Science of bees

On front-porch of a vintage Coast Guard section on Appledore Island, seven miles from the southern coastline of Maine, Thomas Seeley and I also sat close to 6, 000 quietly buzzing bees. Seeley wore a giant pair of silver earphones over a beige baseball cap, a wild fringe of tresses blowing out the back; alongside him was a video clip digital camera installed on a tripod. In the right hand, Seeley held a branch with a lapel microphone taped into end. He was tracking the honeybee swarm huddling ins away on a board nailed on top of a post.

Seeley, a biologist from Cornell University, had cut a notch from the center for the board and inserted a tiny screened box known as a queen cage. It housed just one honeybee queen, along side some attendants. The woman royal aroma acted like a magnet on the swarm.

Basically had come across this swarm spread across my back door, I would personally have panicked. But here, sitting alongside Seeley, I felt a strange calm. The insects thrummed with their own company. They travelled past our faces. They got caught within our hair, pulled on their own free and kept flying. They performedn’t also mind when Seeley gently swept away the very best layer of bees to check the ones underneath. He softly recited a poem by William Butler Yeats:

I am going to occur and go today, and head to Innisfree,
And a little cabin build indeed there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows can I have here, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

A walkie-talkie from the porch railway chirped.

“Pink bee-headed your way, ” said Kirk Visscher, an entomologist at the University of Ca, Riverside. Seeley, his look fixed regarding the swarm, discovered the walkie-talkie together with left hand and brought it to their lips.

“We delay with bated air, ” he said.

“Sorry?” Visscher stated.

“Breath. Bated. Over.” Seeley put the walkie-talkie right back on the train without using their eyes from the bees.