View from the North 40: Honeybees are all the buzz

Now that I have a backsplash behind my stove and I’m not spending my time obsessively wiping grease splatters from my freshly painted wall as if I like to clean, I can think about things other than my own chaos, like bees.

Yes, bees. Honeybees, in fact.

I know. It’s exactly zero degrees out as I write this and who thinks of bees at this time of year in the northern tier of the U.S.? Beekeepers, that’s who, and a few cops in Massachusetts, but I’ve gotten ahead of myself mentioning that last bit because I need to say that this all started with a conversation with our bee guy about how bees survive the cold.

Basically, he said domestic honeybees keep warm through a buzzing-bee version of a dog pile.

Bees in a hive all huddle together, with the queen in the center of the crowd and all the worker bees vibrating their bodies to generate heat. They also shuffle their locations around — as the bees on the outside get cold, they vibrate their way to the inside of the pile, where they get hot enough to take their turn again out in the cold hinterlands of the cluster.

I mention this because I talked to our bee guy four weeks ago when the weather abruptly turned cold and he still had hives on our property. I’ve been a little preoccupied with my own chaos, but as the cold has persisted I keep thinking about those bees and, like always happens when our brains obsess about something, I notice bees everywhere.

Not literally, I haven’t seen honeybees at our house like I have a few remnants of fall’s box elder bug invasion, or the creepy wasp I saw sneaking across the floor of the shop, or the mosquito, yes, mosquito, I saw this week just hanging out in the shower like it was an invited guest at a winter resort hanging out in the sauna.

No, I’ve been stumbling across articles about creating bee-friendly yards, and see tips like: Don’t rake up all the old leaves in your yard because wild honeybees nest in the ground under the insulating leaves. Like I needed more encouragement to just let the yard work slide. “Sorry, I can’t rake. I’m saving the world’s food supply one bee habitat at a time.”

Then, while fact-checking someone’s social media meme, I read from several sources that worker honeybees only live maybe six weeks during the summer, and the entire life’s work of one bee is about 1/10 of a teaspoon of honey. Think about that the next time you’re grabbing up a big dollop of honey for your breakfast.

And a queen bee lays up to 2,000 eggs per day in the summer — 2,000 eggs, per day, for up to three years. If I could, I would insert a shocked-face emoji here because, honestly, I made that face when I read that fact — mouth dropped open and everything.

I knew one queen kept the hive supplied in workers and drones, but I had no idea it was 2,000 per day. No wonder all the other bees let her stay at the warm center of the winter huddle.

I thought a queen bee would be a little bit, I don’t know, “You there, drone, bring me tea and crumpets. Chop chop. Worker, bring my horse ’round, and when I get back from my ride among the peasants, I wish to see that my crown jewels are polished to a shine.”

“So typical of the world,” I once thought. The peasants work themselves to an early grave while royalty reaps the benefits and lives the long, cushy life, but a queen bee is no slouch.

“Busy as a bee” is a real thing.

In the face of all this, imagine my mortification when I read that a Massachusetts woman, angry about a friend getting evicted from his residence, used her honeybees to attack deputies who were serving the eviction notice.

Yeah, in the land of shootings, beatings and driving your vehicle into a crowd, Rorie Sussan Woods of Hadley, Massachusetts, rushed to her friend’s aid with a trailer load of bee hives. She tried to take the lids off the hives, eventually flipping a hive to the ground, all to get the bees to swarm the deputies. She even put on a beekeeper suit and carried a tower of bees to the front door of the home.

In an Oct. 20 article, Reuters has photos of Woods and deputies tussling over a hive, her waving around part of a broken lid, and finally her getting hauled away in handcuffs wearing her beekeeper gear. I can’t make this up.

Research in recent years has shown that bees play with toys and have feelings. I think Woods better hope those feelings don’t include revenge. They just might use their honey to hire some a gang of giant murder hornets to take her out of the beekeeping business for good.

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This is America, where, apparently, anything is possible at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .