When I mention my beekeeping, people sometimes ask “how did you get started?” (and sometimes “In the name of God, why?!?”). I wish I had a story that shows that I'd had noble environmental intentions and coherent motivation. But honestly, I got into beekeeping in the same way I've made a lot of big decisions of life, love, career, and philosophy—by stumbling into them in an unfocused, whimsical, and alarmingly superficial manner.
When I think about it, most of those decisions turned out all right. Either there's method in my madness, or I've been pretty damned lucky. As a case study, here's how I stumbled into beekeeping.
Blame the shortcomings of ant farms for my introduction to beekeeping.
Remember ant farms? My several siblings and I got one as a present one year. At first it was fascinating, elbowing the others to get a better vantage point while watching the ants digging new tunnels through the virgin sand. Not much time passed, though, before the farm collectively became just another ignored and neglected pet. The tipping point came when the soil was thoroughly dug and the farm became a depressing existential hell filled with depressed and moping ants with absolutely no purpose in the world. Worse, their numbers slowly dwindled, as they died off one by one to be buried by the survivors—for reasons not fully explained—in the northeastern corner of the farm. When the farm got down to just one of the social insects listlessly pushing a clump of dirt pointlessly from point A to point B, it was more than a tender heart could bear.
The ideal would've been to have gotten a queen ant. They lay eggs so the colony wouldn't die out. They also have pheromones that keep an ant farm both motivated and populated. But ant suppliers don't provide queens and when digging up my own ants I never found a queen, so I finally gave up on ant farms.
Then, a decade after my last ant farm, I found something even better, something like an ant farm on steroids: a fully functioning observation beehive. The best part of it was that these bees looked happy and industrious, and I soon saw the reason: they had a queen. They had eggs and larvae. It was a working, thriving community that looked as if it were purposeful instead of tragic. I wanted one.
It was only a year or two later that I saw a newspaper feature about a local guy who built and sold observation hives. I called him up right away, drove to his house in San Francisco, and bought one. Well, the box anyway. No bees. He suggested finding a local beekeeper and asking to buy a couple of frames of bees and a queen. No problem.
With some effort, I found the name of a beekeeper. I had already arranged to keep the bees in the library of a small counterculture “hippie” school where I taught middle and high school students art, phys ed, history, film, and so on for a very modest wage. One snag: when I called him, he wouldn't sell me just a couple of frames. What he said made sense: “An observation hive is so small that it will be just barely self-sustaining. You'll probably need to add bees to it now and again, trade out old frames and add new ones full of larvae if you lose your queen, and so on.” He suggested I get a whole, standard beehive and use it to keep the observation hive going. “You might even get a little honey out of it,” he added.
“You might even get a
little honey out of it,”
he added.
This was getting more complicated than I'd intended. It wasn't like I really wanted to interact with bees. They scared me to death, actually. I'd just wanted to watch them from a vantage point that was safely behind Plexiglas.
In those pre-internet days, finding out what to do next wasn't that easy. I did what I usually did when confronted with a great unknown: I went to the library and found a book on the subject. Bolstered with book learning and absolutely no direct knowledge, I discovered that I could buy equipment and bees from the only retail establishment foolish enough to issue me a credit card, Sears, Roebuck & Co., back when it was a retail powerhouse. Besides its huge general catalog, it issued a dozen specialized ones, including Farm & Garden.
I was making $8,400 in 1980 and I'd already spent about $100 on an empty observation hive. A beekeeping starter kit, complete with a build-it-yourself hive body box, smoker, “sting-resistant” canvas gloves, book, and protective veil cost maybe $60, and three pounds of live bees with queen, another $30. This was becoming a very expensive whim, but I was halfway in and I couldn't quit because an empty observation hive would be as depressing as a dead ant farm.
Luckily, the kit came first. It gave me the chance to put everything together, read the book, try on the frighteningly flimsy gloves and the gap-prone veil. With it came a notification that the bees would arrive in a few weeks when the weather warmed up a bit. “No hurry,” I thought.
In 1980 a beekeeping
starter kit, complete
with a build-it-yourself
hive body box,
smoker, “sting-resistant”
canvas
gloves, book, and
protective veil cost
maybe $60.
Weeks passed. One morning, at 5:30 a.m., the phone rang, waking me from a sound sleep. The voice, shrill and loud, cut sharply through my drowsy fog. “This is the Berkeley Main Post Office. You have to come right away. There's a box full of bees over here. They're waking up and they're buzzing really loud.”
“Not exactly. But the box isn't secure and they could sting somebody. Get over here right away!”
I was mystified, but I grabbed my gloves and veil on the way out, just in case. Not that I really knew what I'd do if there were a problem. As instructed, I pulled around to the loading dock and explained why I was there. Looking relieved, the sole worker back there went inside and came out wearing gloves and gingerly holding the outer edges of a small wooden box. It was buzzing. The two largest sides were covered with screen and I could see a mass of bees inside hanging in a large mass. I noted that the screens were doubled in a way that the bees' stingers wouldn't reach, even if he were holding the box from the sides. I relaxed a bit.
The book laid out the steps for what to do from here. I had memorized them, not wanting to be paging through it later, covered by bees in my “sting-resistant” gloves. The next step was to put them into a cool, dark place until just before twilight. When I got to school I put them in a closet where the bees could rest, except during every class break when curious kids came in to sneak peeks at the buzzing, slowly writhing, mass.
I was excited. I was scared witless. I tried to imagine the next steps: gently reaching into the center of the mass and extracting the queen cage, a small screened box, removing the cork on one end, hanging it from one of the frames inside the hive, and then shaking and banging the box until all the bees had fallen into the hive. Put on the lid, put some grass in front of the hive opening, and walk away.
At the appointed time, I put on my gloves and veil and carried the box in both hands at arm's length up to the platform where the hive was already waiting. I was followed by a small group of curious friends and faculty members. They huddled some distance away as I went through the checklist of the next steps. (“Don't forget the cork!”)
With that kind of sitcom-like setup, you'd expect that everything would go disastrously wrong. Sorry to disappoint: As the sun went down, I followed the directions. Things went like clockwork. I remembered to remove the cork. I opened the box and the bees didn't fly away or sting me silly. I shook and jostled them into the hive and they spread over the frames, seemingly relieved to be home among beeswax again. I closed the lid, placed the dried grass in front of the entrance, and felt competent and brave and alive, like I was somehow home again as well.
The next day, things were fine. It was a warm, sunny day, and when I went up to the bee platform at lunchtime with some students, the bees were flying experimental flights out of the hive. Things looked good.
My sense of competence was short-lived, however, and I felt terrible about what happened next. My book-learned beekeeping somehow failed me, or maybe I didn't read far enough into the guidebook.
Not long after, the weather turned cool and wet again. One of my students hurried down from observing the bees to report that they were acting weird, climbing out of the hive and walking listlessly around on the deck. He reported that some seemed to be dead or dying. I climbed up to the platform and looked on helplessly for a few minutes, trying to understand. I began desperately paging through the disease sections of my reference books, wondering whether this was a sign of something like foul brood or deformed wing virus, or whether they'd been poisoned by the bee-unfriendly buck-eye trees nearby.
I opened the box and
the bees didn't fly
away or sting me silly.
I closed the lid, placed
the dried grass in
front of the entrance,
and felt competent
and brave and
alive . . .
It took a while, but I finally realized that they were starving. They were starting a colony from scratch and needed a lot of food to build the comb. The book recommended something I had skipped over: that they should be fed until they get established. They prefer honey, but can live on sugar water. When the cold wet snap hit, they were mostly housebound at a time when there was nothing in the cupboards.
Chastened, feeling like a helpless incompetent who shouldn't be allowed to supervise bees, or even school kids, I had to get back to class, so I put a few of my students to work.
Happy to miss a few minutes of their class for a worthy (or frankly, for any) cause, they mixed up some sugar water, one part hot water to one part sugar. We poured it into a feeder (basically an upside-down mason jar with nail holes pounded into its lid), and took it up to them. Even before we attached it to their hive, the bees smelled the sugar and began streaming excitedly to the jar. Most recovered from their lethargic stupor. Within a day, they had emptied the pint jar and were asking, “Please sir, may we have more?” We continued providing the sweet stuff until the weather cleared up for a long stretch and they began turning up their noses at it.
I'd like to be able to report that my new beehive quickly became a healthy, fully functioning hive that allowed me to finally do what I'd originally intended to do—set up an observation hive—but it turns out that it doesn't work that way. The bees had a lot of work to do before they'd even have a viable hive, much less be able to donate precious comb and bees to a new hive. It would be days, maybe weeks, before they'd build some of the comb deep enough for the queen to begin laying eggs. Those newly laid eggs would take another twenty-one days before they'd emerge as adult bees. During honey season, a bee may live only forty-two days, which means that a large percentage of the mail-order bees would be dead before the first batch of new bees would replace them.
In the best case, it was clear that by the time this hive would be able to donate combs to my observation hive, the school year and most of the honey season would be over. It became clear what I needed to do: buy another hive, one that was already established, healthy, and fully functional. It was time to call that beekeeper back and see if he'd sell me one of his beehives. The quest for an observation hive was becoming more and more expensive.
I had never even seen a fully functioning beehive before going to pick up my first one. The bemused beekeeper I'd talked to earlier agreed to sell me one. As instructed, I arrived at his home at sunset. Not that there was anything fly-by-night going on. In fact, the exact opposite was true: field bees don't fly by night, so waiting until dark makes sure you don't leave any behind.
Before my wife and I arrived, I was concerned about how I was going to move the hive fifteen miles to its new home at the school. I had already read a few bee books, so I knew that the pieces normally just stay together by the miracle of gravity, but that it's possible to bind them together to transport them. I was relieved to discover that the beekeeper had already done that. He had blocked the entrance with wood and tied the layers of the hive together with wires and straps.
In retrospect, I don't think I'd really thought the next part through too well. The beekeeper came out and looked dubiously at the vintage VW Bug in which we arrived. As much as I'd thought about the actual transporting, I had not really thought about how the VW was built. I had arrived with the vague expectation that a beehive would fit in the trunk but if it didn't quite fit we could put the hive in and tie the trunk shut. In a normal car, that would've probably worked, but in the excitement of buying a beehive and going to pick it up, I had forgotten two things: how very small the Bug's trunk is, and where it's located. It's in the front of the car because the engine is in the back, which means you can't just tie down the lid and still see where you're going.
My wife and I looked helplessly at the hive, at the car, at each other, and back at the hive. “What have I done?” I thought. “And what do we do now?” It was a nearly singular experience of excited helplessness (one I would experience again a few years later when we got home from the hospital and put our newborn baby on our bed and realized that neither one of us had any idea what to do next).
I checked the straps. They were tight. I listened to the bees. They seemed to be settling in for the night, not particularly excited or upset, but what did I know? I had had no experience with beehives and had only the thinnest veneer of book learnin' about them. But here we were in a VW Beetle, and there was only one place the bee-filled hive was going to fit. I put it in the backseat behind the driver's seat, strapped a seatbelt around it, checked the ties a few more times, and started the car, reviewing everything I could remember about the principles of “defensive driving” from driver's education a decade earlier.
I tried not to think of what would happen if we had an accident. I tried not to think about the fact that at the other end I'd have to carry the forty- or fifty-pound hive in the dark up a hillside path about 150 yards, then wrestle it ten steps up a ladder to a round platform—an abandoned attempt of years earlier at building a raised dome classroom—where the bees were slated to go.
Believe it or not, we made it. I got the hive in the proper place. I removed the straps and, eventually, the block of wood that sealed up the entrance, half expecting them to fly out and attack in the darkness. I even turned my flashlight off and listened for the sounds of angry, vengeful buzzing. When I didn't hear any, I climbed back down the ladder and returned with a handful of grass to leave in front of the opening. The idea, according to my books, is that the grass offers a visual cue to the bees that they're in a different place, so that they'll circle around, noticing the navigational details and reorient themselves to their new home. I still don't know if that's necessary, because I've never moved a hive without doing that. I still do it every time.
Bees, you may have learned, are dying from parasites and diseases more than ever. According a March 29, 2013 article in the New York Times, for decades it was considered normal for individual beekeepers to lose five to ten percent of their hives. Since the 1990s, though, that percentage began edging upward each year, and now beekeepers typically report that half or more of their hives are dying each year.
What's killing the bees? Everyone has their own pet theories, based partly on their own biases against certain things; and there's good reason to believe it's a combination of things: the constant moving of hives by commercial beekeepers; several diseases and parasites; and (according to many scientists and the European Union, which banned it) neonicotinoid insecticides.
However, everyone acknowledges one big cause, varroa mites, so destructive to bees that in 2000 it was even given a scary name as its scientific nomenclature: Varroa destructor.
V. destructor is a nasty bit of work and a fairly new one, believed to have evolved to its present state of destructiveness in the 1960s in the Philippines. The tiny pest, nearly invisible to the naked eye, spread across the world over the following decades leaving destruction in its wake.
It hitches rides from one colony to another by hopping from bee to bee. It bites into its host and sucks its blood, often jumping to a nurse bee when it gets to the hive, where it feasts and waits until a bee larva is about to be completely sealed up in its final stage of development into an adult. If they jump in too early, the mites can be discovered and removed, so they wait until the last second before making their move.
Sealed in with the helpless larva, multiple varroa mites feast, mate, and lay eggs. They make gashes on the larva's body, which act as a gateway for a number of parasites and diseases that usually prove fatal to the larva and, eventually, possibly to the entire hive.
What to do? Some large scale beekeepers say, “Nuke 'em with pesticides!” That worked for a short time, killing ninety-five percent of the mites. Unfortunately, the five percent that survived quickly became a population that is now immune to that pesticide. There aren't many pesticide alternatives left because most chemicals that kill mites will also kill bees.
There are hundreds
of native bee species
that do the same job
but have been mostly
crowded out of
settled areas by
domesticated honey
bees, in the same way
cattle has crowded
out elk and buffalo in
many places.
More natural methods that have been tried with claims of success include powdered sugar (the fine grain and cornstarch dislodge the mites from the adults), formic acid, essential herbal and citrus oils, increasing heat within the hive, increasing cold, and breeding “hygienic” bees that will pick the mites off each other and dispose of them outside. Weirdly, the last one may be the most likely successful method, and so some beekeepers don't treat their hives with anything at all, figuring that the most “hygienic” bees will be the ones that survive and eventually breed mite-resistant bee populations.
I hope that latter theory is true, and I see some evidence of an individual hive here and there being more resistant to damage than the hives on either side of it. I do not intend to resort to pesticides.
THE SMARTEST THING EINSTEIN NEVER SAID
Maybe you've heard this quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination—no more men.” There is no evidence that Einstein ever said this or anything like it. He was a physicist, not an entomologist, after all. The first known appearance of this “quotation” appeared in 1994, long after his death, in a pamphlet from French beekeepers demanding higher tariffs on foreign honeys.
It appears to be one of those quotes manufactured by activists and attached to a famous name to give it more credibility. It's sort of true. Many plants depend on bees to help pollinate them. But they don't have to be honey bees. There are hundreds of native bee species that do the same job but have been mostly crowded out of settled areas by domesticated honey bees, in the same way cattle has crowded out elk and buffalo in many places. Those native bees would likely make a comeback if all honey bees died, eventually doing the job of pollination.