Long Live The Queen!

And, as Ceridwen adds, "Happy and glorious long to rule over us!"

I went along to watch two friends inspect their hives and rearrange some of the boards that hold the honey combs. I was treated to some education about bees and bee-keeping. The afternoon light was perfect for taking pictures.

Here the one of the queens is surrounded by worker bees who are all facing her. She is a queen only because she was chosen for a diet of royal jelly. At birth she was just the same as every one of them --exactly as human "royal babies" are. She lays eggs and they put the eggs in the cavities, then they cover the eggs with food and a reddish mud that tucks them in as they gestate.

Just as with human royals, the workers sometimes decide that a particular queen needs to be ousted. But unlike humans, they always choose and make another queen to replace her. Thus we can see that bees are not French.

Kirk, the owner of this apiary does not harvest most of the honey it produces. He prefers to let the bees nourish themselves as Nature expects, but he does collect some for his own home. The labor and brain-muscle he has devoted to the project has been "to avoid senility," he says. Although I've seldom seen him since, Kirk was a member of the first Anarchist group I ever belonged to, about twenty-five years ago. He's a quiet, intellectual carpenter.

I tasted the honey. It's good honey!