Subject: Grandma Kept Bees

From: [email-masked] (Rich Brown)
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 1994 22:18:54 GMT

Just wanted to say hello to all beekeepers.  Although I haven't had my hand
in for a while, I used to help my grandma with her hives when I was a kid.  I
expect that when I retire I will keep a couple of hives, just for old times'
sake.

When I was a teenager in the 60's and couldn't get a real job, my grandma
hired me at 65 cents an hour to help her with her business.  Since it was
agricultural in nature, she was exempt from the minimum wage laws.  At that
time there were no penalties either, for hiring illegal aliens, so she did
that too.  No, I wasn't a "wetback" but I worked alongside several.  Shrewd
businesswoman that my grandma was, I and my Mexican co-workers were a source
of cheap labor for her.

I'm originally from southeastern New Mexico (virtual Texas, really), and I
guess you could say my grandma was the "Queen Bee" of honey-farming in that
region.  She had over 200 hives scattered over as many square miles, and each
day around sunrise -- except on Sundays -- we'd hop into her old Ford pickup
with our sack lunches, plenty of water, and the back end filled with empty
supers and hive tools.  Not that the supers were _really_ empty:  Each one
had (is it 10 or 12?) frames in it, and each frame held a latticework of
beeswax honeycomb, empty but eager to be filled with sweet nectar.  Then we'd
drive to one of the 35 or so places where there would be a half-dozen hives,
and start robbing honey.

Usually it was just the three of us, Grandma, Jorge and me, and by the time
we'd hit each location, the hives we'd started at would be full again, and
the cycle would continue.  Sometimes we'd manage to hit two places per day,
sometimes only one.  Often there would be a two-hour drive each way, since
the area is in the Great Chihuahuan Desert, and water was scarce.  Only some
parts of the region are arable, so the hives were mostly near farms that
were watered by irrigation.  Some hives were actually _in_ the desert though,
so that Grandma could market her "Cactus Honey" too, along with the more
plentiful clover and alfalfa honeys.  It was easy for Grandma to persuade the
farmers to let us put the hives on their land, since as every good farmer
knows, bees are essential for pollination.

Now, my grandma was an avid fly-fisherman, so it was no accident that many
of the sites were near fishing holes.  Many were the times when we'd park the
truck, pile out, and Grandma would say, "Start with that'n yonder, I'm gonna
see if the fish are bitin'."  Then she'd disappear over the ridge and go
down by the river, under a shade tree, and start casting.

Meanwhile, Jorge and I would be suited up from head to toe in our gear,
sweating in the 100-degree heat (but it was a _dry_ heat), stuffing old rags
into our smokers and getting ready to rob the hives.  Smart woman, my grandma.

Prying the lid off the topmost super of a hive, we'd check its contents.  If
it wasn't full yet, and all capped off, we'd use the smokers to encourage the
bees to descend into the next lower super.  Then we'd dislodge the topmost
one and set it aside.  Usually that second super was full -- Grandma had an
uncanny knack for getting the hives to just the right height so that we never
had to set the second one aside too, since the bees filled the supers from
the bottom up.  They were very cooperative, I thought.

Well, then we'd continue gently blowing the smoke into the super, and most of
the bees would gladly crawl down toward the queen, in the bottom of the hive.
Sometimes a few particularly diligent workers would refuse to budge.  Prying
loose a frame and removing it from the super with a clamp, we used brushes to
flick those little gals back into the hive.  Then we'd set each bulging frame
into an empty super; when a super was loaded with frames, Jorge and I would
take turns carrying the eighty-pound load back to the pickup.  Whoever wasn't
hauling a super that time would pry the now-empty super off the hive, and
begin the process once more.  We'd carry a "fresh" super back from the truck
each time we hauled a full one.

Usually we didn't rob the super just above the queen's oversized "super" at
the bottom of the hive (I forget the technical term for it).  Instead, we'd
pry it loose from the queen's super, and hold it aside for a few seconds,
filled with honey and buzzing bees -- must've weighed a hundred pounds.  Then
we'd place a fresh super directly above the queen's, and place the unrobbed
super atop that.  Then we'd stack the rest of the fresh supers above it, and
replace the lid.  Now we were ready to rob the next hive.  But first it was
_breaktime_!

I remember that hives seemed to have "moods".  Sometimes the least wisp of
smoke would seem to put the whole hive to sleep, and it was very easy to
rob the hive without any argument from the bees.  Other times it seemed as if
the hive was collectively saying, "Not now!  We've got work to do!" and we'd
have to smoke and brush, smoke and brush, constantly to coerce the little
devils into letting us collect the fruits of their labor.  I always thought
it had something to do with the weather -- humidity or temperature or
barometric pressure, or wind or something.  I remember that desert anthills
too would be quite busy just before a rainstorm, and I thought it must be an
adaptive behavior of colonial insects, to be able to predict the weather, or
something like that.

One day while I was taking a break, I removed my gloves and my netted hat and
took a long drink of cold water.  Closing my eyes to keep out the sweat, I
mopped my brow with a big bandana.  The gentle wind felt good, evaporating the
sweat as it still oozed from my pores.  I turned to face the sun with my eyes
remaining closed and just basked there for a moment, breathing deeply.

I felt something tickling my upper lip and thought, "It could be just a fly,
but it might be a bee or a yellowjacket or even a mud-dauber.  Or it might be
that loco Jorge playing a trick on me."  In any case, I figured, it would be
best to ignore my first impulse, to reach up and scratch my lip.  So, other-
wise still motionless, I opened my eyes and looked crosseyed past my nose,
down at my lip.

There she was, walking this way and that, her multi-faceted eyes peering up
my right nostril.  No!  Don't even think about it!  Well, sure enough, the
warm moist cavern must have looked like an ineresting place to explore, and
that little bee crawled right in.  I almost panicked, but I had the presence
of mind to breathe in slowly and deeply as I lifted my left hand. Pressing
my left nostril closed, I then performed the "farmer blow" and ejected her
as if she were so much snot.  I felt sorry for her, but it was either her
or me!

Unaware of my predicament, Jorge and Grandma had a little trouble at first
understanding why I had suddenly started pacing vigorously back and forth as
I launched into the most proverbial cursing-a-blue-streak that they'd ever
heard from me.  It only took a few minutes before I calmed down enough to
explain to them what had happened.

My grandmother was a remakable woman.  At a time when most women did not even
work outside the home, she had already spent 35 years in business for herself.
She retired from beekeeping, but before that she had engaged in a number of
other businesses.  I will always remember her as a liberated woman, years
ahead of her time.

Maybe I'll post some more remembrances another day.  But now, it's _breaktime_!

Rich
--
-- 
   Rich Brown, Programmer, Computing & Communications
   National Center for Supercomputing Applications
   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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