour that we were together as I rushed it to the door while it gnawed on my index finger. Usually the cat only brings in dead rodents; perhaps it classifies flying squirrels as birds that it should show me before eating.



