Bee Warned!

Bee Gardens

The Wall Street Journal has just published an informative article on "bee gardens" and native pollinators (which the honeybee isn't, by the way—it's an import and an important import at that!). The associated video is worth checking out, too.

My one beef is that the article makes much of the "threat" of getting stung when attracting bees to the garden, going so far as to include a "sting pain index" for various types of bees. Honestly, getting stung by a nectaring bee is an absurdly overstated risk. Unless you are running around your garden like a maniac smacking down bees, they have much, much better things to do than mess with you.

It's a little like warning someone to be very, very careful about eating bananas due to the risk of slipping on the peel.

On Fear and Friendship

Beekeeping is an endless series of mysteries, at least for the beginner. The bees do this, the bees do that, the bees defy the books and articles about them. The bees are charismatic, creative, outspoken, enigmatic. They are predictable except when they aren’t. They are unpredictable within the context of a complex, ancient set of social and behavioral rules. They are ignoring you completely as they go about their business or watching you with an intensity you feel in the bones.

As you work the hive, the bees look at you with their eyes and you look at them with yours.

That’s the gist of what organic beekeeping guru Dee Lusby wrote in response to one of my many ignorant questions on the Organic Beekeeping listserv earlier this summer. I was commenting about how nervous it made me to have thousands of “agitated” bees “staring” up at me through the spaces between the top bars while I worked the hive. In response, Dee wrote something that changed my whole attitude toward spending time with the bees.

“Learn to enjoy the sweet little bees. You will do fine! They look at you with eyes and you look at them….Tak[e] frames up slow….[so] you can see their daily normal movements. By observing this daily normal movement and any deviations is how we learn to follow the bees and their needs to see if something is wrong. It’s also how we learn to pet our bees with fingers and play with them and eye them, and talk to them and enjoy!!!”

I went into beekeeping because of an affinity for honeybees, a love of insects and flowers, a desire to travel more deeply into the miracles of pollination and seasons and nectar flow and animal mind. And I looked forward to each opportunity to explore the hives for “inspections” (a clinical word that in the future I will replace with “visits”—as a bee visits a flower, I visit the hive.)

But also there was fear, and a not-knowing of the bees—an inability to interpret the many sights, sounds, and even smells of the hive. A difficulty realizing that the bees might simply be staring up at me out of interest, curiosity, or alertness rather than out of agitation or alarm. Of course, a welcoming bee-stance is something I have to earn through gentle, methodical, kind-hearted, well-informed beekeeping.

Now, when I open the hive and ever so slowly pry apart the top bars so I can pay my visit to the bees, I smile at all the little faces gazing up at me with an intelligence so intimate and remote it scrambles my brain. I look at them with my eyes; they look at me with their eyes. And then I speak to them, the sweet little bees. And learn to listen as they speak back.

Swarm Saga, Pt. 1 (I Take A Notion)

This is the story of how not to hive a swarm of bees.

Last week, on the Summer Solstice, the bees from both Hive Orange and Green Hive took to the road. One swarm left without saying goodbye, but I was lucky enough to get to see the other swarm take to the skies with a collective roar before landing in a small sumac in the bee yard.
The sumac was a temporary home for the bees whilst scouts went out in search of a better home—a nice, hollow tree or some other suitable spot to set up shop.

Seeing the swarming process was a thrill. Once settled in the tree, the bees became so quiet you wouldn't even know they were there. An astonishingly powerful force of nature, yet so vulnerable and humble.

Initially, my intention was simply to let them go their way and lend their numbers to the feral honeybee population. Several factors, including the bees' relatively accessible location, soon shifted my thinking toward the idea of trying to capture the swarm. I'd already ordered an extra hive body from my top bar hive supplier, though it hadn't yet arrived. That wasn't ideal, but with the new hive winging its way through the US postal system, I expected it in a matter of days. The notion of catching and keeping the bees in a temporary setup seemed to take on a life of its own. "Why not try it?" my local beekeeper said when I called to ask his advice, sealing my fate.

Somehow, catching a swarm seemed the next logical step in the beekeeping adventure. Plus, it sounds so damn cool: catching a swarm. Let's face it, in spite of all my deep ecology philosophizing, I share that horrible human urge to tinker with natural processes better left to their own devices.

By later that evening, I'd begun to think it might be possible to make it work. My intrepid friend Karen was visiting for the weekend and seemed game for the adventure. She took the shots below.

First thing the next morning (4 a.m., actually), Amateur Hour Carpentry had re-opened for business and there was duct tape, screen mesh (for ventilation), and corrugated cardboard everywhere. We built a temporary holding box for the bees and prepared to capture them. (The advice I'd received was to temporarily house the bees in a cardboard box with a separate, fitted lid—like the kind office paper comes in. But I didn't have one of those boxes and didn't want the swarm to up and disappear, so we created this initial holding pen out of an old fax machine package. Why catch a swarm of bees in just one step, when you can do it in three?!)

The calm euphoria before the decidedly non-euphoric storm. As you can see, the cluster was very quiet and subdued—no problem getting close without protective gear...so long as you don't bother them.

Spraying the cluster with sugar water to calm them before seriously bothering them.
The open box was placed under the cluster, the branch on which they'd gathered was inelegantly shaken, and bees fell by the hundreds into the box—and on my suit, and on the ground. By this time, there were many bees flying around in a rage—or was it a feeling of fear and betrayal?
The box of bees was closed...

The bee-brush Samba—an attempt to remove some of the bees trying to sting me through my jeans. Who could blame them?

Back in the shed, my bee suit removed, I have a delayed reaction to the self-inflicted trauma of being surrounded by thousands of flipped-out bees and decide that there's a bee on my neck that wants to kill me. I freak, but Karen assures me it's just a bit of torn cloth from my bandanna. She takes this picture to prove it, but for an hour or so I have paranoid delusions of bees crawling on me.

We rush to Office Max and buy a ream of paper in order to acquire the proper type of box. A minor drama ensues regarding the location of the recycled office paper (why do they make it hard to find that?!). Another small drama ensues about the time it takes to check out (forever!), though we are the only people in the cavernous store in a ghost-town of a mall for which acres of pasture were paved (and people wonder why all the pollinators are disappearing).

Finally, we're out of there and back to Amateur Hour Carpentry so the box can be screened for ventilation and entrance holes drilled to allow the bees to come and go (and forage) while we wait for the real hive to appear.

The bees are transferred into the new box.

And the box is placed on the same stand where the real hive will be located. Bees have very sensitive navigation equipment and would have trouble making the transition to the real hive if the location was suddenly changed.

Mission accomplished, we're feeling pretty good. Karen gives the bees some sugar water to cool them off and rejuvenate them a bit. We're both relieved that, after two transfers, the bees are now set up and can relax in their temp home. We're Swarm Catchers, and we're feelin' mighty fine!

Except for this....


To be continued....

This just in...

Single Bee Sends Gathering Of Humans Into Helpless Panic

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