Every bee colony has a Queen, and mine are both named: Queen Maggie, and Queen LaFonda.
Queen Maggie rules hive #1, installed in the Spring of 2011. She got her name from my dear friend Peggy. Here’s the story: Peggy retired early from corporate PR for a high-tech company, a year or so earlier. At the time, I asked her what she was going to do with her “every day is Saturday” new life.
She said she was going to write another book, maybe using a nom de plume – Maggie Gossett. I tucked away this bit of knowledge. When I later (like a couple years later) talked to Peggy about the beekeeping adventure, she asked me – and you have to imagine her voice, which is low and Southern and charming – “are you gonna name the Queen?”
Of course, the Queen is Maggie. We saw her once. She’s a “marked Queen,” meaning she has a painted dot on her that indicates what year she was born. Hers is pink. A 2011 Queen.
This year, the plan for hive #2 was to “capture a swarm,” rather than buying another package of bees. It’s much more adventuresome. You keep a few things in the back of your car, at all times. A banker’s box with lid. A white sheet. A saw. Your bee suit and gloves.
Then, when you find out about a swarm (yes there are swarm hotlines and email blasts everywhere there are beekeepers), you go to that place, put down the sheet, cut off the branch with the glob of bees, drop it into the box, put the lid on the box, drive it home, and dump those bees into the empty hive.
That’s how it works in theory, anyway. I got lucky because I know The Bee Guru – but I’m getting ahead of the story.
So Julie and Claire come out to paint the second beehive (see “The Painting of the Hives.”) Claire emails me ahead of her visit, to inform me that we should name the new queen “LaFonda,” and the new king “Kip.” (If you’ve seen Napoleon Dynamite, you get this.)
I told her that beehives don’t have kings, but that LaFonda sounds great.
We paint the hives, the girls go back to the East Coast for the rest of the school year, and I await my swarm. One day, in early June, Gregg calls: He just captured a swarm in downtown Denver, at 18th & Wazee. “It’s huge,” he hollered into the phone. “Probably 20,000 bees!”
So when I say I got lucky – I mean that Gregg did the capture, came over, and dumped the bees into hive #2. I wasn’t even there! Talk about service
The bees in LaFonda’s colony are bigger, blacker than yellow, and significantly …. less docile, shall we say? … than Queen Maggie’s bees.
And no, they don’t mess with each other, even though they’re a few feet apart. It’s a pheromone thing. The bees in hive #1 know to stay there, and the bees in hive #2 know to stay in their digs. If one were to wander into the other’s territory, they’d be swiftly dealt with.
Long live Queens Maggie & LaFonda!