A Book of Bees Read online

  Two years later the same lady observed:

  Apiculture, like most outdoor avocations, is almost monopolized by the stronger sex. In the days of our grandmothers this was a natural and necessary consequence of man’s fitness and woman’s want of fitness for the work. Picture a woman’s helplessness in view of a swarm safely clustered in the top of a tall tree! Imagine her lighting the brimstone and piteously dooming to death her faithful little laborers—if you can. Need we wonder then that ere the introduction of movable frames women did not aspire to be beekeepers? But that so few women are interested in apiculture today is less easily explained.… Does apiculture offer any special inducement to women? May it not be that the work, no longer impossible, is still for them undesirable?

  I don’t know the answer to Linswik’s questions, but some things have not changed very much. One of today’s respected beekeeping encyclopedias, The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture, has an entry under “Beekeeping for Women” which is as insulting and patronizing in tone, intent and phrasing as Linswik’s writing. There is, of course, no entry under “Beekeeping for Men,” nor should there be. The keeping of bees has nothing to do with sex, but I am reminded of Samuel Johnson’s observation that the matter of a woman’s ability to preach is similar to that of a dog’s ability to walk on his hind legs: the wonder is not that he does it well, but that he does it at all.

  The ranch hands and I started talking weather because it is of real concern to all of us. It determines their hay crop and my honey crop. In 1980, a year of searing drought, I was able to harvest only six thousand pounds of honey from my three hundred hives and lost bees to starvation in midsummer. In another year, when the rains came at the right time, those same three hundred hives gave me thirty-three thousand pounds. So we talk weather. We talk hay. We talk bees. We talk farm prices and shake our heads sadly.

  Fifteen years ago, I came to this part of the country with nothing to recommend myself. I had been a university librarian on the East Coast. Local people are slow to accept newcomers; they have seen many of them come and go, and I am sure they thought I was one of those bookish types with a head stuffed full of theories about how I could live in the country better than people born to it. But I am not good at theory, and I certainly wasn’t going to spin any about cow or pig farming. Instead, the word went around I was trying to make a living at bee farming. No one had ever done that here. Bee farming, it turned out, was different from cow or pig fanning, but not all that different. I work hard and sweat a lot. So do they. None of us is making much money, but we stay with farming because we enjoy it and like to mess around with animals.

  I cannot sit too long talking, because the empty hive body I took from the beeyard is in my pickup, which is parked out in front. Soon, bees will be attracted to it, and I don’t want to take the chance of anyone being stung. I get up to leave.

  “Ought to be getting back to work, too,” the foreman of the ranch where I have just been remarks. “But I figure if I pour myself another cup of coffee the mood will pass.”

  I pay for my coffee and go. Work at the next yard is routine, and I finish up quickly there. This yard is on the second ranch, but the bees are close enough to town to benefit from the flowers and gardens people have there and the clover growing in their lawns. The hives are already heavy with honey for the winter.

  At the third yard, the last one in this group and the second one on this ranch, I am going to prepare the hives for moving. The bees here are the least productive of any I have. The colonies build up quickly in the springtime, better than in any other yard, making it seem as though they are going to be record-breaking hives. In the woods nearby, there are many wild fruit trees and serviceberry, which provide them with an early source of pollen and nectar. But they never live up to their promise, and their summertime production is disappointing. The ranch is well-kept from a cattle-and-timber standpoint, but the bees would be better off if it were not. The fence rows are kept clean of weeds, many of which would be good sources of nectar for bees. There are no overgrown, unused pastures filled with blackberries, straggling sumac, wild mint, sweet clover and other wildflowers which the bees would know how to use. Instead, the fields are lush with sensible fescue, a grass that stays green nearly the year around and provides pasture for cattle. But a field full of fescue is no better than a desert for bees. Acres of alfalfa have been planted on this ranch for hay, and alfalfa blossoms produce a nectar that makes superior honey, but the ranch hands cut the hay on such an efficient schedule that it seldom reaches the blooming stage, so the bees have no benefit from it.

  Today I want to check the bees to make sure they are healthy and strong and prepare them for moving. They are all in good shape, I find. I replace one telescoping cover that is beginning to dry-rot, and set about readying these hives for moving.

  The yard can sustain only eight hives, and it does not make economic sense to keep a small beeyard so far from home. Not long ago, a man telephoned and asked if I would sell a few hives. I gave him a good price for the eight in this yard, and tomorrow I am going to meet him here at the end of the day, after the bees have returned from their final foraging flights, to help load the hives on his pickup.

  Parts of the beehives are sealed together with propolis, to be sure, but if the hives are loaded into a pickup and driven over rough roads they will jiggle apart and the bees will escape. The bees will be angry over the disturbance to their hives and will sting whoever is nearby, which would add to the difficulty of moving them. But, beyond that, those who escape will be lost, and, separated from the intensely social community that their colony is, they will die.

  Bees have a keen and precise sense of place. When they fly out of their hives, they commit to their memories an exact picture of all the significant landmarks near it. It is such a careful picture that if their hive is moved even ten feet away, their home is as good as lost to the returning foragers. And because their map of a foraging area—perhaps five square miles—is so accurate, a beekeeper who wants to relocate a given beeyard in the same general area must first move the bees at least ten or fifteen miles away and leave them for a week or so until they forget the map of the original location by learning a new one. After that, he can move them back to a spot he prefers near the old location. But if he were to move them directly there, they would stubbornly fly back to their old home place.

  To keep the bees from escaping during tomorrow’s move, I am going to fasten together all the hive parts and block all the holes. I have with me a box of hive staples—copperplated flat wire staples, two inches long with ¾-inch ends. I drive in a pair of them, attaching the hive body to the bottom board on one side, and repeat the process on the other. Another pair on each side holds the two hive bodies together. I drive each staple at an angle to its partner, so that the hive bodies will not shift.

  Hive staple and moving screen: hive is shown ready to move, with staples and screen in place

  I am using a hammer, and the pounding disturbs the bees, even though I have smoked them before I started the job. They come out to investigate the fuss, and I give them an extra puff of smoke to quiet them. That does not prevent one from finding a place on the back of my neck where the veil is lying directly on my skin. She stings me soundly through the veil to express her dislike of what I am doing. I have been stung enough so I have no reaction to bee venom. There will be no redness or swelling on the back of my neck. Tomorrow, the spot will not itch. But I can feel the sharp prick of her stinger as it goes in. It is no worse than being snagged by a blackberry thorn. I am seldom stung, not only because I am used to the bees and relaxed as I work with them, but because I don’t often do things that make them cross, such as pounding on their hives with a hammer. I long ago gave up a number of beekeeping practices conceived with the notion of making bees do certain things that seemed good from a human standpoint but which usually involved radically disrupting the hive. Instead, I watch the bees more, try to understand what they are doing and then see if I can work in a way
that will be in keeping with their biology and behavior. I try to create conditions that will make them happy, and then leave them alone as much as possible. Fewer disruptions allow them to produce more honey—my perhive yields are greater now than in my first years of beekeeping—and they don’t often have an occasion to object to my presence, so they don’t often sting me.

  Like many beekeepers, I have discovered a dose of bee venom from a sting alleviates the symptoms of arthritis, and I am stung so infrequently that when the joints in my hands begin to ache I have to go capture a bee and force her to sting the place where the hurt is. The pain from the arthritis is gone by the next morning. This is anecdotal evidence, and as such has no value for science, but it will not stop me from taking my therapeutic stings and hoping I can keep my hands limber. By my age my mother and grandmother each had hands so crippled with arthritis that they were hampered in their daily activities.

  Those new to beekeeping usually get stung a lot. I was too, when I first began working with bees. Bees’ vision is such that they can easily see objects that move quickly and jerkily, and often a person unused to bees is tense and nervous when he is around them. His jumpy motions will attract their attention. Bees are myopic. Large stationary objects near them appear fuzzy and indistinct, but they are very sensitive to broken patterns, the flickering of light and sudden movement. They are quick to see flowers swaying in the wind and enemies trying to get into their hives. Bees, like other animals, are quieter when those around them are relaxed and move slowly.

  Some people are seriously allergic to insect stings; they should not go near bees. They break out in welts on the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands, experience shortness of breath and accelerated heartbeat. After repeated stings, they may go into anaphylactic shock and die. Such people are very few in number, and some doctors have begun treating them with whole bee venom in an attempt to help cure their allergy.

  The normal reaction to a bee sting is swelling, redness and itching. It is easy enough to desensitize anyone who reacts that way.

  I usually hire a strong young man to help me with the honey harvest each year and before I let him out in the beeyards I make sure he will have little or no reaction to bee venom. I start him on a desensitization program a couple of weeks before he is to begin work. On the first day I put an ice cube on his arm to numb both it and his fears. Then I place a bee on the spot, holding her by the front part of her body so she can curl over her abdomen and sting him. Angry at the restraint, she usually obliges and then pulls away, leaving her stinger behind in the young man’s arm. The bee, her stinger gone, will soon die.

  The stinger is a curved barb topped with a bulbous venom sac. Muscles in the sac continue to pulsate after the bee has left, and the muscular contractions force the barb on the stinger deeper into the flesh. I want my helper to have only a partial dose of venom the first time, so after a few minutes I scrape the stinger out with my fingernail. The stung place will soon become red and start to swell. The next day it will be itchy. On that day I repeat the process, but leave the stinger in place ten minutes, so my helper can receive a full dose of venom. I continue giving him one sting a day until he no longer has a reaction to it. Then I increase the number of daily stings to two. Again, he will react until his body stabilizes at the new level of venom. I continue this way until he can tolerate ten stings a day with little reaction; after that I do not worry about taking him out to the beeyards. Everyone reacts differently, and I never can tell exactly how long the process will take, but for most the first part takes longer than the last. Usually after four, five or six stings, the young man reaches a plateau and can move on one day at a time to the required ten.

  Once he discovers that getting stung is not really painful or scary, he dispenses with the ice cube and starts administering his own stings. He takes control. He has lost his fear and will relax around the bees, which will, in and of itself, make him less likely to be stung.

  After I have stapled all the hives I move around to their fronts to screen the entrances. It would not be kind to close up the hive entrances and ventilation holes with something solid because the bees inside would suffocate. So I am going to put in each entrance a screen of hardware cloth, cut to the exact width of the hive entrance and crimped into a V. I poke the point of the V into the entrance—which makes the bees, already out of sorts, crosser still. I smoke them a bit more, and then, using a hand staple gun, fasten the screen to the bottom board to prevent it from jiggling out in the drive to the bees’ new home.

  I have one thing left to do. From the pickup I take a roll of gray duct tape, tear off small strips and use them to block one of the ventilation holes in each hive. This still leaves the bees the other ventilation hole as an entrance and exit, and air can move through the screen in their usual entrance. Tomorrow, when I meet the buyer of these hives here at dusk, all that will remain to be done is to tape the second ventilation hole in each hive and we will be ready to load them on his pickup.

  Moving beehives is a two-person job. This time of year, of course, the hives are heavy with honey: their total weight may be two hundred pounds or more. But a two-story beehive is impossibly cumbersome for one person to handle alone at any time. It takes two people, one on each side, to lift up a beehive and carry it to a pickup. I’ll help the new beekeeper load these hives, and when he gets home his son will help him unload them.

  Years ago, when I first began keeping bees, I wanted to increase the number of hives I was running from the sixty with which I had started, and do it as fast as possible. I bought a hundred hives that were tucked away in groups of six and seven in remote beeyards along the banks of the Missouri River. A friend helped me move them, and we rented the biggest U-Haul truck we could find in order to complete the job in two trips.

  We brought along my pickup, as we needed it to ferry the beehives between the outyards, often at the end of the narrowest of lanes, to the big truck we had to leave parked on wider roads. In each outyard, we would screen and staple the hives and then tape all the holes we could find. But the man who had sold me the hives had rather lost interest in them; many were in need of repair and had holes in surprising places. The rotted bottom of one fell out as we lifted it, and a horde of angry bees rushed to fasten themselves on to our bee suits, stinging us through the fabric which was damp with sweat and clung to us. We moved that particular hive to the big truck as quickly as we could, but the bees stayed cross, and as we filled the U-Haul we found that bees in many of the other hives were discovering holes and cracks and chinks that we had not. They hovered around the dark interior of the truck, and then, each time we opened the big sliding door, they would fly instinctively toward the light.

  The last yard from which we were going to move bees on the trip was down an overgrown footpath. We drove the pickup as near as we could, and then carried the beehives through brambles to it. After we had loaded the last one, I backed the pickup around and drove down the twisting road to the big truck. As we rounded the final curve, we noticed there was a strange pickup parked near the U-Haul. Two men got out of it and looked around furtively, but did not see us. They tiptoed over to the truck, their curiosity piqued by an apparently abandoned U-Haul.

  They tried the sliding back door gingerly, and found it would open. They gave it a push. The loose bees inside rushed out toward the light and enveloped the two men in a furious buzzing cloud. The men were both heavy, with ample beer bellies, but they ran like jackrabbits to their pickup and drove off at top speed, careening from one side of the road to the other as they tried to brush bees from their heads. I’ll wager that is the last time either of them meddled with an abandoned truck.

  II

  THE BEEKEEPER’S WINTER

  The Beekeeper’s Winter

  Another way to get started with bees is to order all the needed parts of the hives in the winter, assemble them, and then, in the spring, buy what are known as “package bees” to fill the new hives.

  This method has
some advantages and one disadvantage. Package bees, which include one queen and several pounds of bees unrelated to her, are shipped in screenwire cages through the U.S. mails. They are an artificial assemblage and the two or three days they spend in transit additionally confuses and disorients them. As a result, they are sometimes difficult to hive and may even refuse to stay in the quarters the beekeeper has prepared for them.

  But new bees purchased from a reputable bee breeder will almost certainly be free of disease, and the new comb that the bees will draw out on the sheets of wax foundation will serve for many years. In contrast, established hives must be checked carefully for disease and will usually contain old combs that will need to be culled and replaced.

  Some cities have stores in which to buy the tools needed for beekeeping, and the hive parts, too, but the major suppliers for beekeepers sell by mail order. There are a number of these companies, and the prices and quality of their products vary. All of them advertise in the two grand old beekeeping publications, The American Bee Journal (published since 1861), Hamilton, Illinois 62341, and Gleanings in Bee Culture (published since 1873), P.O. Box 706, Medina, Ohio 44258. In addition to serving as a display shop in print for beeware, these magazines feature useful practical articles on beekeeping techniques. But they are published by two of the major suppliers of beekeeping products and have a distinct interest in selling tools, supplies and bees as a result. Their orientation is toward what a person can buy to become a better beekeeper. I have always held there is too much emphasis on gadgetry in beekeeping. Bees are forgiving animals, and will tolerate a good deal of rearrangement in their lives for whatever new fad sweeps the beekeeping industry—plastic foundation and frames, double queen management, tar-paper wraps for winter—but the best beekeepers I know are those who let the bees themselves, not equipment manufacturers, be their teachers.