A Book of Bees Read online

  This unit—bottom board and two stacked hive bodies—is topped with a flat wooden inner cover cut to the dimensions of the top of the hive body. It has a center hole to allow moisture to escape from the beehive beneath, and is overtopped with what beekeepers call a “telescoping cover.” Almost all beekeepers, except for migratory ones, use this type of cover on their hives. Telescoping covers are cut slightly larger than the width and length of the hive body, and are rimmed with an overhanging edge that keeps them in place in windy weather. A fitted sheet of galvanized metal protects them from rain and snow and makes them last longer. Beekeeping supply companies ship all hive and frame parts knocked down; they must be assembled and nailed together, so a beekeeper learns to be something of a carpenter, too.

  The first thing to do in a beeyard after zipping oneself into a bee suit is to take the bee smoker from its metal carrying can and light it. A bee smoker is a cylindrical firebox, compact enough to hold easily in one hand, with a small bellows attached to its edge and a hinged, cone-shaped top with a hole in it. Fuel is put in through the top opening, and the air is forced across it after it is lighted and smoldering by squeezing the bellows. This directs the smoke out of the hole in the top in puffs that will quiet the bees. The smoke makes them act as though their hives were on fire: they forget about tending their home and prepare to abandon it by filling themselves with honey; when their bodies are filled, it is difficult for the bees to bend themselves into a stinging posture.

  Keeping a fire burning in a bee smoker might seem tricky to a novice beekeeper, but it really is not hard. I scrape out whatever charred fuel remains from the last time I used the smoker, then wad up a half sheet of newspaper, stick it inside and light it. When the paper is burning smartly, I put in a few lengths of loosely rolled baling twine and force air through the fire with the bellows, adding more twine before closing the top of the smoker and stuffing a wad of it in my pocket to add later. Once the fuel is burning thoroughly, the smoker may be filled all the way to the top and will smolder for hours without needing to be refueled; it will produce the thick, cool smoke that is best and gentlest for the bees. Hot smoke with sparks flying from it will incinerate them.

  I use baling twine for fuel because a cattle farmer from whom I rent a beeyard takes it from the hay bales he feeds his animals in winter, stuffs it into feed sacks and loads my pickup full of it every spring. It is handy to carry around and burns well. A variety of materials may be used to fuel a smoker, though. Strips of denim or other heavyweight cotton are good, but they must be one hundred percent cotton: artificial fibers produce a foul stench and their smoke makes the bees cross. Dried grass, autumn leaves, pine needles and dried clusters of sumac fruits also make splendid smoker fuel.

  Smoker

  When my smoker is burning well, I pull on my leather bee gauntlets and pick up the two tools I may need—the frame grips and my hive tool. “Hive tool” is the beekeeper’s name for a small prybar, a jimmy. If there is anything bees hate it is a draft, so they weld shut the cracks between the hive parts with a gummy substance called propolis or bee glue, which they manufacture from plant resins. When a beekeeper opens a hive, he must use a hive tool to break this carefully built glue seal. One of the reasons I like to make this inspection trip to my beeyards early in the autumn is that I want to give the bees plenty of time to seal themselves back up before winter’s cold begins. When I open a hive, all their meticulously crafted seals are broken, and they will have to make more propolis and chink up their hives again to preserve the warmth they generate in cold weather.

  Hive tool

  I don’t expect to have to open many hives in this particular yard. Year after year, the bees have wintered well here because they have gathered so much aster honey. I smelled it as soon as I stepped out of the pickup, and when I walk toward the hives, I can see streams of bees flying purposefully in and out of their entrances, a sign that they are hard at work on a nectar flow. When only a few flowers are blooming, the bees fly around in a desultory way, and often, if the weather is warm, they hang aimlessly on the front of the hive or stand in bunches on the alighting board. Today, the bees are active; the ones returning to their hives fly low, heavy with nectar. A quick check of the front of the row of hives shows only one that may be in trouble. A heap of fine, powdery beeswax obstructs part of the entrance. I make a mental note to open that hive and check it. Beehives should always be opened and worked from their rear in order not to intrude on the bees’ flight path. Bees are singleminded and fly directly to their destination. Today they are flying straight to the field of snow asters I can see across the river branch. If I were to stand in their way, it would divert and annoy them; they might sting.

  I move behind the row of hives and put my hand in the handgrip of the bottom hive body on the first hive in the row, hefting it to estimate its weight. It is heavy with honey; its bees should winter well. I have made a note to replace a broken inner cover on the second hive, so I pick up the smoker and puff a stream of smoke into the hive entrance to subdue the guard bees posted there and prevent them from spreading an alarm. With my hive tool I loosen the telescoping cover and take it off, prying up the broken inner cover and puffing more smoke into the top of the hive, which is filled with bees in bustling numbers. They have felt the jarring disturbance, and their abdomens are raised defensively, ready to sting if necessary. The smoke, however, creates a more immediate concern, and they scurry down between the frames to avoid it. I toss the broken inner cover in the direction of the pickup, replace it with a new one and close the hive.

  I work my way down the row of hives, hefting them and assuring myself that they are all in good shape. One needs a few boards under it to maintain an air space from the ground. Carefully, without bothering to smoke the bees, I lift up the front and back edges of the hive and push the boards under it. When I come to the hive I thought might be in trouble, I find that it is much lighter than the others and its honey stores are low. There are not many bees inside, and the ones that are there are clustered over only a few frames in the upper hive body. At this time of year, a normal bee colony is still close to its summertime strength of about 60,000 bees. There can’t be even a quarter of this number here. I loosen some of the frames with my hive tool and use my frame grips to pull it out. The frame has recently had honey but now it contains no honey at all. The ragged edges of the wax sealing the honeycomb show that the cells have been ripped open hurriedly and carelessly to get at the honey stored inside. This is a colony of bees too weak to defend itself from other bees, and it has been robbed of its honey by more spirited neighbors. The powdery wax I had spotted at the hive entrance earlier meant that the honeycomb had been opened by intruders, for in a strong, well-regulated colony the bees never leave any debris in their own hive.

  A check of the rest of the frames shows the bees to be free of disease, although there are signs that wax moth larvae and cockroaches, opportunists that they are, have begun to take advantage of a hive of bees too few in number and too poor in morale to defend itself from enemies. The nondescript, medium-sized gray wax moths lay their eggs in beehives whenever they can, and after hatching, their larvae—wriggling dirty-white caterpillars—feed on honeycombs, destroying them in the process if the bees are unable to kill them first.

  “I had some bees once,” I hear from now-and-again beekeepers, “but the moths got ’em.” This is confusing the sign with its cause. Wax moths are everywhere. A strong bee colony can defend itself from their damage, but once there is a drop in strength and morale the balance will tip in favor of the wax moths.

  As I check the frames of this hive, I find there are a few bee larvae being raised by worker bees. This indicates that they still have a queen, the single fertile female bee each colony requires. I check my record book and find this was one of my most productive hives the previous year, and that early in August I had taken six honey supers from it. “Honey supers” are about half the height of a regular hive body, and stack on top of the hives. I
n them the bees store the extra honey that a beekeeper may safely remove—this is his honey crop. Because honey supers are smaller than hive bodies, they are lighter and easier to handle, easier to carry empty to the hives in springtime and easier to remove filled at the end of summer.

  The six supers I took from this colony are, on the average, twice the number an ordinary colony will fill with honey. So a few months ago this colony contained a greater number of bees than an average colony does. There may have been 100,000 or more only recently. What happened to them?

  Over the years, I have discovered that certain bee colonies—particularly prosperous hardworking ones like this one had been—sometimes feel impossibly crowded when their supers are taken away and they are reduced to their basic two hive bodies. This is one of the reasons why they swarm—that is, split a parent colony into two and fly off with the old queen to take up new quarters in a hollow tree or under the siding of a building. Bees usually swarm in the spring, but occasionally I see swarms in the autumn, after the supers have been removed. This is not good survival strategy for the bees. The autumn swarm that buds off from the original colony will not have enough time to set up a new, well-stocked household before the frosts come and kill the flowers. And the parent colony, even though it has raised a new queen, is usually too weak to defend itself against robber bees and contains too few bees to winter well. This is probably what has happened with this colony.

  If I had just a few hives rather than three hundred, this late swarming would be easy to prevent. If I put an empty super with ten frames of foundation on a hive when I remove the filled honey supers, the bees would have enough space and enough to do to prevent the swarming impulse from developing. But the additional expense of keeping three hundred foundation-filled supers on hand, and the labor of putting them on and taking them off just to prevent a few swarms doesn’t make sense from a commercial beekeeping standpoint. However, if I leave these bees as they are, they will surely die over the winter. Their unprotected combs will be destroyed by wax moth larvae. The beekeepers’ maxim—take your winter losses in the fall—is a sound one. I shall add these bees to another hive, and use the old beehive parts to make a new replacement hive in the spring.

  “Adding the bees to another hive” sounds simple. It isn’t. If I just dumped these bees in with others, they would all be killed as intruders. Every hive is made up of three castes: the drones, the workers and the queen. The drones are the male bees, present only in the spring and of no concern in the fall, when all but one of the bees in each of the colonies are members of the worker-bee caste. Workers are females with atrophied sexual characteristics, and they do nearly all the work in the hive. They gather nectar and pollen, make propolis, raise young bees, build comb, make honey, defend the hive and take care of the queen. The queen is the single representative in each hive of the third caste of bees. She is a fertile female, mother to all the bees in the colony. By being constantly touched and fed by her daughters she spreads her own special chemical marker—a pheromone—throughout the colony. It is this that makes each colony unique and distinct from any other. Queen bees are jealous and cannot bear the presence of another queen. When two queens meet, they fight to the death. And if the offspring of two different queens are abruptly forced together, they will do the same.

  Before uniting this weaker colony with a stronger one, I must find the queen of the poorer colony and kill her. I do not want to give her the chance to kill the queen in the prospering hive where I shall house her bees. The queen, a long, elegant bee, is easy to find among the shorter, stubbier workers, especially in such a small colony. I find her quickly, and—regretfully, because I do not like to harm bees—I kill her with the sharp end of my hive tool.

  Honey bees

  The bees from the weaker colony, however, still carry the pheromone from their late queen. Until it fades, they will be instantly recognizable as foreigners by the bees with whom I want to join them. If I were at home and could return easily to these particular hives, I should unite the two colonies by putting the upper hive body—the only part of the hive that contains bees—of the queenless colony directly on top of the hive next to it, separating them with a sheet of newspaper. The bees, fussy in their dislike of foreign material in their hives, would then set themselves the task of chewing the newspaper away and, gradually and cooperatively, the two sets of bees would meet quietly and not fight and kill. This is the surest and kindest way to unite two hives. But to try and do this here would involve driving back in a week’s time and reducing the combined three-story colony to two so that the bees would not have such a large interior space to keep warm throughout the winter. I do not have the time, and I take a shortcut, one of many I must practice as a commercial beekeeper.

  I remove the hive bodies and bottom board of the queenless hive and set it off to one side. Some bees from it fly up, agitated, and return to the original hive location, where they join the small band of their sister foragers who have returned from the field of snow asters and are confused and disoriented because their home has vanished. Tentatively, without the aggressive assurance of robber bees, they drift a few at a time into the two hives that had once been their neighbors. I stand and watch. Guard bees are on the alert in the entrances of both those hives, aware that something untoward is taking place. They examine the incoming bees, letting pass their own foragers but checking the drifters suspiciously. They fight a few to the floor of the hive and kill them, but most are allowed through unharmed. Returning foragers, no matter what colony they are from, are loaded with nectar and are usually welcome. The other stragglers are so few and so meek that the guard bees grudgingly accept them. The frames that still have bees from the queenless hive clinging to them I rap sharply against a tree. The dislodged bees fly up in distress, circle and try to get their bearings. They, too, eventually return to the original hive location and drift into the neighboring hives; they are so demoralized and unaggressive that the guard bees accept them, too.

  I heft the remaining hives and find them all in good shape. I put heavy rocks on top of each one to keep the telescoping covers secure through autumn and winter storms, then fill out my record book, noting the date, what I have done for each hive and my assessment of their honey stores. I put the smoker back in its carrying can, where it will smolder safely until I get to the next beeyard; the hive tool and frame grips go on top of it, and I’m ready to leave. I probably won’t visit this beeyard again until next March.

  Many beekeepers recommend reducing the entrance to the hives in the fall, and years ago I used to do this. “Entrance reducers” are thin blocks of wood cut to the length and height of the hive entrance, notched with a hole small enough to keep out mice but large enough for a bee to pass through. Mice are destructive to beehives during winter. The inside of a hive is a warm, snug place; during cold weather, when the bees are sluggish, the mice like to go in and chew up combs, make their nests and raise babies. The entrance reducers prevent them from getting in. But when I did reduce my beehive entrances in the winter, I often found that by spring the tiny entrance notch had become blocked with dead bees. Bees in every colony die from old age during the winter, but with the entrance reducers in place, the remaining bees—which, of course, could fly through the ventilation holes in the hive—had not been able to carry away their dead sisters as they would have done had the entrance been unblocked. Under normal circumstances, bees are very mindful of hive sanitation but these piles of dead bees were damp, moldy, sour and unwholesome.

  One autumn, after having harvested a record amount of honey, I was too busy trucking around the country selling it to visit the hives and put the entrance reducers in place. Next spring, although there was some mouse damage to the combs, all the hives were dry, sweet and clean, and the bees were in the best health I’d ever seen them. After that, I stopped reducing the entrances, and now I accept winter mouse damage as a tradeoff for better ventilation and healthier hives.

  The store in the little town between the
two ranches carries more than groceries. In back of the shelves of peanut butter and canned corn are work clothes, axe handles, coils of rope and other country necessities. In the middle of it all is a Formica-topped table, where ranch hands are usually gathered drinking coffee from the pot that sits on a hot plate at the end of the meat counter.

  “Howdy, Bee Lady,” one of the hands calls to me, and another shoves out a free chair for me to sit down.

  I pour a cup of coffee and sit with them. I don’t know their names, but they know mine: Bee Lady. A middle-aged woman in baggy white coveralls who smells of burnt baling twine is a standout in any crowd.

  I can’t think why it is so few women keep bees. Among commercial beekeepers—those with three hundred hives or more who make their living from them—there are few to be found anywhere. I know I am the only one in my area, and I may be the only one in Missouri. Even among those who keep just a small number of hives, few are women although there are a number of women entomologists who specialize in bees and who work for the bee research laboratories.

  I should like to think we have changed since the days of Cyula Linswik, a woman beekeeper who could, in 1875, advise women beekeepers against making their own frames. She wrote:

  Let her spare her gentle fingers for finer uses—as sewing on of buttons—and buy the frames.… One of the thorns in the path of the woman who undertakes to master the theory and practice of beekeeping is her lack of natural or acquired ability to drive a nail straight, to use a saw with safety to the implement, or a sharp knife with safety to herself. The gifted few of whom this may not be true constitute so small a fractional part of womankind that they may be regarded, properly, as exceptions proving the rule. And the woman who begins to keep bees without having her attention directed to this matter is in danger of suffering from vexation of spirit and wounded fingers many times during the course of her novitiate.