California girls

-Posted by Isaac

On Wednesday I was driving up the hills that rise above the big Central Valley. Heading back to Oakland. Here’s California for you:

Beautiful, but somewhat crowded. Progressive, high powered, running on $4.00 gas, virtue signaling from the hilltops.

Also full of almond trees. And colorful people.

This is my almond broker, Denise Qualls. She’s the one handling all the logistics of getting the bees into and out of the orchards. I met her years ago at a bee conference and then saw her on Dan Rather’s show. (15 minutes in.)

She’s famous!

After our first meeting, I coincidentally bought an extractor from her more infamous brother. She laughs at that. They like to trash talk each other in an, I-admire-you-but-you’ll-never-know-it sort of way. I had to laugh at her bright pink (never used) suit, the way she trashed her brother’s bees… the fact that we were all in California looking for work… a Houndmouth song called Sedona came to mind. And I was happy to let that song bounce around my brain the next three days.

On Monday, sporting her pretty new suit, Denise took a few minutes to help me dust some probiotic. Of course she was enamored with my own pretty suit.

She said the bees weren’t too shabby either.

By the look of things, those California temps have suited our girls just fine. To respond to Amanda R., yes the bees are doing wonderfully. Probably 80% of the hives looked like the four above. The next 15% still looked strong enough to make an 8-frame grade, just not bursting. And of course, there’s always a few that just won’t make the cut. A drag on society. But that’s the way it goes, Denise says. In fact, it’s usually over 10% that really fade, she tells me. So our girls are not faring too awful, comparatively.

Every hive got about a pound of protein.

Which took the most time of all the jobs. Every top box had to be lifted, set aside, the bees smoked down. Aside from those few minutes with Denise, it was only me out there. For two and a half days, I hustled. You can see my rental car ‘work truck’ in the background.

I loaded the trunk with 400 pounds of protein, bought from a local bee supply store. This stuff was 15% actual pollen.

Which is supposed to stimulate the brood rearing to a greater extent than the artificial pollen supplement I’ve been feeding since August.

I think they needed it. Although most hives looked big and strong as far as population, there was very little brood rearing. And no natural pollen coming in. Apparently our girls still knew it was January.

One thing I didn’t need to worry about was feeding syrup. There was still plenty of honey weight.

No risk of starvation. Those top boxes felt like lead bricks… my back knows. In the above picture you can see another beekeeper’s hives in the background. That guy was from Oregon.

In fact back at my hotel, I discovered that the place was saturated with beekeepers.

This was in Turlock, a small town south of Modesto. Basically ground zero for almond pollination.

We’re only three weeks from bloom! Our girls will soon find a purpose in all this moving and shuffling, sweat and travel.

It was a quick trip for me, but I’m going to squeeze two posts from it. Next week I’d like to tell you a little about the almond industry. From my beekeeping standpoint.

And you can bet it won’t fit the narrative…

(Ya flipped the script! Ya shot the plot!)