Day 6: Bees!

Friday, May 18, 2012 

Those of us who were interested left at 8 am today for the bee trip, an excursion to a beekeeping institute outside of Prague. It was the first time I'd seen the train station.

Also the first time I'd ridden on the top floor of one of those double-decker trains.

We took the train from Prague, past a series of beautiful little towns, to the equally beautiful little town of Libčice (LEEB-chee-tseh).

From here, we walked under the train tracks (there were tiny black-and-white cliff swallows nesting underneath the overhang)...

And took a ferry, just barely big enough to carry everyone, over to the island where the bees are. 

The countryside was beautiful. 

The institute itself - I forget the full name, if I ever heard it - seems to be focused on bee breeding and research.

Our guide was an enthusiastic fountain of information about bees. We heard about the life spans of the workers (several weeks), queens (several months), and drones (an unspecified length of time until their fatal mating with a queen); the construction and division of labor within a hive; the division of hives (young queen stays in old hive, old queen takes half the bees to build a new one); the six things bees produce (wax, honey, royal jelly, venom, propylase - an antibacterial substance they use to coat their hives - and other bees); the reproduction of queens (they lay more than their body weight in eggs every day, hence the need for the concentrated protein in royal jelly); the production of honey (which is mostly dehydrated nectar)… It was fascinating. 

One of the most complicated parts was the selling of queens. Apparently, any bee in the hive can become a queen, depending on an extremely complex set of environmental conditions during her development. This isn't surprising, as all the workers that come from unfertilized eggs are sterile clones of the queen anyway. The queens will normally kill each other until there's only one left in a colony (except in the cases where the old queen takes half the colony off in a swarm to build a new one). However, beekeepers will take larvae out of the colony and raise them in little cups, carefully monitored in isolation, to produce whole groups of queens that they can sell to other beekeepers. (The pedigrees of queens and drones are carefully recorded.)

The usual method is to put the queen, eight or so attendant workers, and a few weeks' supply of food in a small cage and send it through the mail. Once the queen and her attendants arrive, introducing her to the beekeeper's other bees is a complex process of its own. 

One way is to put the new queen in a small cage within a preexisting colony. (Not the cages above, which are for raising queens to adulthood. I just liked the way they look.) This protects her from the more aggressive workers who would kill her for being a foreigner. The friendlier workers will feed her instead, until her smell and the colony's smell are mixed together, and it seems as if she belongs there. The beekeeper then opens the hive up and replaces the cage's cork with a cork made of sugar. After the hive is closed and the bees have calmed down again, they eat the sugar cork, and the new queen can come out to take her place in the colony. 

Ten percent of the time, one particularly xenophobic worker will still kill the queen at this point, but it works the other ninety percent. 

The other (somewhat more reliable) way is to isolate a group of workers somewhere. In a preexisting colony, the workers can recover from the loss of their old queen; they simply take the brood of larvae they already have and raise one of them to be the new queen. They don't need or want any fancy foreign royalty. An isolated group of workers, however, has no brood and therefore no hope for the future. They eventually become desperate enough to take any queen they can find. This allows the beekeeper to introduce a new queen and let her and the older workers start a new colony. 

The bees they keep at the institute have been specially bred to be friendly; they will actually let people pick them up and pet them. They flew around peacefully while Dalibor took their hive apart to show us the honey, the queen, and the larvae, and they stopped occasionally to rest on people's clothes before flying away again. Even the people who were nervous at first seemed to be completely comfortable around them by the end, and I was surprised at how many of us were comfortable with them right from the beginning.

The queens are marked with dots, color-coded to the year of their birth. This one was born in 2008, if I remember correctly.

After showing us the hives, our guide took one of the combs out and brought it to the centrifuge in the shed next door so that we could extract and taste the honey.

It was delicious. I've never been a huge fan of store-bought honey; I like it, but there's an odd sticky taste to it that I can only eat in small amounts. This, however, was like a mix of sugar and sunshine, light and clear with hardly any color or stickiness to it at all.

I didn't want to stop eating it.

At the end of the tour, we also got to sample honey chocolate and mead. Some of us loved the mead; others thought it tasted like cough syrup. I could taste the sweetness of the honey, but the revolting medicinal taste of the alcohol ruined it, as usual. Oh well. The chocolate was quite good, though. 

We had lunch at a tiny little food stand that seemed to be one of the only other buildings on the island. It was a little red-brown building next to the ferry stop.

They had apparently made a huge pot of guláš (beef and onion stew) in advance, and they served it to our group until it ran out, which took a long time. It was delicious - thick and meaty, faintly spicy, with slices of warm potato bread to soak it up. I went back for seconds. 

We found an insect of some sort on the ferry on the way back; it looked a bit like a miniature dobsonfly, black and flat-headed with black-veined wings like stained glass. Everyone gathered around to exclaim over it and take pictures of it sitting on my hand.

We missed the train by about three minutes, so we had lots of time to sit at the station and wait. I did a quick sketch of the tracks and the trees and cliffs around them. 

One of the other students saw me sketching and recommended the work of illustrator Syd Mead, particularly his elegant way of suggesting the shapes of trees; I will definitely have to look him up when I get the chance. I recommended Tony Cliff in return. 

We met several cats today - a calico at the beekeeping institute and a golden tabby with black paws at the train station. Both were large and plump and seemed to enjoy the adoring attention of a couple dozen college students an ocean away from our own cats, though I'm sure they couldn't understand a word we said.

The ride back was uneventful, though I took lots more pictures of the towns we passed...

The cliffs between them... 

Interesting bits of railroad and river engineering... 

And some of the more elaborate graffiti.