Honey Bee Diva is the soul, template, and essence of the imprint of Spirit in the material world that creates the physical bee form. I believe in the Spirit; intelligent consciousness present in every form of matter. I can’t say I believe in Honey Bee Diva. Honey Bee Diva exists, believe it or not. If I lose you at the end of this paragraph, that’s fine. Listening to bees requires looking for a connection with Honey Bee Diva.
My first encounter with Bee Diva was in the late 1990s. For two years I lived in a simple one-bedroom annexe heated by a wood-burning stove, with no kitchen or indoor bathroom. During this time of grieving, I chose to act based solely on internal impulses. I ate when I was hungry, I slept when I was sleepy, I danced, I moved, I wrote poetry and I painted. During this time, a delightful iconic image entered my creative imagination. I call this iconic image Angel Bee. A series of eighteen small multimedia paintings by Angel Bees soon followed. These paintings will one day become a collection of note cards and posters. The paintings are dynamic, unique and playful images of a winged creature energetically communicating with a human ear.
Doing these little paintings brought my awareness to a place of deep listening to a new, exciting, unknown but compelling inner urge. Fifteen years later, this same quality of deep listening is evoked when I open my hive.
When my hands are doing an action that hurts a bee, the bee makes a howling buzz that, to my ears, clearly says “oh, you’re hurting me.” Guard bees have a specific buzz that accompanies an irritated foray into my bee veil, clearly communicating “watch out!” There is a sweet murmur of satisfaction in which the colony communicates that all is well; when this buzz is heard, the bees are calm and there is no need to smoke. When they are hungry and angry, the colony has another unique sound that lets me know that I need to offer supplemental food and be quick about it.
Enjoying this type of communication with thousands of insects is interesting.
The result of listening to my bees? The healthy parent colony, which overwintered, did not swarm. Three weeks after taking measurements based on bee listening, I have two strong colonies and one Nuc, all with laying queens. The one-year-old queen from the parent colony ended up in the core hive, which is just perfect. She’s been an overlapping queen since last fall and did an amazing job keeping her colony brood all winter, leading to a heavy colony build-up in early spring. She will be an excellent breeding queen and will be easy to work with confined to a happy core hive for a few more weeks.
This is all very curious and a bit magical too, which is fine. I hope to continue to listen to my honey bees instead of imposing my will as a means to achieve any particular goal. Since I first filled my bee pack last May, the honey bees were fed only sugar syrup containing a nutritional supplement along with a blend of essential oils: lemon balm, peppermint, tea tree, lavender. These bees are lucky enough to live in a true green sanctuary: acres and acres of pesticide-free foraging. Of course, I hope the girls make more honey this spring. The weather has been ideal for a generous flow of honey. We have had too little rain to delay the search for food; The days have been neither too hot nor too cold, so the bees don’t have to work as hard to maintain the best internal hive temperature of 93-94 degrees for their developing brood.
What’s the news from the colony this week? Unless they call me and advise me to do otherwise, I’ll leave the bees alone except to set up a few small hive beetle traps, offer supplemental feeding because they’re building a new comb, and wait another week before making a roll of Varroa sugar. and dusting with sugar so the new queens have a chance to settle in and find their egg-laying rhythm.
If you have had the experience of hearing and/or listening to your honey bees, please leave a comment and share your story!
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