Wednesday the 24th of October adds quite nicely to the blog about 'Another day at the office'. My activities of the day revolved around bees, GIS, and lions. I admit that this sounds slightly random for an office day at Elephants Alive.
We wanted to harvest a small amount of honey from the beehives that are currently stored close by the office. We went to the bees in the early morning so they were slightly less active. To collect honey you have to open beehives, which seriously aggravates the bees. You basically open their home with 1) the queen which their world revolves around and they protect at all costs, and 2) their precious honey. When you disturb them severely enough, you trigger a full attack response where practically all bees come out of the hive to repel you with hundreds of stings. It depends on the personality of a beehive (yes, all hives are different!) how fast you get such a response. Needless to say, you don't open a beehive without protection. So off we went, Ronny, Robin, and I, fully suited with our astronaut-like suits to minimize the chance of getting stung.
At a hive, you smoke them a little bit to ‘calm’ them down (well, slightly). Then you work as quickly and professionally as you can to take the hive down, open it, check the frames for honey, remove some frames, and close the hive.. In the meantime, the bees get more and more aggressive, even those that you gently wipe off a surface to prevent them from getting squashed. At first, just twenty or so are around our heads, buzzing loud and bumping into us madly. Because stinging is lethal for the bee itself, they first try other measures to chase us away. But we didn't go away, so we triggered a heightened response. Hundreds of bees were buzzing around us, bumping into us and trying to sting us through our suits, which is (usually) not successful. Somehow though, a couple did get into some of our boots and managed to sting us a couple of times. Luckily, none of us is allergic to bee stings, so it's just uncomfortable.
In total, four frames of three different hives were collected. This is not very much, but we didn't want to take too much of them because the flowering season is just beginning. After collecting the frames, the real fun started. Some of the most aggressive bees followed us for a long time, and there were also some bees still on the frames that we were holding. So we kept on walking, gently brushing them off in the hope that they would leave us. As you get close to the office however, there are another two hives. These hives are not aggressive, but very interested in the honey frames that we were holding. So there I stood, in front of an office, holding frames with a fancy white bee suit on and some bees buzzing around me, waiting for someone to tell what to do next. By the way, it was quite hot and these suits don’t ventilate at all.
When we were all there, we put the four frames in a spinner and quickly took it inside the office without taking any bees along. There we opened the honey caps to allow the honey to come out, and started spinning the honey. Within minutes, we had a nice amount of thick golden liquid dripping down the walls of the spinner. From the spinner, the raw honey goes through two sieves and then straight into our container. The whole office came to our side to have a look, and a tiny taste of this beautiful fresh honey. Even though I am not a honey fan, this tastes amazing. (Keep an eye on the website of Elephants Alive, the honey will be sold in the future!) We quickly realized that it was not going to fit in our small container, and ended up with over four litres of honey from just this tiny harvest. This is a very good sign for phase two of the bee project (see blog ‘Another day at the office’), which includes selling honey jars.
However, the bees from the two hives near the office also smelled the amazing honey on our side of the office, and miraculously found areas to enter the office. It started with a few which we gently tried to take outside, but their numbers slowly increased. We decided to close the door to that side of the office so we wouldn’t be bothered by them too much on the other side. Ronny however didn’t really mind staying there because he kind of enjoyed the sound (remember they were not aggressive and protecting a queen, just after the honey). A call to the office took our minds of the bees quickly…
A lion had escaped from Greater Kruger and they had successfully darted it, but needed some more hands to carry it up the hill to the bakkie (pick-up truck). As our office was pretty close, they called us to ask if we wanted to help carry it. Of course we wanted that! Who would want to miss such an opportunity to get close to a lion? As we got there however, we found the lion at the bottom of a slope, and with our thin and slippery flip-flops most of us weren’t going to be of much help. Ronny did a great job helping them carry the lion on the flat part, but even he had to give up with his flip-flops on the slope. Luckily some more men had arrived, and with some grunts they managed to get the lion up the hill. It was lifted on the bakkie, and after quickly treating some cuts with disinfectant and taking some photos, they drove off. Thrilled with this exciting break, we returned to the office, where I worked on GIS for a few hours on the ‘safe side’ of the office.
On the other side of the office however, some hundred bees had slowly worked their way inside to get a taste of the delicious honey. Ronny must have been very cool headed to enjoy their company all this time. But since not everybody enjoys having so many bees around, and we didn’t want them to die in the office, we got into the bee evacuation phase of the day. As most of them were attracted to a high window that couldn’t be opened, Michelle had the brilliant idea to cover this window from the outside so they would be attracted to the light from the opened windows. So there we went again, bee suits still on (well, some of us) walking back and forth with a blanket between the most popular bee-windows. It worked perfectly, and bees came out from the open windows as quickly as the honey came out of the spinner that same morning. Luckily, this time I did have my phone with me to take pictures. I thought the scene was hilarious, and that some of the pictures would suit perfectly on a beautiful farmers painting.
The next morning the office was luckily still free of bees. We filled some honey jars to be tasted at meetings the same week, and proudly took them outside for a sunny photoshoot. What a success! The bee story continued the same afternoon, because we were asked to collect a swarm that had settled in a paper box just outside a restaurant. Can you imagine what we looked like while collecting that hive? And can you imagine the faces of the guests? This hive was very gentle and we easily collected them in a closed box. Semi-suited up, we put the box in back of the car, and after taking a photo of the situation we drove home.