In Love With Bees

I installed a new package of bees in the Warré hive today. The queen was moving around in her small cage when I pried out the cork in the end replacing it with a small marshmallow, only then placing her in her new home. We shook the bees from the container into the hive and put a feeder along with a small pollen patty on the top of the frames to give them some food while they become accustomed to their surroundings.

We lost all four hives last winter. It happens more than beekeepers wish but sometimes there’s nothing we can do when the snow’s so deep we can’t reach them. The colonies just got too cold. They went into winter healthy and never came out again. I was devastated.

So today, when the bees were climbing all over us I was thrilled. I missed them so much and I finally got to experience their trust and unified resonance once more. Growing up, my mother taught me to be afraid of bees. I stepped on a bee in our chicken coop thirty some years ago and received my first bee sting. Six weeks later it happened again. Although my husband has always wanted bees, I couldn’t quite get there until a couple of years ago.

Now beginning our third season as beekeepers, with each year my comfort level grows. The first year I hung back primarily assisting Jerry but by the second year I had purchased the Warré and a horizontal hive and any fear I had was gone. And when I got the call yesterday that the package was in my tears flowed.

You can’t know what it’s like to pull weeds in the garden with bees only inches away, all of us doing our own thing, in synchronicity with the garden itself. The next best gardening companion is a chicken. I used to have one that would come running the minute I began weeding. She loved to help.

But as the fruit trees began blooming this Spring, only local pollinators were visiting, with only a few bumblebees around. The sound of honeybees simply wasn’t there and although I knew that the package and nucs we ordered would eventually be here, I had no idea if they would be here in time to place their essence on the trees. Because it’s a give and take between bees and the plant life that sustains them, there’s nothing like a colony of honeybees to make everything bloom!

The garden flourishes now, prolific and abundant, made so by the bees who visit. And I await the moment when I sit out in the gazebo where a curious honeybee hovers in greeting a couple of inches from my face. It first happened only a day or so after our first colony arrived. She hovered a few inches from my eyes, looking at me. I sat there while she and I sized each other up, and then she was gone. But in that moment, I fell in love and my devotion to the colony has grown exponentially.

Although I regularly perform Reiki on the colonies, today I took a 432hz tuning fork out to the colony after they had settled in for a bit to align with their resonance, essentially tuning the biofield of the hive. As I struck the fork on the puck and moved it around the hive their resonance changed a bit and they seemed to settle down even more. The bulk of the colony was inside the hive surrounding their queen. They may have already eaten through the marshmallow I placed in the opening to her small cage and when she’s released and ready, she’ll take her maiden flight to breed with drones. She takes this flight only once creating millions of bees over the remainder of her life.

An empath, I feel the resonance of the colony, their hum and their unified presence. Performing Reiki with or without the tuning forks is an experience like no other. So it’s as much for me as it is for them. There’s so much stress in the life of a colony with pesticides and parasites and other problems our world forces them to contend with. All they want is to sustain life. They’re an integral part of our lives and yet are at such risk so I do what I can.

But without them, there is no us. The sound of bees is the sound of love and joy. We have an emotional connection to this unified presence if we would only stop and listen to their message. They survive together, never working at cross purposes but only in the preservation of the colony. A beekeeper sits next to her hive, listening to, learning from, and loving these incredible creatures. Their reverence for one another as well as for their queen is astonishing to observe.

Saving them, in turn, saves us. So how about we do that.