Farm Stand Marfa

FARM STAND MARFA NEWSLETTER OCT 24

MARFA GARDEN DIARIES
Bee Journal Sept 19

The September day was sunny and warm. The West Texas sky wrapped around us.  Clouds loped through the blue canopy.  I was riding in the honey truck with Wilborn Elliott, the local beekeeper.  We were headed to his new bee yard, one he had just set up the week before.

To work the hives, the sun had to be shining.  “Can’t disturb the hives on a cold cloudy day, when they’re all huddled up inside,” Wilborn told me. “ Got to work them, when the sun is warm and the workers are out looking for nectar.”

The warmth of the day made Wilborn happy. “Everybody likes the cooled down fall weather. But I like it hot, need a warm spell to get the nectar flowing in the flower.”

Two thumb-sized wooden boxes, each one holding a mail-order queen and a few worker bees to keep her company, sat between us on the truck seat. Wilborn kept fussing with the boxes, covering and uncovering them with an old hat that shielded the bees from the hot afternoon sun.

“I have to get the mail order queens to the divide quick, because a good vigorous divide- they’ll start developing a queen right off and won’t accept these Italian queens I’m bringing.”

We were traveling fast on the narrow farm road 169. “I’ve been riding this road most my life,” Wilborn said. “It’s the way to Casa Piedre where my mother bought a little place in ’44.  Goes all the way through the northwest end of Big Bend Ranch. Comes out at the River Road just 8 miles from Presidio.”

The River Road is more than a road.  It runs along the Rio Grande, the watery border between Texas and Mexico. “That River Road is something,” Wilborn told me.  “Years ago I would get up on a high point and look down into the river.  If the water was real clear I could see a big old catfish swimming.  I don’t know about now.  That was back then when I was living on the ranch.  I sold it in ’93 moved to east edge of Marfa.”

Ranches, miles and miles apart, flew by us.  Wilborn was anxious to get the queens to the new hives. The high grasses growing in moist spots along the fences were a blur.  Every time Wilborn worried with covering the mail-order queens, the truck wandered onto the shoulder.  Never slowing, he grinned playfully, rode the shoulder a ways and angled the truck back onto the blacktop.

We did slow down at the patches of Whitebrush we passed to see if they were in bloom.  He knew where every stand of the bee brush grew along the Casa Peidra road. “There’s some blooming!”  We shouted gleefully as we passed the shrubs waving branches of tiny white flowers at us.

We stopped to inspect the Whitebrush for honeybees.  “There’s a few working the bloom,” Wilborn said proudly.  No time to linger, we climbed back into the truck and roared off to the hives.

“Last week I was at my place watching the sky. I saw a cloud down Casa Piedra way.  I was bored so I got in the truck to come down here and see where it was falling. It was coming a good rain about 22 miles from Marfa, closer to town than my other boxes on down at the windmill.

Little creeks were getting big and running over the road. I knew this meant Whitebrush would come on blooming in about 10 days.  So I asked the ranchers around here if I could put a few boxes of bees out.”

We arrived at the entrance to the Godbold Ranch where Wilborn had been given permission to put some bee boxes.  I opened the gate and Wilborn drove through a mud hole full of water.  Mud holes with water are a welcome sign in the desert- indicators of recent rains.  Winding our way through the ranch to the hives, Wilborn admired the pastureland.  “They had the mesquite pulled up years ago and doesn’t look like there’s been any grazing.  This sure is good.  Look there’s grasses everywhere and up the sides of the hills.”

Four small white boxes in a line seemed to be waiting for us.  “These 4 frame nucs aren’t mean.  Maybe they’ll make a good colony next year.  Of course they’ll be Africanized then and half assed mean.”

All of us in West Texas know about the legendary African honeybee, a vigorous worker and fierce defender of its hives. Not too long ago, about ten years, West Texas honey was produced solely by the European honeybee that had been brought to Virginia colony around 1622. The East African honeybee, Apis mellifera scutellata, arrived in Brazil in the mid-1950s and has been traveling north slowly ever since.  The African bees have bred with the European bees, creating a hybrid insect so aggressive that hives have to be kept at least two miles from a home.  Fortunately, these Africanized swarms are not likely to wander much further north because they don’t like the cold.

“Better to suit up,” he said.  As I pulled the bee suit over my boots and clothes and tucked and zipped everything up tight, Wilborn told me about his run-in with the established hives further south.

“Last Tuesday I went down to the hives at the windmill going to Casa Piedra to make these divides.  Whitebrush was in full bloom along the road.  But it was chilly and cloudy.  I tell you them bees came out mad as a wet hen.  I wasn’t suited up I just had a veil on and it was open.  I don’t think I smoked them enough.

I had to run for the pickup. They got in my veil and got me around the eyes, the nose and the back of the head.  After I killed about 50 of them I went back out and finished my work. One eye was still shut yesterday Friday.”

I examined Wilborn’s face, “Yeah,” I said, “You look a little one-eyed.”  Wilborn suited up too.

“I took 4 combs out of a good hive, one with honey and one with bee bread, that’s pollen.  What they raise the brood on. Took a little nuclei away.  Shook a little honey on that brood.  Put them in an empty box, stopped it up with socks and moved them up here.”

Once we were in our suits, we gathered small dried sticks of the creosote bush lying on the ground to burn in the smoker.  First Wilborn stuffed the smoker, a small hand-held can with a bellows, with bits of torn burlap.  Once he had a fire going, we snapped the creosote sticks into pieces and fed the tiny flames. We walked over to the hives in a cloud of smoke and approached them from their back sides.  Guard bees manned the front of the hives.

Wilborn removed the roof from the first box and lifted out a frame. He studied the comb for brood, young bees about to hatch.  The frame crawled with nurse bees and workers.

“I’ll have to look for the cells they’re building to make a new queen and cut them out, so they don’t kill the mail-order queen.”

We found a few new queen cells in the process of being built. Wilborn cut them off with his pocketknife.  They looked like tiny wax bread ovens.

“This kind of divide should have been done the first of September but I wasn’t thinking right,” he explained.  “They need bloom to survive.  I was waiting for the fall rain, but it was light.”

It takes a queen 12 days to hatch, 5 days to mate and 18 days before her eggs hatch.  “We’d be into wintertime by then,” Wilborn said.  “For eleven seventy-five a piece I get an Italian queen in the mail.  Introduce her.  In 8-10 days she’ll be fat on honey and pollen and she’ll start laying because they come already mated, artificially inseminated.  I tell you,” he said shaking his head, “what kind of business is that.  You can’t tell me one raised natural isn’t better.  But I’m in a hurry to let the bees work the Whitebrush that’ll be blooming and to beat the winter.”

Once Wilborn had checked all the frames, he spaced them evenly in the box. He was suited but ungloved.  Bees buzzed all around him. Some landed on him.  Only one stung his hand. When he was ready to insert the mail-order queen box, I handed him one of the little boxes.  He positioned it at the top of the hive box between two frames.  When it was secure, he used a marking pin to write the date on the edge of the frame.  Then we moved to the next hive and repeated the process.

Back in the truck and driving home, Wilborn talked about his grandfather who had taught his mother and him the bee business. “My granddad used to buy queens years ago for a dollar and a half.  They wouldn’t do anything. He’d go and kill them and start drawing some from his better hives to make his own queens.”

“When will we come back?” I wanted to know.

“It’ll take several days before the bees eat the sugar plug stopping up the entrance to the mail order box.  By then they’ll be used to the new queen’s smell and will hopefully accept her.  Then she’ll be their queen and start laying right away. In a few days, I’ll bring them syrup (watered down honey) to eat.  There might not be enough bloom for them to feed on.  They’ll be needing some syrup”

At the border patrol check a few miles outside of Marfa we slowed to a stop. “We’re both US citizens,” Wilborn told the young border patrol agent.  “We’ve been down at the bee yard putting in some queens!”

“You have?” The young man said and smiled at us.  “Ok, then.” He waved us on.

As we pulled away slowly, Wilborn turned his head to me. He was laughing. “God damn,” he drawled.  “What else would we be doing!”

Still, we drove away feeling as if we had gotten away with something – just introducing some mail order artificially inseminated Italian queens to a bunch of Africanized Italian bees living in the Chihuahuan Desert not far from the Mexican border.