Mother-Daughter Bonding - Not

My hopes for mother-daughter bonding around beekeeping were dashed when I took Emma to the hives. All seemed to be going well. Meghan - young, friendly, and almost as freckly as my daughter - talked us through the hive, showing frames of bees and honey as she went. Her description of what happens to successful drones during the queen's nuptial flight were titillating.

Emma wore the only extra bee veil. I stood ten feet away, looking on from a secure distance. And I got stung, right in the middle of my forehead. Horrid.

No, I didn't scream or cry. I just said, "Oh" and jumped a little. I was proud of myself. But still.

Now she hates bees.

Some Good News

To Frank's point about thinking beyond honey bees, the loss of biodiversity for bees in Europe has slowed significantly. Let's work to accomplish the same result in the U.S.

Fail-Proof Smoker Lighting

ECourtesy of my husband, Rich, not a beekeeper but possibly a high school pyromaniac. The face that he could light the smoker quickly and efficiently on the first try is possibly evidence that women beekeepers are different from men.

Step One: Lay Out the Materials
3 wadded up half-sheets of newspaper (if you can get printed newspaper any more)
1 handful of smoker fuel
A lighter (do not use matches!)
Your smoker, lid off

Step Two: Light a Wad of Newspaper and Drop It in the Smoker

Step Three: Stuff the Rest of the Newspaper in the Smoker

Step Four: Puff

Step Five: Add the Handful of Smoker Fuel

Step Six: Puff, puff, puff. Keep puffing.

Voila.

Day Three - Checking for Queen Release

Queen cage, empty
except for one poor dead worker

On day three, I went back to the beeyard to be sure the workers had released the queen. There were about a half-dozen of my classmates in the beeyard, and there was a spirit of kindness and collaboration that I am coming to expect among beekeepers. I headed to my own hive first, feeling a bit tentative. I wore close-fitting jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt, leather gardening gloves and my veil, much more than I wore to tend my hive last year: I don't yet know the temperament of this Georgia queen. I was quickly joined by three other new beekeepers, all eager to see how my girls were doing. No one else had lit their smokers, so I left mine in the beebox. The girls didn't kick up a fuss when I removed the top cover, but seemed as gentle and quiet as my Michigan Mongrels. Inside, everything was fine. The workers had released the queen from her cage, and the girls were busily building up comb and storing nectar. A couple people helped me lift my hive so I could raise it up higher with extra 4"x4s".

The beebox

Sadly, one of the beekeepers' hive was mostly dead, her pile of corpses already much bigger than my entire dead colony from the winter before. We helped her lift her hive so she could dump the dead ones off, saving the remaining workers the job of removing so many. Perhaps the hive isn't queen right. We were not skilled enough to figure out what was wrong, but we all hoped that our teacher, Clay, will have the answer at the next class.

My carpool buddy Pete's hive had drunk the entire two gallons of sugar syrup he'd left for them, and another beekeeper, Lawrence, offered a gallon from the trunk of his car. Elliot, a fellow Ann Arborite, gave me his phone number and offered to add my super for me if I didn't have time to get back to the beeyard next week.

All this generosity and helpfulness makes me feel like I've entered a slower, kinder universe.

Day Ten - Finding Eggs

M'Lis and I went out to check our  hives. My bees had built pure white burr comb on the inner cover, right between my two on-the-cheap Ziploc feeders. I never saw white burr comb in my hive last year - it was always yellow - and this looked exactly like spun sugar. I love sweets, and all I wanted to do was scrape it off and eat it. I didn't feed my bees sugar syrup last year, and I wonder if this comb - a product of the bees' bodies - has this white color because of the granulated sugar they've been eating.

Eggs look like little grains of rice

Another beekeeper showed us how to hold up the frames at an angle with our backs to the sun, so we could see the eggs. How exciting, the moment when our eyes made sense of the tiny white grain of rice in the center of each cell, and we knew the queens were laying!

We also checked Ben and Pete's two hives, our carpool buddies. We were interested to see that their hives were about equally far along, although Pete's has consumed over two gallons of sugar syrup, and Ben's has consumed none. Makes me wonder, is there really value in feeding them syrup? Two hives is too few to draw conclusions.

Another Point of View about the Honey Bee Crisis

Dandelions in this blooming cherry orchard mean the nectar is flowing

I spoke to the director of Beal Botanical Garden at Michigan State University, a professor of plant biology and a backyard beekeeper. Frank emphasized that he is not an expert on honey bees. He  pointed out that we use neonics to treat for emerald ash borer, a pernicious invasive beetle that has more than decimated the ash tree population in Michigan and elsewhere. So there might be a downside to banning their use. "To me, the bigger question might be, if neonics are toxic to honey bees, what are they doing to the native bee pollinators?" Frank says.

Frank has observed many wild honey bee swarms near his home. He himself got into beekeeping when a swarm moved into one of his wife's empty parrot breeding boxes. Now he's up to three personal hives.


The honey bee is one among many pollinators. Some believe that the introduction of the honey bee - brought here from Europe in the early 1600s - has led to a decline in native pollinators due to competition for nectar and pollen resources. Many agricultural crops are also not native to the Americas, and a farm, especially an agribusiness, does not resemble a naturally occurring ecosystem.

Day One - Package Bees

First day in the beeyard for the SEMBA beginning beekeeping class, suited up and read to go.

Yes, I dropped the queen bee down among the ten thousand bees in the little box they were delivered in.

Yes, I placed the bottom board upside-down.

Yes, I forgot the extra 4'x4's to raise up the hive.

Yes, I forgot the nail I needed to release the queen, and the rubber band I needed to secure her in the frame. (Thanks for bailing me out, fellow new beekeepers!)

Yes, my Ziploc bag of sugar syrup leaked all over the boot of my RAV4, causing the rubber seal to come undone and inviting an ant invasion.

Yes, I had a colony last year and should know better.

No, I did not get stung. Neither did any others of the 30 students who were installing package bees in their hives that day.

Yes, the colony survived all that ineptitude. 

Onward.

Food Disaster?

Could this be our future?

Several people have asked me about the truth of The Huffington Post article "Honey Bees Are Dying Putting America at Risk of a Food Disaster." I'll be talking to horticulturalists and bee people over the next few weeks to try to make sense of all this overwhelming and sometimes alarmist information about honey bees.

Today I spoke with the horticulture manager where I work, at the University of Michigan's Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum. He had this to say:

"While it’s true that 80% of agricultural crops are pollinated by honey bees, honey bees are not their only pollinators. In fact, many agricultural crops are self-pollinated and don’t rely on insects at all. Some crops – such as the almond crop in California – are quite dependent on commercial beekeepers for pollination, but here in Michigan we do not rely on domesticated pollinators to such a great extent."

So, Mike is not worried that we are one bad winter away from starvation. However, he does say that there is a general decline in many pollinator species, not just honey bees, due in part to indiscriminate use of pesticides. Lawmakers can help by implementing restrictions on pesticides containing neonic-treated crop seeds, similar to the ban set to take effect in the E.U. in December 2013. 

Home gardeners can help by reading the labels of pesticides they buy for home use. These product labels clearly state if they are damaging to honey bees. You can also write your Congressional representative advocating for neonics restrictions.

Other ways you can help: plant flowers, buy local honey, or even become a beekeeper.

Building the Bee Boxes

I ordered two complete hive sets, one for the swarm I was planning to capture (still waiting for them to show up) and one for my new hive at the SEMBA beginning beekeeping class.

After hammering 280 heavy-duty nails and 600 finish nails, I felt like my arm was going to fall off. By the end, I was hammering (slowly) with my left arm, using my right arm for support, while standing on a stool to get more torque. I still have 100 sheets of wax foundation waiting to be attached to the frames.

I think it took about 15 hours. Maybe more.

All this to save fifty bucks.

I recommend assembled hives.

Dead Bees

The colony was dead.

The apprehension of every fresh, green beekeeper: will the girls make it through the winter? All too often - for over 40% of backyard beekeepers this year - the answer is "no."

I recall a day back in late October - one of the last days the bees were out and about before the long hard winter - when I thought, perhaps, there was too little activity compared to my neighbor's hives. Those bees flying about looked a bit large. Were there only drones in the hive? Was something wrong?

I told myself that I was just overthinking. Like the first time my infant daughter slept through the night, and I woke up at 3 a.m. afraid she wasn't breathing. I'm a worrier, that's all. My nice neat little colony, so healthy, thriving, all summer long. They'd be fine.

On a warm day in February, I noticed a tiny puddle of water on my bottom board. I thought, "Well, good! They must be breathing. They must be keeping it warm in there, warm enough that the moisture inside the hive hasn't frozen." How wrong I was. The truth is, just because you're a worrier, doesn't mean things don't go wrong.

There are many beauties to beekeeping. Not least is the kindness and community of one's fellow beekeepers. I was lucky enough to discover my dead colony in the company of my bee mentor, Meghan, and a group of others from my beeyard. Meghan told me that moisture in the hive is a bad sign - bees don't like it and work to keep it out - and sure enough, when we opened the hive, inside was a little bolus of tiny black corpses.

"If you had ten hives," Meghan said, "Four of them would likely have died, and this would have been one of them."

"This happened to me my first year," said Karen, another beekeeper with a thriving hive. "Don't be discouraged."

Then Meghan pointed out that this tiny bolus of corpses was only a fraction of my colony; most of them had likely absconded - perhaps swarmed - before winter set in. This small bunch was not able to generate enough heat to keep warm through the winter. She helped me clean out the hive, and set it up to receive a swarm or a nuc later in the season. The new hive, she said, can really hit the ground running with the drawn out comb from last year's colony.

The bright side - and I do mean bright - is the honey. Fragrant, gold, sticky, chewy, sweet, thick honey, redolent with pollen and beeswax and the flavor of the garden. The hive apparently absconded before winter set in, leaving their 60 pounds of winter honey stores for me to extract, eat and share. 

More on honey extraction later ...