I went for a walk
the other Sunday to stretch my legs with Scooter, my dog. Of all the possible routes
we could have taken, I decided to head for the town cemetery. I wanted to also
go looking for some stingless bees. The cemetery is a good place for this.
The older
mausoleums begin to deteriorate and crack, so it gives the bees a place to
enter the tombs. Most are small native stingless bees but occasionally you
might find a colony of Africanized bees.
I didn’t even
cover half of the cemetery. I found five colonies with four different
varieties, including one with Africanized bees.
The stingless
bees got a little upset when I tried to get some photos of them. They started
flying around and getting into my hair. They don’t sting but they do bite, sort
of like an ant. Bothersome.
I won’t touch
these bees, even though I would really like to have some of those stingless bee
colonies (those are on my “to do/to have” list). There’s enough other ways to
get bees, such as capturing swarms and splitting hives.
Stingless bee colonies in
the graves. One characteristic of many of them is the entrance tubes they make
with a combination of wax and propoleos.
And there’s
something that’s not quite right about entering a grave to get a colony of
bees. It doesn’t sit well with me (and probably with most people for that
matter). I’ve done it before, however, but at the request of the family.
Many a year
ago, a drunk guy pulled down the entrance plug of an old mausoleum in the town
cemetery, which had cracked all the way around. This tomb had to be more than
50 years old. A colony of Africanized bees had moved into it. He wanted a bit
of honey but instead got all stung up before high tailing it out of the
cemetery. He left empty handed.
I was contacted
to see if I could help. The colony had been causing problems anyways by
stinging people when they would go to clean around the graves. Now it was
opened.
It was a big
colony and the first comb was right in the entrance of the grave, forming a
wall of bees and wax that went from the top to the bottom. It was a bit bigger
than two deep frames in size. There were about five of these before I got to
the wooden casket. Some smaller combs continued over that.
Two Langstroth
boxes got filled with brood comb and bees. This old comb eventually got weeded
out as the bees filled frames with new comb. The honey got dumped.
It’s kind of
unnerving to go into a tomb but at times beekeepers are required to do this
type of community service. I won’t go looking for the family of this newest
mausoleum colony in order to ask them if I can remove it. But I suspect, if
they come looking for me, I’ll say yes.
The mausoleum with the
colony of Africanized bees. It looked like someone may have actually tried to
remove the bees since the entrance plug is loose. But since there is no marker
on the top part, maybe it’s empty—waiting to be filled.
Part of my plan
was to find that first mausoleum to see if it had bees again. It’s in the old
part of the cemetery, but I didn’t get that far. If I remember right, it got
cemented shut but maybe it’s cracked again. It will have to wait for my next
walk.
---Tom
A simple mausoleum in the
town cemetery. The stingless bees had their entrance tube coming out of the
upper left edge of the rounded plug for this grave.
An old grave in the cemetery, unusual for its shape. It
was the only one I saw like this. The marker had if dated in 1948.
Some graves are humbler,
marked with a simple wooden cross. Others have a small metal fence around the mausoleum
and shrubs or flowers planted.
For more posts
about my bee adventures in the cemetery, see these past entries:
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