Minding Bees

Invariably, when people hear that I am a beekeeper, they ask whether I've read "The Secret Lives of Bees." I have read the book and I even have a poster of the film based on the novel hanging in the honey room in our barn. The truth is that for me beekeeping is a lot of hard work -- it is not effortless, the way it is portrayed in this novel. The bees do not behave as if they know me and when I am clumsy or taking their honey away, they sometimes get downright cross with me.

The road to becoming a beekeeper has been a difficult one for me. I started beekeeping when my husband and I bought our home in the Berkshires. It is situated in the middle of several acres of meadows on rolling hills with views of Mount Lenox to the north and lush green woods with a pond at the edge of the meadows. The first time I walked in the meadows, it was summer, and I was assailed by a sweet burst of scent from the wild thyme under my feet. The landscape and the scent emanating from the meadow reminded me of walking in the countryside in Greece and inhaling the scent released by the wild herbs underfoot. The Greek countryside is spotted with bee hives and Greece has been known for its honey since antiquity. I turned to my husband and said, "This is bee country. We must get bees." From that point on, with a vision of hives sitting prettily in our meadow and bees happily foraging among the wild flora, I began in earnest of look around for a beekeeper to help me get started. After some searching, I discovered a beekeeping supply and resource center in Greenwich, New York. My husband and I attended a beginners workshop, purchased a 3lb package of bees with a queen and set off to hive the bees. I had already painted my hive and set it up facing south, along the edge of the meadow, with the woods acting as a wind barrier behind the hive.

While my husband had been keen on the idea of my becoming a beekeeper and had even accompanied me to the workshop, he balked when it actually came time to install the bees in their hive. He chose, instead, to stand at a safe distance with camera in hand to capture the release of the bees into their new home. I had carefully read the directions on how to go about opening the package, taking out the queen cage, and then depositing the bees in the hive and thought I had a good grasp of the process. Alas, things did not go smoothly. First of all, I had trouble lighting my smoker and when I finally had it fired up, I knocked it over as I was nervously trying to pry open the wood cover off the package. As I straightened up the smoker, I had not kept the lid on and hundreds of bees were emerging up from under the wood cover, making it difficult for me to find the small queen cage. Wearing leather gloves, I clumsily grasped the queen cage, which is about two inches in length and half an inch wide, and tried to attach two small nails at right angels in order to create a hanging bracket for the queen cage to be hung between two frames. The nails kept dropping out of my hands. By this time, there were bees flying all around me, I was overheating in my bee suit and my hands were shaking from nervousness. Somehow, I finally managed to attach the nails and hang the queen between the two frames in the middle of the hive and shake the remainder of the bees into the hive. There were still a lot of bees flying around outside the hive as I placed the outer cover over the hive. I prayed that these bees would finally find their way into the hive as evening drew near and that they would settle down to the important work of releasing the queen. The queen is kept in a separate cage because the bees and the caged queen are not from the same hive when they are packaged and the bees do not recognize her as their queen. This means they would probably kill her. A new queen has to be introduced slowly into a hive, giving the bees time to become accustomed to her before she is released. At the one end of the queen cage is a candy plug which the bees eat through over the course of the next couple of days or so until they reach her and release her. If all goes well, she is received into the hive and immediately gets to work laying and beginning the marvelous and complex life of the hive.

I've come a long way from that first awkward interaction with bees; I now have several hives and extract enough honey to sell some to a couple of our local stores. But every season arrives with its surprises and its lessons. This past winter I lost two hives -- one suffered from Nosema which is a severe form of dysentery that weakens the hive and in the end kills it off. The other hive had plenty of food supplies, but the bees probably lost their queen sometime earlier in the winter and were not able to survive.

Life and death are a reality in a hive -- the life or death of a single bee does not make a difference to the hive. A hive is a living entity which survives or dies depending on the health of the queen and on the ability of each bee to work in conjunction with other bees to accomplish the complex work of the hive. Bees take on various roles over the course of their lives, from nurse to defender, and finally to worker bees, who leave the hive and forage for nectar and pollen. There are also queen attendants, scouts and, of course, the drones--all vital contributors to the life of the hive.

One of my favorite past times is to stand near my hives on sunny days and watch the bees flying in and out of the hive. The hive literally hums contentedly as bees come and go in front of the hive with the pollen baskets located on their hind legs spilling over with pollen. Then, I understand, my original vision of having hives in my meadow is not just a dream, but a real and important part of my life.