Hoea Road Bees

I often walk past what I call The Goat Place as I head up Hoea Road shaded from the morning sun on my 45 minute circuit connecting Leikolu, Hawi Road makai and Akoni Pule. The last stretch leads to my morning reward, the coffee shop... But now I understand what the big nubian was trying to say, jogging right up to me on the road one time, but all she got was a patronizing retort: What are you doing? You'll get run over, momma goat! Now go on back home!
She was really saying, There's bees in there! Help! There's bees in there! Help!
That's how come Bee Friend, Golden Maverick and I found ourselves in a rickety, teetering, hanging-by-a-toenail outbuilding at The Goat Place, with the wind lifting and banging down the corrugated aluminum roofing like a soundtrack for a seedy motel, and a flock of kids bleating and crying like the Big Bad Wolf was standing right there in the shadows of that old monkey pod tree filing his nails, whistling a preprandial tune, and the three of us looking hard at a dark mass of honey bees shaped like North America up in the far corner.
We cleared the stack of fluorescent light tubes, passing seven or eight at a time man to man until we could stand right under the bees.
In our first experience with this, at the house above the hardware store, we saw only little pukas in the outside wall cladding where those bees entered and left. Here, the interior wall was eaten away in that shape and that shape was a mass of bees fixated on comb. When we pulled more cladding away from the wall we saw comb structure floor to ceiling in length.
Just like a tree, said BF. That was his passion, seeing bees in their natural setting, left to their own devices, not cooped up in precisely measured frames at the mercy of the honey merchant.
We were here to help the Goat Lady whose grandfather fell and hurt himself working out here amongst three generations’ worth of jobs left undone and calamitous disarray. The only pure things left in the mess were the Goat Lady’s heart and all those goats. Beautiful, soft, curious, frisky and at the moment, petrified, bawling, squalling goats of all ages. Actually, we were here to save the bees. Who knows how long they’d been nesting here in the wall’s cavity, so long their combs started at the door and worked their way under the cladding across every stud. Long, grey, papery, and dried-out by the door, the combs had reached the corner where we found ourselves staring and wondering outloud, There’s a lot of bees!
BF reached into the corner with his improvised bee collector made from a dustbuster, some duct tape and a couple of cutaway plastic water bottles. He’d reach through a cloud of angry bees and I wondered how this adventure was going to do down, because I couldn’t see any turning point, any progress. It seemed overwhelming. I saw plundered combs laid out on a piece of wall off to one side. Combs still heavy with pollen or brood. Some stained dark, a dull, uncomfortable, old smokers’ fingers kind of stain, not pleasing to the eye like the amber-colored combs we knew and loved. That’s why we thought there’d been some poisoning here, but now I don’t know.
Once BF brought a piece of comb over and said, Honey! Look at this honey! and dropped it in the Top Bar Hive box we’d set in the midst of the rubble. Countless creatures all abuzz clouded around BF’s head, going for his breath. Some succeeded in crawling up inside his veil, driving him outside to regroup. One stung him right on the tip of his nose. For all that commotion in BF’s corner, there was an alarming number of bees amassed on the discarded combs. They were gorging themselves on honey or pollen, we supposed, or tending to brood.
The plan was to get the bees in BF’s hive he’d made over the weekend. It was a handsome, cedar TBH, complete with viewing window and room for a dozen top bars.
GM held the cut comb sections while I stitched them onto top bars using dental floss and a length of wire looped at one end for a needle. The Goat Lady had loaned us first a cane knife when we’d asked for a machete, and later a six inch kitchen knife. We used one or the other to slice through comb we wanted to keep, to put in the hive. We went for comb covered in bees. We’d brush them aside but some got pinched by our fingers or pierced by the needle. Sometimes we exposed a flank of white interiors in those antique-looking cells. It upset me to cut through brood but at least I knew this was “keeper comb.”
After two or three bars had been stitched and placed in the hive, I looked out at our scene of chaos, bees now filling the shack’s airspace, shards of glass crunching underfoot as we tiptoed through a disarray of tackle, electrical innards and corroded casings and coverings for who knows what, and in that moment I confess a little doubt crept into my brain...so I reached for another top bar and picked at the dental floss with my sticky, goatskin-covered fingers...
GM was a stalwart. His hands got stung so bad through his gloves they were swollen for days after. But he kept coming back with variations on duct tape around his jacket cuffs and gloves. He was quietly determined. Without that we couldn’t have done it.
BF finally got the vacuum to work right and started collecting bee clusters the size of grapefruit. We got into a rhythm at last. GM and I had a top bar stitched and ready with more good comb around the same time BF was opening a dense jumble of bees from between the two water bottles. We’d slide back the flat rectangle covering the growing hive and snug a top bar in place while BF shook a new group into the depths of the box with a strange, small thwack.
BF’s earlier collections were insignificant and as he shook them into the hive, sometimes while I had only one side of a comb stitched, I despaired to see the bees once captured now rise up and back into the angry cloud. But eventually the bees had good reason to stay in the hive. They had pollen. They had brood comb. And they had honey. Honey drips signed themselves on every surface of the hive, attracting bees, calming them down. And I attribute some of the hive’s settling down vibe to BF’s earlier introduction of that chunk of glistening, oozing comb.
So we were getting somewhere! Each time we slid back the cover, the mass of bees stayed inside. I noticed bees fanning on the hive’s perimeters, no doubt their pheromone signalling to the rest that this is the place. We had turned a corner.
GM took a turn vacuuming bees and I kept stitching. BF cut the remaining comb free from the studs. Eventually there were no more top bars. No more room in the hive. For the last cupful I moved one of the followers, or end-plates back and then pushed it gently in place, imagining all those legs and eyes and bodies getting gently squeezed further under the comb sections we hoped would make the beginnings of a new hive.
We left the hive overnight, with the three entry/exit holes open. BF said if the queen was in the box, the stragglers would find their way into the hive to join her.
At sunset that same day, I went by with a buddy of BF’s to check on the hive. I wanted to take pictures but couldn’t bring myself to get too close without the protective clothing. The angry cloud was gone but the memory of it was fresh. He was great. He said How’s your camera work? And in swim trunks and tee-shirt got up close, opened the viewing door and got a pretty good picture of the full hive.
When BF, MM and I went back Tuesday, we were concerned to see a fair cluster of bees right up hard in the corner again. BF was convinced the queen was still up there. But we had come to take the hive away so we loaded it up in my truck and took it up to a willing place off Kinnersley, right on the ditch. Let’s hope there’s a queen in there.