This year I finally bought a house. As a new homeowner I've had to learn a lot of basic things, and it's been very educational in ways I never expected or even wanted to be educated. However, there are some bright spots, and in a world of gloom and hate I wanted to share a couple of them in the hopes that they'll brighten someone's day.
I own a book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, that's about learning to draw. There's some theory that may not be 100% accurate about left brain vs. right brain, but I feel the book is still useful in many of its exercises. In particular, one main point of the book is that drawing isn't about learning to draw. Drawing is about learning to SEE. Human brains are excellent at filtering out unnecessary information. The world is full of an exhaustive amount of information, even if one restricts it to visual information, so it makes perfect sense that your brain has to filter so you don't get constantly exhausted and overwhelmed. However, to accurately draw something as it actually looks from your vantage point, the book argues you have to learn to see all the little details you might otherwise ignore. The brain can get annoyed and think, "eh I have a mental symbol for an apple, why are you wasting my time trying to imitate little shadows and lines," but that's what you need to do if you want to draw something realistically.
Drawing aside, I've seen this in nature. I grew up playing in the woods as a kid and I've seen my share of plants and gardens and insects. Still, there are some things that didn't really register to me until someone pointed them out and made me look more closely. For example, septic tanks. As a new home owner who found via inspection that the drainage field was broken, I had the obnoxious and very expensive experience of getting the decades-old tank and field replaced. A septic tank inspector guy came over. I had no idea where the tank even existed, but he glanced at the yard and was like "oh it'll be here and here, notice these little flowers tend to grow around septic tanks etc." He had the superpower of septicvision, despite having a job some might look down on as menial.
Now to the topic actually mentioned in the title, honeybees. I conceptually know about honeybees, I've been stung by various wasp or beelike insects and found I was allergic to several in the past, I've eaten locally produced honey, and so forth. And yet, I've never really paid that much attention to them. As a new homeowner several months into owning a house, suddenly one day I see this big, loose cloud o' bees maybe 8 feet across, with audible droning 20 feet away. I thought it was a distant engine or something until I saw the cloud. A bunch of them were landing on the garage wall of my house where an external light fixture wasn't properly sealed to the wall, and they seemed to be crawling inside. The next day the cloud was gone, but the bees were still flying in and out.
I didn't know if they were wasps or hornets or bees or what. Obviously I didn't get close since I've been allergic and didn't feel like testing my luck. A pest inspector arrived, and it turned out a colony of honeybees decided to move into my wall void. As an aside, I'm discovering as a homeowner that the phrase "wall void" strikes terror into my heart, as in "imagine a flood of termites spilling out into your wall void," or "you can't get to the wall void without carving up your wall". A local beekeeper arrived next, and this is where things got really neat. Here are some of the things I've learned, or at least been told:
1. Honeybees always leave and enter the hive from the same side. I spent maybe 20 minutes watching today and this is totally accurate, they always fly to a route that takes them towards the light fixture from a certain direction, even though there's just a hole in the wall above it they could crawl into from any angle. The pest inspector said they pretty much will only sting you if you're in the flight path -- or, I assume, if you disturb the hive.
2. They could be Africanized honeybees ("killer bees"). According to the beekeeper you can't ever really tell unless you capture one and do DNA analysis, or unless you disturb the hive and get chased by 1000 bees. Apparently they've interbred enough that there are a bunch of varieties, but the aggression still seems to be dominant. I then wondered if it was even worth taking them out instead of killing them -- I definitely don't want to kill normal honeybees since I know how much colonies have been dying. It turns out that even an Africanized colony can be reclaimed. They take the colony, replace the queen with another queen of a known safer breed, and within a few weeks the hive ends up entirely replaced with regular bees.
3. My yard has gotten really grown up and I'm in the process of reclaiming it. The beekeeper immediately pointed to some Mexican clover in the front yard, which he informed me was neither Mexican nor clover despite the name, and said the bees were probably using that. Sure enough, when I went close and stared at these little flowers I normally glance over, I saw a honeybee or two busily harvesting from them. I wouldn't look at different trees or flowers and see some as likely bee candidates, but the beekeeper did. He also said they typically harvest from pepper trees -- from a brief google search, this appears to be the Brazilian pepper tree, and the woods next to my house have at least one or something very similar. It turns out it has effects like mace if you burn it, and can have effects like poison ivy if you touch it. Well, that's good to know.
4. Beehives are hot, which also lets them survive temporary cold weather. To locate a beehive inside a sheetrock wall, beekeepers use infrared guns.
5. Scout bees actually measure potential hive locations. The beekeeper said the process is that first a scout bee arrives, crawls into the wall, and measures the whole thing. If it thinks there's enough room, it reports back while the colony is just relaxing on a treebranch or something temporarily. More scouts then go and double check the same location. If they agree there is enough room, they report back, and the queen makes the call to move the whole colony in.
6. I've heard of this in passing, but anyone interested should check out how crazy the communication protocol is:
Finally, and what really prompted me to make the thread, they're just really cool to watch. Once I got over my concern for being stung and stayed out of the flight paths, I watched for a while today. There seemed to only be one or two bees assigned to the Mexican clover patch, and I could see one go from flower to flower, digging its head in and wiggling itself. I could literally see its legs covered in collected pollen, and possibly even the rest of its body. After a while I suppose it was fully loaded and flew off to deliver the cargo.
Most of the time, a bee would either enter or leave the hive every 5-10 seconds, sometimes with gaps up to 30 seconds. They even seem to have a sort of redlight system, where an inbound bee would pause or land nearby because another bee was going in or out, and then continue when the path cleared. When they leave the hive, they fly in abrupt, complex patterns but they APPEAR to be consistent -- a departing bee would fly a few feet out, change direction a couple of times in a sort of ascending spiral, get maybe 20 feet high (it was cloudy today so I could actually see them pretty well against the sky), and then make a beeline (ho ho) in some direction. It was almost as if they were getting on a highway system and then taking off once they reached their path. Watching for a while, I could see multiple paths. One went off towards the neighbor. One went across the street, maybe to their front yard flowers. One went behind the house, maybe to the pepper tree. One went towards my front yard, which I assume includes the Mexican clover.
Is any of this important to my day-to-day life, or yours? Not necessarily. You could go your whole life without seeing these details and still be fine. Despite that, I think it's important to sometimes take a break from the hectic pace of life and the worries that we face, if we're fortunate enough to be able to take a small break, and just observe the tiny details of how the world hums along underneath us.
I want them gone so the honey doesn't build up in the wall and attract predators, and so I don't get stung. But in some way, I'll miss them.
I own a book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, that's about learning to draw. There's some theory that may not be 100% accurate about left brain vs. right brain, but I feel the book is still useful in many of its exercises. In particular, one main point of the book is that drawing isn't about learning to draw. Drawing is about learning to SEE. Human brains are excellent at filtering out unnecessary information. The world is full of an exhaustive amount of information, even if one restricts it to visual information, so it makes perfect sense that your brain has to filter so you don't get constantly exhausted and overwhelmed. However, to accurately draw something as it actually looks from your vantage point, the book argues you have to learn to see all the little details you might otherwise ignore. The brain can get annoyed and think, "eh I have a mental symbol for an apple, why are you wasting my time trying to imitate little shadows and lines," but that's what you need to do if you want to draw something realistically.
Drawing aside, I've seen this in nature. I grew up playing in the woods as a kid and I've seen my share of plants and gardens and insects. Still, there are some things that didn't really register to me until someone pointed them out and made me look more closely. For example, septic tanks. As a new home owner who found via inspection that the drainage field was broken, I had the obnoxious and very expensive experience of getting the decades-old tank and field replaced. A septic tank inspector guy came over. I had no idea where the tank even existed, but he glanced at the yard and was like "oh it'll be here and here, notice these little flowers tend to grow around septic tanks etc." He had the superpower of septicvision, despite having a job some might look down on as menial.
Now to the topic actually mentioned in the title, honeybees. I conceptually know about honeybees, I've been stung by various wasp or beelike insects and found I was allergic to several in the past, I've eaten locally produced honey, and so forth. And yet, I've never really paid that much attention to them. As a new homeowner several months into owning a house, suddenly one day I see this big, loose cloud o' bees maybe 8 feet across, with audible droning 20 feet away. I thought it was a distant engine or something until I saw the cloud. A bunch of them were landing on the garage wall of my house where an external light fixture wasn't properly sealed to the wall, and they seemed to be crawling inside. The next day the cloud was gone, but the bees were still flying in and out.
I didn't know if they were wasps or hornets or bees or what. Obviously I didn't get close since I've been allergic and didn't feel like testing my luck. A pest inspector arrived, and it turned out a colony of honeybees decided to move into my wall void. As an aside, I'm discovering as a homeowner that the phrase "wall void" strikes terror into my heart, as in "imagine a flood of termites spilling out into your wall void," or "you can't get to the wall void without carving up your wall". A local beekeeper arrived next, and this is where things got really neat. Here are some of the things I've learned, or at least been told:
1. Honeybees always leave and enter the hive from the same side. I spent maybe 20 minutes watching today and this is totally accurate, they always fly to a route that takes them towards the light fixture from a certain direction, even though there's just a hole in the wall above it they could crawl into from any angle. The pest inspector said they pretty much will only sting you if you're in the flight path -- or, I assume, if you disturb the hive.
2. They could be Africanized honeybees ("killer bees"). According to the beekeeper you can't ever really tell unless you capture one and do DNA analysis, or unless you disturb the hive and get chased by 1000 bees. Apparently they've interbred enough that there are a bunch of varieties, but the aggression still seems to be dominant. I then wondered if it was even worth taking them out instead of killing them -- I definitely don't want to kill normal honeybees since I know how much colonies have been dying. It turns out that even an Africanized colony can be reclaimed. They take the colony, replace the queen with another queen of a known safer breed, and within a few weeks the hive ends up entirely replaced with regular bees.
3. My yard has gotten really grown up and I'm in the process of reclaiming it. The beekeeper immediately pointed to some Mexican clover in the front yard, which he informed me was neither Mexican nor clover despite the name, and said the bees were probably using that. Sure enough, when I went close and stared at these little flowers I normally glance over, I saw a honeybee or two busily harvesting from them. I wouldn't look at different trees or flowers and see some as likely bee candidates, but the beekeeper did. He also said they typically harvest from pepper trees -- from a brief google search, this appears to be the Brazilian pepper tree, and the woods next to my house have at least one or something very similar. It turns out it has effects like mace if you burn it, and can have effects like poison ivy if you touch it. Well, that's good to know.
4. Beehives are hot, which also lets them survive temporary cold weather. To locate a beehive inside a sheetrock wall, beekeepers use infrared guns.
5. Scout bees actually measure potential hive locations. The beekeeper said the process is that first a scout bee arrives, crawls into the wall, and measures the whole thing. If it thinks there's enough room, it reports back while the colony is just relaxing on a treebranch or something temporarily. More scouts then go and double check the same location. If they agree there is enough room, they report back, and the queen makes the call to move the whole colony in.
6. I've heard of this in passing, but anyone interested should check out how crazy the communication protocol is:
Finally, and what really prompted me to make the thread, they're just really cool to watch. Once I got over my concern for being stung and stayed out of the flight paths, I watched for a while today. There seemed to only be one or two bees assigned to the Mexican clover patch, and I could see one go from flower to flower, digging its head in and wiggling itself. I could literally see its legs covered in collected pollen, and possibly even the rest of its body. After a while I suppose it was fully loaded and flew off to deliver the cargo.
Most of the time, a bee would either enter or leave the hive every 5-10 seconds, sometimes with gaps up to 30 seconds. They even seem to have a sort of redlight system, where an inbound bee would pause or land nearby because another bee was going in or out, and then continue when the path cleared. When they leave the hive, they fly in abrupt, complex patterns but they APPEAR to be consistent -- a departing bee would fly a few feet out, change direction a couple of times in a sort of ascending spiral, get maybe 20 feet high (it was cloudy today so I could actually see them pretty well against the sky), and then make a beeline (ho ho) in some direction. It was almost as if they were getting on a highway system and then taking off once they reached their path. Watching for a while, I could see multiple paths. One went off towards the neighbor. One went across the street, maybe to their front yard flowers. One went behind the house, maybe to the pepper tree. One went towards my front yard, which I assume includes the Mexican clover.
Is any of this important to my day-to-day life, or yours? Not necessarily. You could go your whole life without seeing these details and still be fine. Despite that, I think it's important to sometimes take a break from the hectic pace of life and the worries that we face, if we're fortunate enough to be able to take a small break, and just observe the tiny details of how the world hums along underneath us.
I want them gone so the honey doesn't build up in the wall and attract predators, and so I don't get stung. But in some way, I'll miss them.
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