Made by Hand

by Mark Frauenfelder

Beekeeping for Dummies book

  A magnifying glass to see eggs

  So on a Saturday in late January 2009, I put Jane in the car, and we drove to Los Angeles Honey, the only beekeeping-supply store in the city. After taking an exit off the San Bernardino Freeway, I drove through a gritty industrial neighborhood of used auto parts warehouses, scrapyards, and metal recycling centers. In the gloomy drizzle the neighborhood looked like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. I saw a group of men on the side of the road with a pickup piled high with old TV sets, barbecue grills, and other cast-off detritus of the consumer age. One of them was handling a thick wad of cash, peeling off a few bills to purchase some items from a man who had a shopping cart loaded with stuff he’d probably scavenged from Dumpsters.

  So this is where all the stuff bought at Walmart that people no longer want ends up: It gets resold as scrap to street dealers and recycled into new raw materials, which are probably shipped back to China to be melted and repoured into shiny new toys packed in Styrofoam and sold back to us.

  I found Los Angeles Honey across the street from a muddy lot filled with teetering towers of old wooden pallets that men on forklifts were moving from place to place. I thought of Bertrand Russell’s definition of work in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness”: “Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

  DIY is mostly work of the first kind, but people find it to be pleasant. The guys moving the pallets probably don’t like their job, because they are being told to do it, rather than being self-directed. I liked putting together the components for my self-watering garden containers, but it was my idea to do it. If I had a job where I had to go all over town assembling garden containers because my boss told me to, I’m sure I’d start to loathe it.

  I parked in front of the beekeeping store, and Jane and I entered the small lobby area. We were the only customers, and I couldn’t see anyone behind the counter separating the lobby from the cavernous warehouse in the back. It was clean and well-lighted inside, a startling contrast to the grimy, haphazard, industrial hubbub outside. The warehouse had metal shelves stacked fastidiously with wooden beehive materials.

  Eventually a man appeared from behind one of the shelves at the far end of the warehouse. His orange-and-black-checked shirt, round belly, large-framed eyeglasses, thinning hair, and business-like demeanor gave him a distinctly beelike effect. I handed him my list of supplies. As he began collecting them from the shelves, I asked him a few questions.

  His name was Larry, and his father had started the business in 1957, when Los Angeles still had a lot of fruit orchards and people on the periphery of the city still had large enough lots to keep bees without alarming their neighbors. When lots were subdivided and people started living in condos and apartments, the demand for hives plummeted. That’s why, he said, one beekeeping-supply store really is sufficient for all of Los Angeles.

  But Larry explained that in the last year business had increased. He figured it was because people wanted to pitch in to increase bee populations devastated by colony collapse disorder, and because they were tired of sitting in front of a computer all day long and wanted to spend more time outside. I told him that he was describing me, and he finally cracked a slight grin. “When you spend a lot of time with bees,” he said, “you get to understand them. And that helps you begin to understand people.”

  He stacked my hive boxes (called supers) and other supplies on the countertop. “You have to attach the bottom cover to the bottom super,” he said.

  “How do I do that?” I asked him. Without answering, he went to the back, returning with four nails. He showed me where to put the nails, then handed them to me. I dropped the nails into the smoker so I wouldn’t lose them. I also bought a beekeeper’s outfit. I wanted to get one for Jane, too, but they didn’t carry child sizes (I didn’t bother asking for outfits that would fit Carla or Sarina as they’d already told me they didn’t want to get close to the bees). I carried everything to my car, taking two trips to do so, then strapped Jane into her booster seat and drove home with my supplies.

  DOMESTIC HARMONY COLLAPSE DISORDER

  Sometimes things just work out. Getting bees for my hive was one of them.

  When we moved from Tarzana to Studio City in the spring of 2009, I noticed that lots of bees were buzzing around the roof of our new home. On closer inspection, it became clear that they were flying in and out of a crack in the outer wall of the second floor. They’d set up a colony between the walls.

  When I told my friend Mark, a contractor whom we’d hired to do some remodeling, he told me he’d just finished a job in another part of town that had bees in the walls. They had hired an exterminator. When the poison gas was pumped into a hole in the wall, the thousands of bees in the colony had flapped their wings so vigorously that “it sounded like a 747,” he recalled. “I could feel the wind from ten feet away.” He said he felt sad for three days afterward.

  Fortunately, Kirk ran a humane bee-removal service. I e-mailed him in early March 2009, telling him about the infestation and that the housepainter we’d hired didn’t want to start painting until the bees were gone.

  Kirk replied: If they are in the wall, you have to dismantle that part of the house to cut them out. If they are trapped, it takes about six weeks to get them all out.

  I shot back: I’m willing to cut a hole in the exterior, but my wife won’t let me wait six weeks for them to come out. What should I do?

  Kirk: Well, to get them out, you have to remove the siding or whatever the outside is made of. If stucco or wood siding—very expensive, time intensive. Plus they are up high. Have you thought of a painter who isn’t afraid of bees? If you want, have the painter deduct what it would cost to paint that part, and I will trap out the bees and then paint that part, or you have to kill them, I guess.

  I really didn’t want to kill the bees. Sean, our housepainter, was a compassionate soul, so he wrapped himself in a makeshift bee-protection suit consisting of a dust mask, duct tape, and overalls. He painted the bee-infested area without getting stung. Now we didn’t have to rush, and Kirk could set up the bee trap without having to partially dismantle the house.

  Kirk arrived on a Friday in late March in his pickup truck. He donned his beekeeper’s suit, indelibly stained from years of contact with propolis, the plant-based resin bees use as a glue for maintaining their colonies. Then he climbed a ladder, caulking gun in hand, and patched up the crack the bees were using to fly in and out of the wall space. He sealed up the crack completely, except for a small hole. He plugged this hole with a matchbox-sized gizmo called a bee escape, which allows bees to travel in one direction (in this case, out of the house) but not the other direction (back inside).

  Kirk climbed down and pulled from his truck a white cardboard box about eighteen inches long and twelve inches wide and tall. It contained a “nuc” (pronounced “nuke,” short for nucleus), which is a starter hive containing eggs, pollen, worker bees, and a queen. It had come from a colony Kirk had removed the day before in Redondo Beach. He carried the nuc up the ladder and secured it next to the bee escape. The plan was that the bees in the wall would come out via the bee escape, then collect nectar, pollen, water, or whatever their assignment happened to be. When they tried to go back into the wall, the bee escape would stop them. They’d fly around in circles looking for an opening and would eventually enter the opening in the nuc box. Once inside, they’d discover the queen and switch allegiance to her.

  Kirk said he’d return in about a week and a half to remove the nuc.

  The day before he was scheduled to arrive, I told Carla that my hive was ready to be installed. Carla, who doesn’t like bugs of any kind, told me that she didn’t want the bees coming anywhere near the house, and especially not near the swimming pool.

 
; I argued that even if we didn’t have a hive, the canyon below us would be full of bees and that they’d be buzzing around our house all summer anyway.

  “But we’ll have more because of the hive,” she said. “How many bees are going to be in the hive, forty or fifty? ”

  “Forty or fifty?” I said. “Are you kidding? No, more like ten thousand.”

  “What!? We can’t have that many bees on our property! We’ll have swarms!”

  “No, we won’t,” I assured her. “We already have that colony on the roof, and they don’t bug us.”

  “That’s because they’re up so high that they won’t come down to bother us.”

  “But they need to come down to get nectar from the flowers and blossoms,” I said.

  “Oh, great. When are they going to do that?” she said.

  “Well, my point is that if they aren’t bugging us now, when they’re moved to a hive, away from the house, they won’t bug us, either.”

  “How do you know? How far away do they need to be? Have you researched it?” she said.

  I had to admit that I hadn’t.

  “I don’t want bees to ruin our summer by the pool! None of your friends’ wives would let them have bees.”

  “Please, just let me try,” I said. “If they cause a problem, I’ll get rid of them.”

  “I want the hive to be put in a place where there isn’t a problem to begin with.”

  “OK. When Kirk comes tomorrow to take the bees out of the trap, you can talk to him about where we should put the hive,” I said.

  Carla reluctantly agreed. We had established a truce—albeit an uneasy one—in the beehive war.

  The next day, as I was walking back to the house after tending to the chickens a little after 9 a.m., I saw Kirk pulling up in the driveway.

  “Howdy!” he said, getting out of the truck.

  “Hi, Kirk. Did we say 10 a.m.?”

  “I’m usually early,” he said. “Do you have your hive set up where you want it?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about that. My wife is concerned that the bees will pester her and the kids if the hive is too close. She’ll be here at ten or so.”

  “Well, then, let’s put the hive as far from the house as we can,” he said.

  I led him to the backyard, to the same area where I was keeping the chickens. “My idea,” I told him, “is to put the hive behind this bush, so if the bees fly toward our house, they’ll have to fly up and over the bush, keeping them up over everyone’s heads.”

  “OK,” Kirk said.

  “Will that work?” I asked.

  “It might.”

  I used a shovel to make a level spot in the sloped dirt, then laid a couple of pieces of lumber down as a platform for the hive. Kirk and I set the super box down, then walked back to the front of the house to get the nuc, hopefully full of the bees from our house walls.

  Kirk put on his beekeeping suit and told me to put mine on, too. As he was preparing to get the nuc box off the roof, I went in the house to put on my suit for the first time since trying it on for size at the store a couple of months earlier. When I came back out, Kirk was halfway up the ladder, holding a smoker in one hand. He lifted the lid to the nuc box and squeezed some smoke into it.

  “Yep,” he said, “there’s brood in there.” That meant that the bees were taking care of the new queen, so she could lay eggs. He replaced the lid.

  I held on to the ladder to keep it steady as he climbed down with the nuc box tucked under one arm. He handed it to me. The box was buzzing like a vibrating cell phone. A couple of dozen bees were frantically orbiting around my head and body. My senses were on high alert. I knew the bee suit would protect me, but my lizard brain was telling me to drop the box and run.

  It took a couple of minutes to carry the nuc box to the hive, and it was difficult to walk on the steep slope carrying a box of bees while wearing the beekeeper’s mask. At last, we reached the hive.

  “Now, lift off the top,” Kirk said. I thought he meant the top of the nuc box. When I took it off, a bunch of agitated bees shot out, circling wildly.

  Kirk stayed calm.

  “Put the lid back on. Take the top off the hive, and use your hive tool”—it looks something like a small crowbar—“to remove five frames.”

  I didn’t have my hive tool with me, so I had to go back into the house to get it. When I returned, I used it to lift out the frames. Kirk instructed me to lift the top of the nuc box, and he gave the bees a squirt of smoke, which immediately knocked them into a daze. The nuc box had five frames in it. They had combs on them, and hundreds of bees were crawling around them. I lifted the frames out and placed them in the hive box one at a time. The stupefying effect of the smoke began to wear off, and the bees started moving more frantically. The pitch of the buzzing went higher. I hurried to get the rest of the frames in.

  “When the bees get more active like that,” Kirk said, “it’s natural for you to want to move quickly. But it’s the time for you to slow down. We’re in no hurry.” I followed his advice and finished transferring the frames at a normal pace. I put the lid on, and we walked back to the house to have a cup of tea and a snack.

  We’d been sitting at the kitchen table for a few minutes when Carla arrived. It was about ten-thirty. She said hello and asked how things were going.

  “We got the bees into the hive,” I told her.

  “Oh, really?” she said, her back turned to us, putting dishes into the dishwasher. Kirk didn’t notice the hint of sharpness in her question but, being her husband, I instantly knew she wasn’t happy that we’d already populated the hive without waiting for her to OK the location.

  Kirk stayed around a little longer, setting up another nuc box on the roof to capture more bees—apparently, the colony living in the walls of our house was large. When he left, I went back into the kitchen, where Carla was cleaning up.

  “Is everything OK?” I asked hopefully.

  Carla turned. “You were supposed to wait until I came back before you put the beehive down.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “He got here early, but I talked to him about the best place to put the hive, and he said the spot I picked was a good one.”

  “Show me.”

  I led her outside, past the pool, past the chicken coop, to the bush at the far end of the yard.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “They’ll be flying all around the pool.”

  “No, they won’t,” I said.

  “How do you know?” she said.

  And then we had the same argument as before, only a little more loudly.

  BEES IN THE BELFRY

  One evening not long after Kirk’s visit, the family gathered upstairs to watch a movie. Sarina pointed out that the recessed lights in the ceiling weren’t as bright as usual.

  “I think there are bees in them,” she said.

  I was about to blurt out, “That’s impossible,” but lately so many things had been going wrong with our bees and chickens (the coyotes had started snacking on the hens at this point) that I kept my mouth shut and peered up at the glass light enclosures in the ceiling.

  Sure enough, they were filled with dead bees. That meant that the colony that had taken up residence in our walls was also in the space between the roof and the ceiling. In fact, one of the glass cups was so packed with bees that they were blocking out the light from the bulb entirely. We called off the movie, and I sent everyone downstairs while I removed the glass cups and got rid of the bees (which were all dead, presumably from the heat of the bulbs). There were thousands of them all over the floor. I had to empty the Dustbuster a few times to get them all.

  Carla made a gagging sound and turned her head in disgust when I brought down a glass cup full of dead bees.

  “This is horrible,” she said. “Our house is filled with bees. I thought you and Kirk had taken care of the problem.”

  “I thought we had, too,” I said meekly. What else could I say? Between this and the chicke
n deaths, I was flunking animal husbandry. “I’ll call Kirk and ask him what to do next.”

  “Are they going to make a hole in the wall and swarm through?” said Carla.

  “No,” I said. “They can’t chew a hole through the wall.” I sounded more confident than I felt—at this point, I felt like I didn’t know anything about bees.

  I e-mailed Kirk, and he said he’d come by to check things out. In the meantime, I’d been checking on the bees in the hive out back, and they didn’t seem to be doing very well. The ones from the five honeycombed frames that Kirk and I had added to the hive seemed to be ignoring all of the other frames: They were devoid of comb. Once again, I e-mailed Kirk and asked him what was happening. He replied: Hey Mark, it has been a bad year for honey. Not much going on. You should maybe feed them. But let me come over and help set it up. It is ant season.

  Ants are a natural enemy of bees.

  Kirk said he’d come over and inspect my hive when the Backwards Beekeepers club met at my house. In late August, more than fifty people showed up for the meeting, and while Carla served snacks to everyone and I manned the espresso machine, Kirk donned his bee suit and went out to peek at my hive. He returned with bad news. The entire colony, or what had been left of it, had absconded. The hive was completely empty. Kirk wasn’t exactly sure why the bees had left, but he thought I ought to try feeding my next batch of bees sugar water as a way of encouraging them to stick around.

  “Meet me at the Solano Community Garden in Chinatown on Thursday, and we’ll get you some more bees.”

  I was frustrated that my bees had left in search of better accommodations, especially on the heels of my chicken die-off. But I reminded myself that every chicken keeper I’d met had lost chickens to predators or illness, and that several other people in the bee club had lost their bees. Losing animals, as sad as it might be, is part of the homesteading experience. My job, I decided, was to get better at it to keep those losses to a minimum.