Fumble Bee

The CBRTI has many objectives, like spreading awareness about the role of bees in increasing crop yield (through planned pollination), and bee-keeping courses of varying durations.

I’m onto one such class, but have bunked the theory session for the day; half an hour with Wakode is education enough. The sprightly, goateed deputy director fills me in on the life and times of this social insect that would feature in a portrait of the Apidae family if they ever cared to take one. Interesting information, some of which I’ll present, as our epoch demands, in the form of easy-to-process factoids.

Bet you never knew about royal jelly—at least I didn’t. RJ, a gooey, white, highly nutritious liquid secreted by the hypopharyngeal glands of nurse bees, is a regular at the queen bees’ dining table, and accounts for their fecundity and size, among other attributes. Fellow jelly users—the secretion is credited with miraculous all-round rejuvenative properties—include, apparently, Margaret Thatcher.

We are aware of the queen bee’s reproductive capabilities, but what does one make of the life of drones? Exclusively created to mate, these guys flatline once the toogey-woogey is over, with their diddly-doos stuck inside the queen bee.

My meeting with Wakode is interrupted by his colleague Shivaji Desai. The practicals are on, he says. As we head out to the lawns of the complex, which are dotted with bee boxes, I ask him the obvious: Will they sting? Desai tells me that as long as one handles them in a calm manner, with sure hands, everything will be alright.

My course mates include all kinds— homemakers, retired folk, and a couple of youngsters. To be a bee-keeper, all you need is some time and conducive environs. The bee box is a squarish structure, with two prominent parts—the lower brood chamber, where the honey bees reside, with seven or eight frames for the bees to construct their combs, and the super chamber, a kind of attic used by them to store excess honey.

Desai takes off the top cover and lifts frame after frame, pointing out the social hierarchy in the hectic jumble of bees. Life goes on uninterrupted in the colony. A couple of my course mates follow suit. Finally, it is my turn, and my fingers are trembling. I also know that bees have this ability to sense erratic blood flow in a novice handler’s veins—among the many signals to go all out against him/her.

I consider giving up even before I’ve begun, but Desai wants me to have a go. I pump in some cotton-wool smoke through a rectangular slit on the side—the effluent supposedly numbs guard bees for a while—take off the top cover and force myself to lift a frame. And there I am, looming large over bulbous yellow and black bits of frenzied life, just like that alien spaceship did in Independence Day.

The buzz is louder, the pale yellow honey deposits inside the wax-walled hexagons are close enough to lick. There’s the buxom queen, there goes the indefatigable worker, and just look at that stingless, loser drone! Plus there’s pupae, larvae and all of nature’s jazz.

The attack begins all of a sudden, just when I’m scraping some wax off the second frame. A guard bee whizzes out of the colony, plunges its stinger into my palm, and then pops it right there. Even before I can sense the pain—a burning sensation around the area—a couple of other suicide bombers are scrambling out, seeking martyrdom.

‘‘Boss, now what?’’ I say feebly. Desai plucks a leaf from a plant and rubs it on my palm. Dying bees, he says, release a kind of chemical that helps others home in on the target. ‘‘The leaf’s smell should confuse them, but you better move away,’’ he adds.

I flee and park myself in a corner, deciding that all it takes to be a bee-keeper is, apart from the inclination, lots of practice to help establish that comfort level with the bees.

So what was Genghis Khan talking about then? Maybe, he was referring to rock bees, they are supposed to have a really bad attitude. At the same time, you could also consider the fact that, though the quote made for a fancy beginning to the article, the great Khan never uttered such a thing.