I Was Stung Once, by Jason Streed

Reprinted here with kind permission from the author, is an essay I relished and am delighted to to share. Thanks, Sam, for bringing this gem my attention. The photo below is titled "Bee Yard, Jan 1979," and shows the hives kept by Sam and Jason's dad. Location: Near Mount Vernon, Iowa.
I WAS STUNG ONCE

I was stung once, but only once, in the five-plus years my father kept bees. I was ten, and my face was at most three feet from a swarm clustered on a sapling. Bees are fairly docile when swarming, so the problem wasn't my location but my reaction to an errant bee landing on my cheek. I slapped it, even though I knew better, and it stung me. Then I panicked and ran, even though I knew better, until my dad stopped me and scraped out the stinger. I was fine by the next morning, of course, and had no hard feelings toward the poor creature who had died in the act of stinging.

There were no real dangers in living so close to so many bees—my tree house was fifty feet from at least 20 hives. Instead, sharing that space offered rare pleasures, privileges I hope to earn again one day.

The most obvious was the abundance of excellent honey. We had gallons of it—more than our family could ever enjoy, even though we enjoyed honey more than most. Dad sold some, and we gave much of it away as a gift. Relations, friends, teachers, and bus drivers were at least annually given beautiful, dusky, amber quarts of a honey that in some years united the tang of alfalfa and the smooth sweetness of clover. In our basement were sometimes scores of gallon milk jugs full of it. (The last harvest from those hives was, I think, in 1983; I finished the last jar I had from that year in 2001.)

Another pleasure was the extraction of the honey and comb from the hives. I was never involved in bringing the honeycomb in from the hives, but I sometimes helped, while my patience held, in the removal of the honey itself. My mind will always carry the gleam of the stainless steel centrifugal extractor; the aroma of honeycomb yielding in the warming tub; the taste of a mouthful of honey-laden comb straight from the hive; and the hum of bees flying confused circles in our garage as the sun went down.

All around the culture of beekeeping is an air of humility before these small creatures. The life of the hive is extraordinarily complex, and every beekeeping book I've ever read is quick to point out how apiculture often becomes about much more than maximizing honeyflow. Even a straightforward introduction to the discipline like Keeping Bees is full of passages like the following, about getting acquainted with a newly-acquired bees:

Once they've had a cup or two syrup, they'll be happy and you can play around with them for a bit to get used to having bees in your life. A little familiarity will eliminate the fear we all have of stinging insects.

Pour a puddle of syrup through the screen and shake some bees into it. . . . Watch their little tongues go at the syrup. Touch the feet and antenna of bees crawling inside the cage wire. They can't sting through the wire. Blow on a cluster and see what it does. Poke a broom straw through the wire and into the bees. Stir them gently. Fast movement will meet with antagonism. Slow, gentle movement won't be noticed. You are learning two major skills of bee handling: do nothing until you feel safe—have confidence born of know-how—and do everything in a slow, gentle, and deliberate manner.

And again:

Try to decide your top priority [in keeping bees]. Are you keeping bees primarily to harvest the honey, or is the honey a justification (if you need one) for keeping the bees? If you pick the former, I look forward to reading of your 500-pound record in the coming issue of the bee magazines. If you pick the latter, that's two of us.

Here's a passage typical of the very fine The Queen Must Die:

There are said to be at least five thousand species of wild bees in North America alone, but little is known about them. When creatures have little or no commercial value, if they are neither especially harmful nor useful and not strikingly beautiful, fascinating, or bizarre, they are largely ignored to go their own way. This also holds true of most people of little or no distinction.

Growing up among bees, and with a beekeeper, has given me many gifts, even if I am a little late in appreciating some of them. I'm endlessly grateful for the chance I had to watch my father and a few hundred thousand bees work together.

—by Jason Streed

Spring Wanderings

Spring has definitely arrived in Upstate NY USDA Zone 4. There aren't enough exclamation points in all of human history to adequately punctuate my pleasure with this, my favorite time of year.

This weekend, I saw my first heron of the season, the first pair of goldfinches, and what appears to be a nesting pair of Canada geese down by the pond. The peewees and phoebes have arrived, as have the vireos. To our great joy, a handsome bluebird male appears to have selected one of our many bluebird houses to set up shop. The other 10 or 12 "bluebird houses" we've put up have already been taken up with swallows, who are a delight in their own right.

Over the weekend we saw bumblebees, cabbage white butterflies, and a butterfly we suspect was a comma (yes, there's a butterfly called "comma," along with one called the "question mark").

The honeybees were seen working the willow and gathering pollen from a blue hyacinth. Last fall we planted 100 or so Siberian squill, and they too have bloomed, though I haven't see any honeybee action there as yet. The dandelions have just begun to blossom, and I imagine much of the bees' focus is on that vitally important foraging plant.Speaking of dandelions, Wren and I enjoyed one of our annual spring rituals this weekend—foraging for tender dandelion leaves in the field, which we cooked up with olive oil, anchovy paste, onions, and pine nuts and tossed over pasta. Serious seasonal/local yum!

On my morning walk with the dog yesterday morning, I communed at woodland's edge with the aptly named spring beauties, one of my favorite spring ephemerals.
An additional sign that beekeeping season is officially upon us: I managed to acquire my first sting of '08 on Sunday afternoon while observing Hive Orange from what I thought was an appropriate distance. They weren't having it, though, and clocked me upside my head. It didn't hurt much. Must be the time of year.

Birdchick Rocks

One of my favorite blog discoveries of late is Birdchick: The Birdwatching Adventures of Sharon Stiteler. If you're at all interested in birds and bird photography, check it out.

Turns out, Birdchick is also a beekeeper. She recently posted some amazing shots of bees removing pollen from their sisters' pollen baskets and her hilarious essay, Hello Bee Sting, Goodbye Dignity is well worth reading.

She also has some funky things going on re: disapproving rabbits.

Stinging Insights

They say bee stings are more painful in the fall, and without having the slightest ideas why that might be, I'm beginning to think it's true. Got a couple of stings on my hand while checking the very crowded Green Hive the other day and couldn't believe how different these stings felt from those received earlier in the summer.

My experience throughout the summer has been that the sting "zaps" for a moment, then subsides. The real problem comes the next day, with heavy-duty itching and minor swelling. My stings have typically bothered me, itch-wise, for 2-3 days, but never actually hurt. It's been surprising to find the bee sting is more about annoyance than pain.

The stings I got the other day were a different story. My hand swelled up in a major way and really bothered me for 24 hours—not only itching me to the point of insanity, but somewhat painful and "hot" as well. Then, in hour 26, nada. A completely different pattern from the previous stings.

Either my bio reactions are changing as my body begins responding to periodic low doses of venom or there's something different about bee stings in autumn or something was different about the way these particular stings were delivered.

Could it be that as autumn comes and the fruits of the bees' labor accrue, the bees develop an ability to inflict more pain on those who would tamper with their precious winter stores? The beeyard is now redolent with the scent of honey. It is intoxicating and magical to smell from 10-15 feet away the warm, wafting aroma that just a few weeks ago could only be discerned by standing directly beside the hive. The aroma is an attractant to be sure. Perhaps the bees somehow know it and have enhanced their defense mechanisms accordingly.

Schmidt Sting Pain Index

Ever wonder what a bee sting feels like in comparison, say, to a paper wasp or yellow jacket sting? If so, behold the wittily nuanced descriptions of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, and let us hope we will never know these things for ourselves.

Top Five Reasons I Got Stung

1. The dead bee I picked up wasn’t dead.
2. I bothered the bees before a thunderstorm.
3. My swarm-catching technique could use some refining.
4. I inadvertently squished a bee while working in the hive.
5. I deigned to get too close to the queen.

The sting doesn’t hurt so much as it surprises. And then it itches. For days. To the point of insanity. The sting and its aftermath remind you to be gentle, careful, methodical, considerate, slow-going, and—always, always—respectful of the bees.

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.

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....

They Call Me Swarm-Catcher!

Not a very good swarm-catcher, but a swarm-catcher nonetheless. (Not sure if I succeeded in catching them, or simply waylaying them en route to bigger and better things.)

I just might be eligible for the Least Elegant Swarm-Catching In Beekeeping History Award and will confess all the inglorious details soon. On the other hand, I have experienced the exhilarating terror and fascination of the swarm-catching adventure. It was Sensurround x 25,000+---the approximate number of bees (and I am being conservative here) I managed to provoke out of a peaceful, silent, minding-its-own-beeswax swarm.

The photos below were taken by my intrepid pal, Karen, who worked with me throughout the whole process and did some great documenting. Below, you see me spraying a little sugar syrup on the outer part of the cluster to calm the bees down a bit before startling the living hell out of them by violently shaking the branch they were so happily resting on into a large box awaiting them below.

Moments later, their peace disrupted, I found myself enveloped in a torrential rainfall of bees. Many landed in the box as planned; many more wound up in the air and, as you can see, madly tried to dissuade me from my folly. It was frightening, but also transcendent to stand inside a force of nature in a well-made beek suit. I must also take my hat off to my cheaply made Old Navy bluejeans which protected me remarkably well from the justifiably defensive onslaught.

That thing covered with bees on the right side of this shot? That would be my arm.
Yes, I wound up with a few minor stings—and honestly, it was good to get that over with, because I'm not nearly as nervous about getting stung now. Also, I have learned that the real problem with bee stings is less the pain of the sting than the murderous itch that reminds you for days on end not to hassle bees. Actually, given how obnoxious my incursions were, I think the bees went easy on me and once again showed their essentially nonviolent temperament.