Unwanted Visitors

We’re selling the house.  Or I should say, we’re trying to sell the house – it’s been on the market for two years.  There are regular viewings and a number of offers have been made, but we haven’t got the price we’re asking for.  We’re not in a hurry.  I think the main issue is that it’s an unusual house – we like quirky and odd, but most people don’t.  They see it and like the idea and then go and buy a characterless box on a new-build estate.  There are regular viewings and Harry has gotten used to seeing people he doesn’t know traipsing through his kingdom.  There is the occasional problem when people bring their kids with them and naturally they look at his toys (read: dinosaurs) or make a comment about a poster on the wall.  Or one time when they were wearing a t-shirt that he liked and he stared at them none-stop for 30 minutes.  We love him dearly, but he’s no salesman.

It made me think about how the bees deal with visitors to their hives.  It’s been a bad year for wasps.  Or a good year for them, but a bad year for anyone who doesn’t like wasps.  Even at the beginning of the year wasps were in the hive – I’d pull off the super and there’d be at least a couple in there somewhere, feasting on nectar.  There’d be some argy bargy at the entrance of the hive, but once inside the wasps would be left alone – it being too much hassle for the bees to through them out.  A strong hive can defend itself, but a strong hive doesn’t need to go to war to conserve the resources a couple of wasps will finch off them. 

But not all hives are strong – sometimes purposely.  Beekeepers use mini-nucs to raise new queens.  This is a small hive, probably made up of just a couple of hundred bees (usually a cup full) that are used to tend to a queen cell.  The benefit is that fewer resources are taken away from the hive, but the downside is they can’t really defend themselves.  This year my mini-nuc was a disaster.  Wasps quickly found its location, although I made their life as difficult as I could the mini-nuc couldn’t defend itself – its reserves were plundered and the bees were left with nothing.  The queen hatched, but the colony absconded – it wouldn’t have lasted long on its own, but it thought its chances better than staying put.

After the initial argy bargy, Harry usually lets the people get on doing what they want.  He knows what they’re going to do and knows the path of least resistance is to let them get on with it and then they’ll leave.  I hope that means we’re a strong hive.