The Swarms of March

Swarm Lures, part two

February 2017 became my marker for replacing the FlowHive super. Surely, if the bees had survived the winter-workers would soon be bringing their fat legs full of sourgrass pollen, as well as precious nectar, into the hive.

March continued the sourgrass blooms, as well as Berkeley Flowering Plums, and the beginning of blackberries. I was an observant gardener. Inspecting the FlowHive super through its little porthole window showed new signs of activity in the super. This coincided with the videos and fact sheets the FlowHive people were publishing, identifying that this was beginning preparations for the start of FlowHive honey storage. First the worker bees would clean the premade FlowHive comb, cement the seams with propolis (made from resin and sap collected from plants and trees), and then begin the layering of honey. As recommended by the FlowHive folks, I had put a queen excluder between the brood box and the super, that way she was kept in the brood box. I watched as the workers started the propolis cementing in anticipation of the deposit and capping of honey comb. This is what I’d been waiting for.

After a few weeks, there was still no activity in the super as dusk approached, as the worker bees would make their way back down into the brood box for the night. What was I doing wrong?

Nothing

It turns out that I had a wonderfully strong hive. Too strong. One pleasant Sunday afternoon, while I was gardening in the front yard, I overheard my neighbor telling his kids to come in from the backyard, to get inside from the bees. I also overheard another neighbor further up, shout the same thing to her kids. “It looks like a swarm,” she shouted. I remembered I had received my hive as a benefit of a swarm, so I went into my back yard to investigate. Another swarm? Maybe they’ll join my hive and make it even stronger.

But at my hive, there is was, thousands of bees making their way as a giant orange and black cloud swirling through multiple back yards. Suddenly, after a year of watchfulness, it looked like my hive was now deserting me.

I watched in stunned awe, as seemingly millions of bees, forming a giant tornado of orange and black, swirled around unceasingly until they started coalescing into a long droopy pi?ata on a branch in my neighbor’s back yard. When they had finally calmed down after about twenty minutes, I looked back at my hive. There were still bees coming in and out, so the entire hive hadn’t abandoned me. Not knowing what to do, I reached out to my swarm lure lady, and called the local bio-diesel/fermentation supply store to see what they recommended.

Lost Cause

With every process, situation, activity and profession, every human activity, there are experts. These are professionals trained in matters that require expertise. As a registered/licensed architect, I am a professional. In every activity there are also amateurs, newbies, hobbyists.

And lost causes. At that moment, I was a lost cause. An expert returned my call, offering to come over and retrieve the swarm, and to look inside my hive. “what did you see when you last looked into it”, he asked, “have you seen queen or swarm cells?”

Um, I admitted that I hadn’t looked into my hive. I didn’t even know what a queen cell was. Ugh. What had I done? When I started surfing I was able to keep my errors to myself. A missed wave here, a tumble there, even when I tore my foot and head open, requiring stitches (just ask former co-workers at Perkins+Will), during my first year of learning to surf, I could keep my lack of expertise to myself, and the few people on the beach early in the morning, who weren’t paying attention to me anyway. However, with this swarm, I was unintentionally inviting my entire neighborhood to participate in my lack of skill, expertise, and knowledge.

Ah, but it wasn’t over yet. After the bee guy swooped up my swarm, he opened my hive. “You’ve have a really strong hive here,” he said, all geared up with veil and gloves, “really strong and congested," he continued, "you should have given them more room.”

He pulled out one of the Langstroth frames and showed it to me. Teaming with bees, it was a wonder to behold. Hanging below the frame were multiple small small chunks of of wax, hanging like a fig from the frame. “That’s a queen cell,” he said, as he reached down and plucked it off. “She’ll hatch and take half of your remaining hive with her as a new swarm.” He put the frame back into place and held the queen cell in his gloved hand.

“Holy cow, she’s hatching,” he said, and sure enough, the end of the fig-shaped cell, was beginning to pop open like an escape hatch. We watched as the new princess emerged and crawled around. “Good thing I brought a queen cage with me,” he said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pill bottle with vent holes in it and dropped her royal highness into the cage. “I’ve never seen that before,” as he dropped the cage into his pocket. “I can keep her in here for up to a week.”

I was absolutely agog. It was like I had ventured into a parallel universe gemba that I didn’t know existed.

It was too late to stop the swarming. This was a “shoulda, coulda, woulda” moment. I should have dropped a second brood box on top of the first in February. I should have researched and re-researched Keeping Backyard Bees, Beekeeping for Dummies, and all of the other beeking books available. I should have been more questioning in my support of the FlowHive. I should have, but I didn’t. My quiet new adventure had become loud and obnoxious. Bees were just being bees. Now I needed to re-qroup and figure out what to do going forward.

An assessment.

I still had a strong hive. The bees were doing what bees do. I could leave them in their small box forever and they would just swarm (and swarm, and swarm) again -providing other beeks with new hives. Or I could learn to manage the bees in ways that benefit them and myself and my neighbors.

Many Swarms later.

I ended up enriching a number of local beeks in the area, at the end of my swarm season. I was able to snatch one myself. After loading it into a nuc box, I gifted (re-gifted?) it to a co-worker through a nuc-box – a starter cell for the wannabeek. He had a hive that had been empty since he installed it two years ago. Now it is thriving and growing larger every day. He has learned from my wrong-headed benign neglect and is inspecting his hive at least once a week.

I moved my formally prolific hive to the backyard, to be a little more hidden. I’ve also started inspecting it more frequently. I’ve added a second brood box, and moved up some frames from the old brood box, replacing the old spaces with new, ready to be incorporated frames.

Why write about bees?

Statistics identify that 6% of the adult population in the US cannot ride a bicycle. 69% cannot balance a checkbook, 80% cannot operate a stickshift in a car. People learn to do something new every day, to connect them to new parts of the world. While everyone cannot learn everything, I believe being aware and curious of the operations of the world around me, can only help me as an architect. Learning about new schools of thought, finding new gembas, practicing beginner's mind; it makes me a better architect. Design solving is a system of discovery that supports processes of understanding.

Cliff Moser is the author of Architecture 3.0: The disruptive design practice handbook, BIM in Design and Construction chapter of the Handbook of Construction Management, and BIM Disruption 2016, The Disruption of Interoperability and Transportation Disruption 2016.