Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Ovid, Heroides 2. 9 ff (trans. Showerman) :
“Spes (Hope), too, has been slow to leave me; we are tardy in believing, when belief brings hurt.”
Ah. Hope. They were honey robbers, not residents of last year’s colony, my best, my strongest ever. Instead I uncovered an empty hive, all the honey stores eaten, evidence that the colony had lived on a long time, but no bees. Not in the honey super I’d left on top. Not in the third hive box. Not in the second. Not in the bottom one either. Only foraging bees attracted by the minimal honey that remained.
(Assistants_and_George_Frederic_Watts_-_Hope_ 1886)
I let myself hope yesterday. Dreamed of dividing the colony, setting up my new beeyard with the divide, leaving the parent colony alone in the orchard. But no. I’m sad, feeling a bit defeated. I did everything I knew: mite control, extra honey stores, the cardboard sleeve and the barrier to vermin. This latter got pulled out and there was some evidence of rodent invasion, but only a bit.
On the other hand, I was tired last year at the end of the bee season. The harvest was taxing. Lifting the heavy honey supers and maneuvering the even heavier hive boxes in the late summer heat had exhausted me. There are things I could have done better, maybe they would have made a difference. Maybe not.
The feeling tone I have right now is very similar to those two articles I wrote about below. Bees, like the climate and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, are under significant pressure and the efforts in recent years don’t seem to have stemmed the problem, in fact it has gotten demonstrably worse.
My analyst, John Desteian, often said, “Don’t get me started on hope.” The story of Pandora had it wrong after all in giving a patina of good will to the last thing to escape from her box. It may not be all that different from the others.
