The Making of a Bee Documentary
This is what we saw yesterday. Some of it, anyway.
An enclosure for propagation of solitary bees, x-rays of nesting tubes for mason bees, a cooling chamber for artificial winter at 4°C. And a male mason bee (easily identified by its blond moustache) on the lookout:
Today we had to stop filming. Seems that we will be getting some natural winter with temperatures pretty much like in that chamber. Just what we needed…
And bloom there is. At last.
The bees are happy. And so are we.
Among the many thousand colonies I have seen in the past weeks, this one stood out:
It was late morning on a sunny day. Bees from the other hives were happily going about their business, as were the surviving bees in this hive. But in front of the entrance, there were these foragers, laden with pollen. And dead.
What happened – we don’t know. They might have come “home” late and got too cold outside. But if they made it back this far, you would think they would have made it back into the hive as well. Hive-doors are not locked at night, after all.
Maybe something was wrong with the pollen. But wouldn’t they have died out in the field? It doesn’t fit with CCD either, because the rest of the colony was apparently fine and more importantly: it was there. With CCD, typically, the hive is almost empty with just the queen and a few caretakers left.
But this one? A mystery.
Any ideas, anybody?
Beekeepers really don’t have it easy these days…
But then again: with half the US bee population, some 1.3 million hives, in the Central Valley, this may not sound so absurd anymore.
Most bees are placed in the orchards by now, but the weather is cold and windy and bloom is late in Kern County. Not good for almond growers. Or bees and beekeepers. Or filmmakers. We wait.
This is completely off topic and I apologize, but it simply blew me away and I thought I should share it with you. It also illustrates very nicely the kind of interesting people you meet around the bees.
In preparation for the next segment of filming I went up to Grass Valley to meet one of our beekeepers; and he had this guy from Switzerland working with him who is planning to set up his own beekeeping operation and also happens to be one of the mechanical engineers who built this beautiful Pushkin automaton, a mechanical robot that is able to write original poetry. It “knows” 24 words and basic grammar, it writes the poems by hand and adds a unique drawing to each of them. Every single part – screws and dials and springs and cogs; hands and hair and eyes and clothes – is custom made.
You can see all of the 3000 parts here and find some more information here (in French). Awesome.
Some might have wondered about the name “Bee” for a newspaper in the last post.
We did, too. And found this:
The Modesto Bee is actually the sister-newspaper of the Sacramento Bee. And they write in their Guide to the Bee:
Why is it called ‘The Bee’?
(Exerpted from The Sacramento Bee’s Ombudsman column on March 24, 1991)
Glad you asked. It’s been that since 1857 when James McClatchy founded the paper. An editorial on the first day of publication said: “The name of The Bee has been adopted as being different from that of any other paper in the state and as also being emblematic of the industry which is to prevail in its every department.”
So, the promise was a paper as busy as a bee. (Quaint, but not a bad marketing strategy, I should think.)
The first James McClatchy used a picture of a bee on his business stationery. His son, C.K., ordered the image of a bee depicted in mosaic tile in the lobby of the old Bee office at 911 Seventh St. in 1901. That mosaic now is on permanent display at the Sacramento History Museum.
In 1943 James McClatchy’s granddaughter, Eleanor, then president of The Bee, asked Walt Disney to create some new images of the insect to “lend personality and a familiar identity” to the papers and the company’s radio stations.
Disney, who donated his $1,500 fee to the Army Relief Fund, came up with “Scoopy” for the papers and “Gaby” for the radio stations. The new logos were announced with great front-page fanfare in The Bee on Sept. 4. That evening, a 15-minute radio interview with Disney from Hollywood was broadcast on KFBK. Eventually, Scoopy drawings were created for all sorts of Bee promotions and events, and the fellow became ubiquitous around the paper.
Scoopy is the only Disney-created character allowed to “work” outside of the Walt Disney Company, and still lives today throughout the pages of The Bee. He can be seen at events throughout the community, greeting children of all ages.
More pictures of “Scoopy” can be found here.
We’ve been in Modesto today, in the not yet blooming almond orchards, to place bees. Bright sunshine, but cold.
They seem to like their bees down there.
And although the bees don’t necessarily make it into the headlines these days, the alert reader can find a lot of information if she knows where to look.
Our beekeeper says, after having observed these columns for decades, that when there are less than 5 ads for bees at this time of the year, there are not enough bees around.
Joe Traynor, a beebroker further south in Bakersfield, wrote this in an email a few days ago:
“The bee situation is about the same as in past years: plenty of colonies (or hives), but a shortage of strong colonies. There are many good (strong) colonies, but also many weaker ones. Rental prices range from $120 to $190 per colony (about the same as last year). The price is usually (but not always) based on colony strength.”
In his article “The Game of Almond Pollination”, he very vividly describes the negotiations that are going on between beekeepers and almond growers these days. It may resemble “a high-stakes poker game”, as one of the beekeepers puts it, but if there are not enough bees around, the “game” can turn very serious very quickly.
Last Friday, I am peacefully driving into town with one of our beekeepers, when, suddenly, the car stops. “YOU SEE THAT?!!” I don’t. His arm shoots out and points at something on my side of the street. I see an old warehouse, some streetsigns, a little thicket of bare branches.
“Popcorn!”
He pulls out his phone to call his manager at the beeyard. And while I listen to their conversation – “One week from now, there will be popcorn all over the Valley!” – and take a closer look, the scene in front of my eyes begins to shift and the messy thicket of indistinct trees and bushes transforms into a wild almond tree with scattered, wide open, lily-white blossoms. Popcorn. Now I see it.
And I also begin to grasp the significance of it. Because this is what the life of the many people I have been meeting in California over the past year is revolving around. The almond blossom. The big dance. It is about to begin.
This is what happens if you leave it all to the spellchecker!
The quote appeared in a piece by Reuters about the decoding of the honeybee genome in 2006. Apparently, the autocorrect dutifully replaced all mentions of “the queen” with “Queen Elizabeth”, thus informing us about some yet unheard of capacities of the British monarch.
Thanks to Radiolab for referring to this beautiful typo in “Oops. Stories of unintended consequences” and to Craig Silverman for gracefully preserving it on Regret the Error.
