Blowin' Smoke

If you've been around honey bee hives much, you know what a smoker is.

It's a tool that beekeepers use to inspect, manipulate or handle a hive. They smoke a hive to check the health of the colony, to add a little food, and to take a little honey. 

In a way, it's a form of "blowin' smoke" or a deception.

Moses Quinby of St. Johnsville, N.Y. invented the modern-day bee smoker in 1875. He created a firepot with bellows and a nozzle. Ancient Egyptians used pottery filled with smoldering cow dung to smoke the hives.  

Why smoke? Smoke calms the bees. It  masks the smell of the pheromone that the guard bees release to alert other bees of "trouble in River City." The bees smell the smoke and gorge on honey in preparation for The Big Move.

Survival instinct.

Pure and simple.

The result: mass confusion. And that leaves plenty of time for the beekeepers to go about their business.

As a child, I loved the old bee smoker that my father used to tend the hives. We marveled at the contraption that bellowed like an accordion and snorted puffs of smoke.  Sometimes my father would pump the bellows and teasingly blow smoke toward us. 

Today, over at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis, I watched bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey and assistant Elizabeth Frost smoke the hives and feed pollen to the bees.

They placed the smoker on a table and it kept blowing smoke. It curled into clouds and swirled into stripes and all I could think of was one word.

Art.

Pure and simple.