Hives Combined

First: the bulk of the day. Phil played butcher. For six hours straight. He cut and cleaved and sliced and cleaned. We had about one and a half five gallon buckets of meat for sausage, many gallon bags of fat for lard. Enormous chops, and a picnic roast that I hope will fit in my canning pot, since it looks about like a 20-pound turkey. (And since it has a large bone right in the middle, it's not terribly practical to cut it, especially with a still-sore hand.)

Speaking of chops: we did try one for breakfast. That's a normal sized frying pan it's in, not a miniature omelet pan. And, yes, it's touching both sides. Enormous.

When Phil was almost done with his butchering, it was time to start grinding meat for sausage and rendering lard. I think it took me about seven hours to cut up the 75 pounds of meat so Jadon and Isaiah could send the bits through the KitchenAid meat grinder, and so I could cut up the fat into bits and render out 12 quarts of golden lard.

That's just about identical to the amount of meat we got from the two girls we processed two months ago. So, yes, we fed the boar for two months for no gain. (Honestly, I was relieved to see that he hadn't lost weight!) But I think we sort of knew that, and with the various freezer issues, and the chicken processing, it took us longer to get to it than it should have.

That was today's triumph. A whole hog taken care of.

Isaiah and I also cleaned the motor home: carpets vacuumed, floor swept, couch cleared off. Sadly, my kitchen is now again a disaster, but I am done. I have been on my feet since 8am, and 14 hours in a row is enough. The dishes will wait until the morning.

In a way, that was a triumph, too. Or at least a pleasure.

But the really beautiful, really amazing thing came with the bees.

It was time for me to put in a mouse guard. Apparently, mice can access hives even with a quarter-inch space, so beekeepers put metal mouse guards in front of the opening to thwart intruders. The guard has holes just a bit larger than a hole punch, through which the bees can fly (and, incredibly, I watched two exit one hole at the same time, so presumably they can also carry the dead out, but that seems like it would be quite a challenge).

Despite knowing that I needed to put it in place, I could find no instructions anywhere. Finally I found a picture that attached the guard to the wood with a thumbtack. And the motor home has thumbtacks (which is good, since I don't think we brought any with us).

I put that one on the Celestial hive first, and that went smoothly. The bees were having a bit of a pileup at the entrance, but they will figure out their new flight patterns very quickly. No varroa mites on their monitor sheet: overall, appear to be doing well, with a good number of bees in the hive.

So I turned my attention to the Celadon hive. This was the day, I had determined, when I would open the hive to see whether they had food enough for the winter, or whether I needed to combine them. If they didn't have food enough, I would have to find the queen and somehow contain her, so I could kill her later. I wasn't really confident about that last part.

I opened their one and only deep and pulled out the first frame. It was totally light: no honey stores. Despite daily feeding for the last month.

Second frame: a few capped brood, a few capped honey cells. Not much.

And so it went. There were maybe two frames that felt even somewhat heavy, with capped honey ready for winter. This hive could not survive on its own.

The experience was unique. I really felt present to the bees, in a way I usually am not. And I said to the queen, "I am sorry, but I am going to have to find you. Even if I have to look again and again, I will find you."

(I forget if I mentioned this before: you have to kill the weaker queen, rather than allow the two queens to coexist, because if the weak queen is still putting off pheromones, her bees will go to the strong queen, ball up around her, and kill her. Presumably, the strong queen's minions will do the same to the weak queen, so the hive ends up queenless and sad. And dead.)

My queen was not marked, and I had not seen her on the first look through the frames. I had only had a glimpse of one queen one time, actually, so I wasn't sure I would recognize her when I saw her.

I shouldn't have worried. Compared with the other, black and white striped bees, she was almost monocolor burnt sienna, with a different look. I spotted her on about the sixth frame, and I bent down to get the queen tube, which I was hoping would hold her well. (I slipped holding the frame, and temporarily lost sight of her, but she hadn't gone far.)

I tried to capture her for a minute or two, when she suddenly flew down, briefly alighted on my pant leg, and then fell to the ground at my foot.

Stunned, it took me a second to realize, "Kill her quickly!" So I stepped on her, as if she were a black widow or a cockroach.

It wasn't until I was reassembling the hive when I thought, "She said goodbye, as she came to me, and then sacrificed herself." It reminded me of what high priest Caiaphas said of Jesus: "One man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not."

Maybe it's a stretch to compare an insect with the Creator and Savior of the world, but I mean no disrespect. The queen's death was, to me, such a noble and precious act: beautiful. (And would not a creature be able to imitate the example of the Creator?)

Then I was free to combine the two hives. So we have the Celestial deep on the bottom, with a layer of paper on top. Then the Celadon deep next, with a mostly empty box containing food on the top.

May the Lord make the two together prosper, and protect them well through the days to come. May they be stronger together than they are apart.