Intimidated by the many choices in the slim catalogue, I ordered the beginner’s kit. After all, I was a beginner. It contained a hive box, lids, base and frames, together with thick gauntlet gloves and that hat and veil from the photo in that vintage book. A hive tool and a bee brush rounded out the kit. I eagerly awaited the shipment.
When the large box arrived from North Carolina, I spread the contents all out on the floor of my humble chicken coop and began to assemble the pieces. Traditionally hive boxes are painted white; I went with a deep barn-red. I wanted my hives to have a bit more style, and I had a can left over from painting the outside of my house.
Also in the supply catalogue were advertisements for bee suppliers. These were bee farms located in the southern states that grew large colonies of bees and shipped them north for beekeepers. I had my pick of suppliers from Alabama, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia. All were a great distance from my home, but I choose a firm from Texas. I called up and placed an order for a box of Italian bees, a subspecies of honeybees. Carniolan are another subspecies of the honeybee used commonly in beekeeping, but I decided to go with Italian bees because of the familiarity of their name.
The first box of bees arrived in relatively good condition. A percentage of the bees were dead, but there were still many live bees in the box. The three-pound box that the bees are shipped in is fairly small—six inches by eight inches by fifteen—and contains around three thousand bees. The two longest sides are open, covered with tight mesh to keep the bees in but allow air to freely circulate. The other four sides are made of low-quality wood, similar to old food crates. Within the sealed box is a smaller, much smaller, box containing the queen. The bees are also given a tin can filled with sugar water to feed them on their journey north.
Once I received the bees I proceeded to install them into my freshly painted hive. I had read the books, spent time on setting up the hive and now I was ready to suit up and start raising bees.
I failed. It was a cool spring that very first year and I got the bees out of the box and onto the hive, but I couldn’t put the covering lid of the hive on because the bees had not quickly entered the hive. Sadly, it began to rain that afternoon. Cool and rainy, not good bee weather. Fearful of putting the lid on their apparently delicate bodies, I left the lid off. My first decision in beekeeping turned out to be one of my worst. The next morning I returned to the hive to find the bees all dead from the rain and cold. I would have to start over quickly.
I made more calls to the southern suppliers and found one in Alabama that still had bees for sale and would ship them to me. I eagerly awaited their arrival.
Luck would not be on my side on my second attempt of that first year either. I got a call from the post office informing me that they had my bees, but as it was late on a Saturday, they would not be coming out to Vashon Island for two more days. I had the option of driving in to the main post office, then termed the Terminal Annex, to pick up my charges. Located in the industrial neighborhood south of downtown Seattle, the terminal was a low long concrete building astride the railroad tracks. Although it processed a majority of the mail for the center of the city, it still felt like a remnant of an era of large brown canvas mailbags and carts with large steel wheels plying the concrete docks surrounding the building. I headed down to the building and scurried up to the loading dock, eventually finding someone who knew where the package was located. Although the bees were well sealed in their box and then covered with a bag, the postal workers were generally afraid of the parcel and left it on one of those high-wheeled carts at the end of the loading dock. I ventured over, found it and was immediately saddened. The box was lifeless, no noise, no activity. On the floor of the wooden box was a pile of dead bees: dead from the heat, dead from the cold, dead from the transport from Alabama. In an effort to salvage something from the purchase, I was able to quickly show the postal workers that the bees were dead and collect something from the insurance. My first year of beekeeping consisted of a pile of dead bees at the farm, a pile of dead bees at the post office and a brand-new hive sitting in the yard, looking very empty. I would begin anew with the next spring a year later.
The second year proved a tad more successful but was still a failure. The bees made it to the farm, managed to colonize my hive and lived through the year. Not a drop of honey, but still I was hooked, convinced that I could make a go of this. I liked the wardrobe, the simple design of the wooden boxes, the smell of the beeswax foundations.
It would take a few years to get the basic skills necessary to keep a hive alive through the spring, into the summer, so that I could capture some of the honey produced. Once I achieved that level of success and tasted the result, the honey, all of the setbacks and lessons were worth it.
Fresh, local honey is an amazing product. Not sticky, not cloyingly sweet, full of delicate flavors. When I harvest the honey early in the summer it is light in color and light in flavor, simple, the product of bees on clover and spring flowers. By late summer the honey is dark brown, thick, complex and tastes of madrona trees and late flowers. Since that first year of success, I have kept hives every year. I have never been too successful, but have always harvested enough honey for myself and my friends. In a good year, gallons of honey fill plastic pails; in the lean years, a scant single bucket has to suffice.
Over the years I have slowly learned about the lives of bees. Primarily, I enjoy beekeeping because I will never understand it completely. Keeping bees is a task that is at first glance simple. With a bit of luck and some understanding of bee culture, you can be successful, notwithstanding the shipping of bees across the nation. In those first few seasons, I thought that I understood the colonies in my hives. I now know that I will spend my life with these small insects, never fully understanding their behavior, and yet I will always know enough to head out to the bee yard for another season.
A beehive is complex but organized. A few basic ideas: There are three types of bees—the queens, the workers and the drones. Queens and workers are females, drones are males. Each hive has one queen, the rest are mostly workers and a small percentage are drones. The queen lays eggs for future generations, the workers tend to the queen, leave the hive for food, make the honey, guard the hive, create the honeycomb and keep the colony clean. The drones do essentially nothing except mooch off of the colony. The drones’ one and only task is to fertilize the queen. Only one drone gets this job, but without a male on hand to fertilize the queen, no eggs would be laid and the bees would die. This task takes at most a few minutes and is performed once per season, but the rest of their lives the drones drain the hives of their productivity. Beehives are most certainly a matriarchal society; males have very little role. I wonder if the workers are bitter at the arrangement: spending their days working tirelessly so that the larger, plumper drones can eat the wealth of their labor.
The queen is the largest bee of the colony physically and in presence. Nearly twice as long as the worker bee and slow to move, she will spend her life gently moving from cell to cell depositing eggs into the hexagonal cavities, the workers sealing the cells, feeding them and caring for the young bees. On a good summer day she will lay two thousand eggs.
The essence of the beekeeper’s task is to provide the colony with a physical hive, the structure for growing their colony in the most efficient way. Wooden boxes, open on the top and bottom, form the outer dimensions of the hive. Within these simple four walls are hung nine or ten frames: simple flat panels, the outer framework of wood, the center made of thin beeswax, pressed in with the indentation of the bees’ hexagonal form. Each box resembles a hanging file folder common in a modern office, the frames resting on the upper edge of the wooden box; the frames can be moved freely back and forth across the width of the box until the full complement of frames fills the hive box.
The top and bottom of each box is finished with a wooden base, the top with a series of lids to keep the bees in, the weather out. Along the bottom where the wooden box meets the ba
se, a space is allowed for the bees to come and go, while larger creatures are kept out.
Bees are most particular beings. Their size is standardized. Unlike a pig or a cow or a dog, one bee varies very little from the next. In twenty days they reach full size and stay that way. This uniformity allowed early hive designers to create a hive with precise sizing, based on the measurement unit of bee space. Bee space is the amount of room needed for a bee to move through; larger than that volume and the bees will begin to fill in the area with wax and propolis until the space is back to their liking.
Once the beekeeper has provided a space for the colony, assured them of ample food in the form of sugar water if the weather and flora do not cooperate, then the bees will flourish. Through the spring and early summer months the bees will grow their colony; the queen will lay thousands of eggs, and those eggs will hatch into thousands of worker bees, all destined to collect pollen for the creation of honey.
At this stage beekeeping sounds like a great altruistic enterprise: create a perfect environment for these lovely insects to prosper. Sadly for the bees, altruism is not the goal of the beekeeper. Honey is the goal. The strategy for the beekeeper is to create a lovely home for the bees so that they will produce great volumes of honey, then to steal the honey and trick them into thinking that they need to create even more honey.
Honey is the bees’ way of preserving the bounty of summer, much like the way we create cheese or jam or wine. They know that their only way of living through the cold and bleakness of winter is through the stockpiling of honey in the warm months of summer when the flowers are blooming. During the darkness of December they eat their stored honey for nourishment. Instinctively they are pushed to produce as much honey as possible to keep their colony alive. We capitalize on their industry. In a well-managed hive, the honey is removed regularly and replaced with empty beeswax frames, which pushes the bees to produce more and more honey.
Is it cruel? I don’t think so. It is simply part of the social contract that we enter into with the bees. We provide for them, guarantee their survival through the year and in return we receive a part of the product of their labor. If I didn’t love honey so much I would reflect more on the injustice of it all.
When the bees have filled a number of the frames with honey, capping them to seal them with beeswax, I can then go in and remove the entire set of frames to extract the honey. Entering a hive filled with bees is a delicate matter. I have little fear of bees. It is an essential trait needed to keep bees. A friend of mine wanted bees for years and finally started a small hive a couple of years ago. He loved the idea of beekeeping, certainly loved the honey and appreciated the concept of keeping bees. He was, sadly, not comfortable with the actual bees. His foray into beekeeping lasted a quick season. He would bundle himself up in layers of protection, gloves, hats, veils, tight shirts, and venture out to the bee yard. I think that they sensed his trepidation, his fear. They were most inhospitable to him. It was not a relationship destined to continue.
I enjoy bees, love to watch them. I often find myself on a warm summer day standing next to the hive, watching the bees fly in and out of the long slender opening at the base of the hive. I know what they are doing—flying to patches of flowers to harvest pollen to bring back to the colony—but I wonder if they know what they are doing. How can they possibly communicate with the hive as a whole? The queen is the center of the hive, but she really doesn’t run the hive; she spends her days laying eggs. How do the bees pass on information? How do they make decisions?
The beekeeper’s year is a relatively flat line with two, maybe three peaks—in a good year, four. The most exciting task involved with the keeping of bees is their installation in the spring. After those first couple of years ordering bees by mail from the southern states, I found a much better and more successful system. A small beekeeping supply store opened up an hour from my home. Their well-designed service involves driving a large panel truck down to California every spring and picking up hundreds of boxes of bees, then quickly driving them back up the coast to their eager customers. The bees always arrive in mint condition and it’s a rare chance for beekeeping hobbyists to meet each other.
The date of arrival tends to fall on April 15. Easy to remember: the excitement of new bees, the dread of filling out tax forms. I order the bees weeks ahead and look forward to that date throughout the overcast early spring weeks. Once the bees arrive, flowers will bloom, the skies will clear and the pastures will grow again. It might not happen quite on schedule, but the hopes can be centered on one date: April 15 it is.
I order four boxes each year, enough for a season of plenty. Each year I have found that there is uneven success among the colonies. Inevitably one will do tremendously well, two adequately and one will be quite disappointing and produce no honey. Having four colonies spreads the risk well.
Before the drive to pick up the bees, I ready the hives for the new arrivals. I clean the boxes, stands and lids, scrape and repaint if necessary. I mow the lawn underneath and around the eventual placement of the stands; once the bees arrive, running the loud mower past them seems like taunting. By the end of the summer, long blades of errant grass surround the hives, the disorder of the exterior contrasting with the strict order of the interior of the hive boxes.
Once I return to the farm, the long drive behind me, I am giddy with excitement and anticipation. I love this next hour; I wait all year for this time. I love to share this quick show with friends. It is a short performance, but full of drama. Everyone who is lucky enough to be at the farm for this afternoon gets immediately hooked; they order their own bees from their cell phones that afternoon or they pledge to start their apiary the next spring. Bees draw you in with their simplicity and their complexity, the mystery behind how their world operates.
I ready all the parts necessary: the bees in their boxes await on the back gate of the pickup truck, and the hives are already in their places, empty and waiting. I bring the tools from the toolshed: the hat and veil, the canvas gauntlet gloves, the smoker, the hive tool, a small scrap of cedar shake, matches, paper, twigs.
The challenge in the quest for honey, in my opinion, is the lighting of the smoker. Bees have a weak trait that keepers can exploit to their advantage. Bees recognize smoke in their hives as indicative of a serious danger to the future of the hive and immediately gorge themselves on the honey in their stores. Their vision, I suspect, is that they will need an ample amount of honey to start their new lives in a reborn hive after the fire. When they are full with honey, they have little desire or ability to contest the human invasion of their home. The smoke calms them and makes them uninterested in stinging, or at least less interested in stinging.
The tool used to smoke a beehive has changed little if at all in the hundred-plus years since its invention. A small cylindrical metal chamber holds the fire, a small wooden bellows with leather or false leather providing the hinges of the bellows. The action of pumping the bellows sends a stream of air into the base of the fire, keeping it lit, the smoke exiting from a spout at the top of the smoker.
Building a fire is straightforward—any Boy Scout can do it. The trick here is to keep a slow fire, lit for an hour, but never letting it burn with any intensity. I’m looking for a source of smoke, not a source of heat. I build a small tight fire in the bottom of the can, get it started well and then cover it with a bit of dried grass. The fire will smolder a bit, the grass will filter the smoke and cool it off a bit and the bellows will provide enough air to keep the fire lit. I worry about the fire dying while I am working with the bees; as the smoker tapers off I imagine the bees springing to life and seeking vengeance on me.
Once the fire is well enough established, I begin to assemble the equipment and my kit. The hat is a sad white plastic interpretation of a muslin-covered safari hat, the thin veil draped over the top, a long string line pulling the veil together around the neck. I pull the string tight, tie a knot that will secure the veil well and yet leave a bow
easy to disentangle if bees find their way into the interior of the space created around my face by the gossamer veil. A trapped bee, unable to find her way out, buzzing inches from your face, makes even a calm man shudder, hands quickly pulling at the string to release the prison that is the hat.
The gloves are elbow-length thick canvas: gauntlets. Regal in styling, they seem out of place with the plastic safari hat, cracked and soiled from years of use. They are thick enough to keep the stinger of a bee from piercing the skin with any depth, yet still thin enough to allow adequate movement.
In my side pocket is kept a hive tool: a small metal blade, eight inches long, an inch wide, with a tight bend on one end for prying and lifting, a sharpened edge on the other for invading tight spaces. This bar is a lever to open and pry and pull at the frames of bees stuck in the center of the hive boxes. Even with the clumsy gloves, it makes for dexterous handling.
The basic uniform I wear is always the same: long pants with tight legs, long-sleeved shirt with tight arms and high collar. Early on I began a habit of always wearing the same shirt. A white cotton Oxford-cloth button-down shirt, it fits the bill in many regards. It is white, the color of coolness and calm, it is never as warm as a dark black fabric. It is made of cotton: cotton is a plant, familiar and unthreatening to bees; wool is of an animal and potentially a sign of aggression to the bees. It is also the same shirt that I have worn for years. The bees may be different every season, but I hope that they recognize me through this shirt. It is rarely if ever washed and most certainly has had no perfumes or cologne near it. I did make a tremendous mistake one early season. It was a bit chilly out when I went to check on the bees and wore a polar fleece jacket instead of the usual white oxford. The bees initially just checked out the jacket, but as the first guard bees landed on it their barbed feet got tangled in the fine hooked fabric. They let out some kind of bee alert, and when more came out to check on their sisters, they too got stuck in the fleece. In a few minutes I was covered with angry stuck bees, trying to sting me, attempting to release themselves, calling for more assistance. I dropped what I was doing quickly, ran through the pasture, trying to remove the pullover as I tumbled down the hill to the house, my arms and neck being stung repeatedly. The white button-down has sufficed since.
Growing a Farmer Page 5
