Down on the Farm: Meeting her majesty

No, it wasn’t at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor Castle. Her name wasn’t Elizabeth, though I’m not sure she would have even told me her name if I had asked. It was, instead, in the blooming oregano patch on the west side of Farmstead Creamery. The sun was still shining, though the air had grown quite chilly — too cold for flying anymore that night.

For some unexpected reason, our blooming oregano has always been a favorite for the bees — both the honeybees over the 13-year period that we raised them on the farm and the myriad assortment of bumblebees that call the farm their home. There are big, fat, fuzzy ones; smaller, leaner ones; those with dark butts and those with rusty ones; those with a white stripe and those that are nearly all yellow. They come in droves for the purple oregano blooms, and when the temperatures drop too cold for flying anymore, they hunker down and sleep right on the blooms, waiting for morning.

I was on my way from harvesting in the aquaponics greenhouse, my bin full of freshly picked lettuce, when I stopped briefly to admire the bees. Having kept their cousins for so many years, I have a fondness rather than a fear for bees (not those nasty hornets and wasps). When bumbles are busy on the flowers, you can pet them and they don’t even care!

I was only stung once by a bumblebee, and that was when harvesting cut flowers early in the morning for farmer’s market. A dew-laden bee was asleep underneath a leaf, right where I grabbed the stem for plucking. Naturally, my hand was stung. I can’t blame her for stinging me; I was being careless and didn’t know she was there.

Bees don’t want to sting you. Hornets and wasps can sting again and again without any bother, as they have a smooth stinger, like a needle. Bees have a barbed stinger, like a harpoon, which means that they can only sting once — the stinger stays in you and pulls out of her body along with the venom sack, and she will soon die (the only exception is queens, who can sting repeatedly in order to fend off other queens and maintain their singular rule over the hive).

If a bee is busy out collecting nectar and pollen and feels no threat to her personal safety or the sanctity of the hive, she has no interest in stinging you. Therefore, the spectacle of literally hundreds of bees on the oregano was mesmerizing rather than terrorizing. I have a special affinity for the chubby bumblebees, which make flying look like half a miracle as they bob from bloom to bloom, sometimes running into obstacles along the way like tiny, winged pandas.

On this particular trek past the oregano patch, I spied an especially large bee —remarkably so compared to the others. I know that queen bees are always larger than the other members of the hive because of their advanced reproductive biology, but I was never quite as sure when looking at bumbles which might be a queen. In early spring, it’s likely the first you see flying about are queens. Unlike honeybees where the whole colony overwinters, only the queen bumblebee survives the cold months to start a new brood in the spring. This means they still have to be able to fly and forage — something a laying queen honeybee cannot do with her mammoth abdomen.

So what other than size alone led me to believe I was in the presence of a queen? The state of her thorax.

Here’s a little bee biology: There are three main parts to the body of a bee — the head (with its eyes and antennae), the thorax (the part to which the wings and legs are attached) and the abdomen (at the end of which is the stinger). When bees hatch from the hive, they are born with a completely fuzzy thorax. Visit your buzzing flowers and you’ll see bees with such fuzz between their wings. As a bee ages, however, the process of crawling in and out and around in the tight quarters of the hive gradually rubs off this fuzz.

Queen bees live significantly longer than worker bees or drones. A worker honeybee typically lives three weeks in the summertime, and she will produce one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey (and that is not a typo) in that lifetime. That is why you scrape out every last drop from that jar of honey! Queens, on the other hand, live years. That’s a whole lot more fuzz-rubbing time.

So here I was by the oregano, admiring this overly large and rotund bumble bee when I noticed her completely shiny black, fuzz-less thorax. For the first time with great certainty, I knew I was in the presence of bee royalty. I gingerly plucked the oregano so we could take some pictures and videos before returning her to the patch for her overnight camping pleasure. By the time I returned in the morning, the sun had warmed the bees and they were all flying again. There was no sign of the queen. She was off on her duties, her appearance complete.

Would you like to have peaceful adventures with bees like this one? Plant flowers the bees will like (oregano, bee balm, clovers), let your dandelions bloom in the spring (they are a critical source of pollen for the baby bees) and refrain from spraying or fogging your yard. Not only do such practices kill annoying insects, they are also deadly to many beneficial insects. We need our bees, so be kind to them, and maybe you too will have a chance to meet her majesty. See you down on the farm sometime.