Whether it’s waiting at a long TSA line at the airport hoping we won’t miss the flight, or standing by the phone for the doctor to say the scans all look good … patience is something we all struggle with.
How many of you remember this Nestle Quick commercial from when you were a kid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfKvwd2hkIg
I would say that most of us, especially as we grew up … the word “patient” wasn’t necessarily celebrated in our vocabulary. And somewhere between when I was a kid to where we are now, the world has been turning faster and faster and patience has all but disappeared. Perhaps there’s something to be learned from when life was a bit slower and you had no choice but to let things cool down before you reacted.
As a young lad, I would get a comic book for a birthday or another special occasion. Now I have to admit, I wasn’t a comic book type of kid, but I remember looking at the back page, drooling all over the nifty items and gadgets that could only be had through mail order…things like sea monsters (which actually turned out to be brine shrimp), x-ray vision glasses (which did a better job of making you blind), an all sorts of other magical items like growing rocks, which did work. Once I scraped enough money together, I would have my mom send a check through snail mail and then I patiently and I mean patiently waited, waited and waited some more. Back in the 1970’s, it was normal to wait 8-12 weeks for delivery whether you ordered Don Ho’s Hawaiian greatest hits box set, or Popeil’s pocket fisherman. Today, you can order those x-ray glasses and have them delivered from Amazon in a matter of hours. Instant gratification without pondering … is this really such a great thing? Do I really need x-ray vision, or Don Ho’s greatest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V58lYBvygI) hits instantly? There isn’t even time for buyer’s remorse.
Mail order was a great way to learn patience as a kid, and so was glue. You all know what I’m talking about. Whether you were working on a model airplane or gluing paper together for an art project, patience was needed for the glue to “set,” meaning we had to wait some more. And what if you didn’t? Well, the wheels of your model car would fall off, roll off the table’s edge, and right under the kitchen stove only to be found when mom started cooking. The smell of melting plastic filled the kitchen.
Today we are all about “now.” Every ounce of patience that we learned from the past has all but disappeared.
We don’t need to wait to see a movie, we can see it now on OnDemand. We don’t wait to have a delivery; we have Amazon Prime. We don’t have to wait for a meal, we have more fast-food places that we can count on to fill our demanding bellies of feed me NOW.
So, what does beekeeping have to do with patience? Well, like that glue that seemed to take hours to dry, Mother Nature sets the pace. We need to work with her timetable and understand the cycle of the bees, or it could be costly.
Let me explain. Even as I’m up here talking about learning patience as a kid, I had a moment just like that Nestle Quick Bunny of freaking out. It was an odd week back in late May. I had several swarms that as much as I tried… I simply could not prevent them.
Knowing a new queen was going to take 16 days to emerge, and then another week to 10 days for her to start laying, I counted the days till I did my inspection and searched for eggs. To my disappointment, I had about 6 queenless hives. Not a single egg anywhere. How could this be, and right at the beginning of the nectar flow to make matters worse? My honey season is going to be a total bust. I felt I had no choice but to fix the situation and without delay. We can do that nowadays you know… the good old days are gone with waiting 8-12 weeks for a delivery. I can get a queen in hours in the form of Dave. In desperation, I called him and told him my dilemma. We immediately went into planning mode. When will you have them … can we meet in Warrenville … how many do you need? Yipes! That much. Do I get a friend discount?
Patience … what patience?
However, between that call, and my normal life obligations, liking having a job to pay for my wife’s pedicures and mortgage, we never met up. And that’s where patience came back into play, and it was a good thing. I’ve played this queen less game before and have been on the wrong side of the “fix” by acquiring a queen only to find eggs present at my next visit when installing her. And now I must deal with a new situation of having an extra queen and no more equipment. Ugg!
So, like letting the glue set, I decided to wait and go to work to save my job. Plus the cost of 6 queens at $35 a head was pretty hard for me to swallow. But I did right, all but 1 of those hives had eggs or capped brood on the next inspection. And what about that last hive, they had eggs a week later. Patience prevailed!