RIVER WATCHER: When bees fly free

Down by the riverside on a sunny day in early February, I was exulting in the first almond blossoms, as was a contingent of honey bees!

There had been a profusion of warm days in January, some that had hit the high 50s, and although honey bees can frolic forth from the hive in that range of temperatures, there were few flowering plants from whence they could extract nectar.

Like well-timed traffic lights, nature's timetable generally is so geared as to be in conjunction with the needs of other organisms. Anything out of synchronization spells trouble for simultaneous expectations! A drought and a lack of blossoms is bad news for bees ... and for the proliferation of colonizing seeds.

I burrowed into the canopy of almond blossoms ... to get the full force of their fragrance and flowering beauty, and being among the petals and a pantry of pollens also put me among the honeybees.

I was nose to nose with the bees, but have no fear; the bees were focused on finding nectar, and the snooping human was of little concern. The flowers advertise flamboyantly for insect help!

It's really revealing to see a bee in a magnifier. They are hairy little buzzers, dusted with yellow specks of pollen as they weave from blossom to blossom, spreading pollen particles of life as if in joyous jubilation, but keeping some stuffed in their leg baskets for use in the hive.

The stuff that some think causes sneezes is carried back to home base, emptied into the waiting jaws of workers who tamp it in some of the cells, and then later mix it with processed honey to feed fellow bees.

Such love and devotion! The nectar becomes super charged in the field bee's stomachs, passed from mouth to mouth, and always, a certain portion goes into cells for storage.

There is super conservation as if a super conservationist committee decides on the disposition of dwindling resources when weather extremes stop their foraging.

Probably a scout bee had reported the opening of the almond, and the field bees had embarked, like some military battalion plunging into the great unknown.

I wondered where their home base was located, as traditionally their range is only about two miles. Maybe they had a colony in a hollow tree, as one swarm adopted the hole in our oak tree at the Feather River Nature Center one year.

Usually the hive is a manmade box tended by a beekeeper. The controlled units are a valuable aid in orchards when the bloom is on, and the thefts of hives in Butte County in recent times places a hardship on the rancher. Nut production is controlled by pollination, and there aren't enough wild bees of other species to cover the large orchards.

As I gazed at the beautiful golden Apis mellifera, I marveled at their many abilities to keep a complex social structure in order. Is it the "they-know-without-knowing-they-know function" that accounts for the ingenious hexagonal wax cells they mold into large sheets? Is it built-in information that directs the hive location, the central disposition of a queen in each colony, the nourishment of the larvae, the foraging of the field workers, the cell cleaners, the water carriers, the guards? Or are they under the command of an unseen Director?

We study them, analyze the body, theorize over their organization, but still we are not into the brain and spirit of the animal itself, just as we are kept separated from the minds of all animals. The mind is a private thing!

"There was an Old Man in a tree,

Who was horribly bored by a bee;

When they said, 'Does it buzz?'

He replied, 'Yes, it does!

It's a regular brute of a bee!'"

— Edward Lear