In Which We Keep Bees, and Vice-Versa

“Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so.”

--Douglas Adams

The truth is, most often, something at least slightly (and occasionally wildly) different from what you may be hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, feeling, or most especially thinking at any given moment.  Including right now, of course, but if we chase that particular white rabbit, we’ll never say anything useful at all.

So it is with keeping bees.  Most of what people think about it (even people who already do it) is not quite right.

There are a number of questions sensible people have when the subject of keeping bees in one’s backyard comes up, among them:

• Are you nuts?!  Bees sting!
• Isn’t it awfully expensive, what with all the special equipment you need?
• Doesn’t it hurt your back to lift a 50 pound box full of bees and honey?
• Doesn’t it take a lot of time?
• Are you nuts?!  Bees sting!

There are others, of course, but these are the ones we hear most often when telling people about our new hobby.  We don’t yet know anywhere near enough about beekeeping to consider ourselves “experts” but we expect that this will eventually change.  An expert, after all, is someone who has made every mistake possible in a narrow field; we certainly made a good start on that path last year; this year, we’ve encountered a few new doosies, but we figure we still have plenty more mistakes to make before we get our black-belts in bees.

So… to answer the common questions:

Yes, bees do sting.  But, to date, knock on wood, we have never been stung while working a hive.  We are sure that this will eventually change, but the truth is that bees are generally passive creatures, so long as you follow a few common sense rules.  The only times we have ever been stung have been when we were accidentally endangering a bee whose presence was unknown (sitting idly in the bottom of a sandal, for example, or resting on the hinge of a gate).  And both of these instances were before we got a beehive.

There have been plenty of times, in fact, when we have worked side by side with bees long before we ever thought about getting a hive of them in our backyard.  Our rosemary and basil plants are frequently buzzing with every kind of bee imaginable, and our raspberry autumn sage (you might know it as scarlet salvia) positively brims with bumblebees most of the year.  We get down in the dirt to tend to these plants, and have our faces and exposed arms literally inches away from the bees on a regular basis – we let them go about their chores, and they let us go about ours.  It is really quite peaceful.

As for when we are actually working the hive, no we don’t get stung, for a few simple reasons:

• ·         Protective clothing.  Some beekeepers are good enough at it that they can go in sans hat-and-veil, with no gloves, and even in shorts and short-sleeves.  We’re not there yet.  We wear homemade veils, long-sleeve shirts, jeans and boots, and the tight-fitting gloves preferred by medical facility cleaning crews world-wide.  We suppose it’s theoretically possible a bee might be able to sting through these gloves, but they give us the extra confidence necessary to stay calm, which is really key.
• ·         Mist of sugar-water.  Some (nay, most) beekeepers use smoke to “pacify” a hive of bees.  We reject this approach entirely, because, while it is effective, it is also a much harsher treatment of the hive than is typically realized.  The reason bees do not attack when they have been “smoked” is that smoke causes the bees to retreat to the hive in an attempt to minimize the damage caused by the supposedly impending forest fire – if the hive manages to go undamaged, then as many bees as possible must be alive to allow the queen to survive in the newly denuded forest – this is a highly stressful scenario for the hive; smoke doesn’t make them sleepy, it makes them panic.  We have not yet got enough experience to notice the difference (nor do we want it, frankly) but from at least one experienced beekeeper we have been informed that “smoked” hives take several hours to recover from this panic state and begin working properly again.  A sugar-misted hive (or better still, one sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar) is peaceful in the same way that office workers who are given an especially large Christmas bonus are peaceful.  They are temporarily out for a party, and return to work without too much grumbling.
• ·         Top Bar Hive.  This is the biggie.  We don’t run nearly as much risk of getting stung as most beekeepers do simply because when we work a hive, we are only working one comb at a time instead of exposing the entire hive all at once.  More on Top Bar advantages in a moment, but this is one advantage that answers the most common complaint we hear.  Yes, we will eventually get stung working the hive, but no, not that often, and yes, there are ways to minimize the possibility.

Of course, we are not all that sympathetic anyway to the wimpy complaint of “ooh, aren’t you afraid of getting stung?” simply because we’ve been stung before, and it didn’t really hurt very much.  We’d much rather be stung by a honeybee than, for example, step into a fire ant mound without noticing it.  Yes, a honeybee sting pinches a little, but after a fairly short while, you forget it happened.  Fire ants, though, remind you for days that you transgressed on their territory.  Nasty blighters.

The next big complaint, of course, was that beekeeping is an expensive hobby.  If you follow the traditional “rules” then, yes, that would be true.  Pick up a catalog from any of the handful of beekeeping equipment vendors throughout the country, and you’ll be shocked.  A full “starter kit” with Langstroth hive supers, stands, honey extractor, haz-mat suit, smoker, etc. could run you $600-800.  And that’s before you throw in a $100 for the actual bees.

Fortunately, you don’t have to follow those rules.

Top bar hives (more properly “horizontal top bar hives” or “hTBH”s – we’ll talk about “vertical” vTBHs some other time) can be made from scrap lumber (we’ve seen some stellar examples made out of torn up wooden pallets) for however much money you are willing to lay out for construction materials.  There are blueprints available on the web, but the truth is, you can use a little common sense to figure out what dimensions you want to use.  There’s a professional “large scale” hTBH beekeeper in New Mexico who has 50 acres of scrub land dotted with old water barrels sawed in half lengthwise – picture what kind of structures in nature the bees use, and you’ve got the idea – vTBHs are probably a little more realistic, since hollow trees are usually upright, but hTBHs work just fine, since bees are just as happy to build shorter comb in a longer lateral space as they are to build very long comb in a narrow space.

As for the extra “stuff” you don’t need any of it.  None.  Not one thing from those glossy catalogs.

You can make your bee suit from things you probably already own.  If you don’t have any filmy scarves long enough, maybe you’ll need to get some veil material from your local cloth store.  Other than that, maybe gloves (though, as mentioned, not all beekeepers wear them, and not wearing them has the advantage of letting you feel everything you are doing, and make fewer “oopsie, I dropped it” mistakes).

Hive tools?  Any strong flat tool will do; a sturdy carpenter’s ruler, a really good butcher knife, these will be just fine.  And as for a smoker?  Yeah, please don’t use one.  We’re serious.  You’ll want to get a spray bottle (preferably one that has never been used for anything else except maybe water) and/or something you can use to puff out powdered sugar (a baby powder container is a good example, though if you are going to use one, we recommend washing it thoroughly before filling it with sugar).  Neither of these items will run you anywhere near as much as the specialty equipment will, though.

The next big complaint is the heavy lifting.  We’ve got some good news:  in hTBH beekeeping, you’re not lifting much of anything.  Depending on how you construct your hive, you may have to remove a heavy lid (ours is made from a patchwork of scraps from old 2x8s, and is pretty heavy, but we’ve seen some that are nothing more than a piece of plywood held in place with bungie cords).  Once the lid is off, you only work one bar at a time (our bars are made from “1x1” lumber which is actually 1 ¼ inches wide), and the comb extending down from each of these bars will never, even when full of honey, be more than 2-3 pounds each, a weight we are fairly sure the big strong readers of this blog will be more than capable of managing.

The question, of course, arises because people are envisioning a Langstroth hive.  These are the big box hives you’ve probably seen if you have ever visited a commercial beekeeping setup of any size or scope.  They contain multiple boxes, one where the queen lays brood, and boxes above this where she is excluded (by use of a wire grate big enough for worker bees, but too small for the queen to get through); this is the perfect arrangement if your goal is to maximize the amount of honey you are stealing from the hive, but it is not so good if your goal is to cooperate with the bees.

It also poses the problem of needing to do a lot of heavy lifting – if you want to check on the health of the brood comb and the queen, you have to first remove the box containing all the honey, decide how much to take, and then get into the box with the queen.  You’ll notice this means you’ve got to expose every single bee in the hive, so you’ll be doing this in the midst of a frantic swarm of bees who are panicking because a) you’re messing with their house, b) you’ve probably “smoked” them, so their instinct is to huddle in the house you are messing with, and c) you’ve drastically altered the temperature in the hive, something they by instinct spend a great deal of time moderating.  So… why would you want to go through the trouble?

Taking a lot of time is probably the only reasonable topic to make the list of frequent complaints, but even then… we only work our hive for maybe 10 minutes at a stretch.  It is true that with a top bar hive, you really do need to work the hive more frequently than in a traditional hive (we inspect our comb once a week), but honestly, other than the initial building of the hive (which took a weekend, but could probably have been done faster if we were better carpenters), and the time taken to find a package of bees (we drove 30 miles to get ours; you could just as easily have them delivered to you), we can’t think of anything that takes more time than it would take to watch a sitcom on television.  Okay, we take a while to clean up after harvesting honey… but that’s a fun job.  30 minutes licking your fingers… a minute and a half washing up with soap and water.

That just leaves the final complaint, a repeat of the first.  And all we can say about those afraid of stings is, unless you are actually allergic to bees, you’re just a big ol’ wuss.  But don’t feel too bad about it… we, too, totally freaked out the first time we held a 3 lb package of bees, all buzzing at us like the end was nigh.  Trust us, though, if you can get over that initial fear, it is well worth it.

Happy farming!

Rethinking Our Place in a (Warming) New World

“It is notable that as these data records have grown longer and climate models have become more comprehensive, earlier predictions have largely been confirmed. The only real surprises have been that some changes, such as sea level rise and Arctic sea ice decline, have outpaced earlier projections.”

--“Climate Change Impacts in the United States”, U.S. National Climate Assessment, U.S. Global Change Research Program, page 2

We have, naturally, written extensively before about global warming and its likely impacts.  And most people who find this blog, whether intentionally or by accident, are likely to be of at least a relatively scientific bent, meaning that the obvious truth of global warming is taken, more or less, at face value.  There is legitimate debate in the scientific community over how quickly the Earth is warming, or what particular tipping points may exist, and what impacts will be felt where, and when, but there is no longer any legitimate debate over the most basic of questions, “Is the Earth warming?”

There are some interesting questions to be raised from a purely sociological perspective, however, in recognizing the uncomfortable truth that not everyone accepts the very real, very palpable fact that human activity is largely responsible for changes to our climate which are both irreversible and incomprehensible.  Douglas Adams once quipped that the last thing a human being needs is a true sense of perspective, since our utter insignificance would destroy any individual ego if we ever felt the full scope of it all at once.  In that context, it is perfectly natural that – in spite of overwhelming evidence – any given human being would deny that we have, collectively, done irreversible harm to the very ecosystems which allowed for our existence.

Enough warning flags have been raised about potential disasters related to climate change; we are not writing today to cause any more alarm.  Instead, we would like to suggest some small shifts in perspective which might be helpful to those who will find disaster unfathomable, even as it occurs.  The truth is, our species is likely to survive global climate change, and some members of our species, at the very least, are likely to thrive under whatever conditions emerge at the other end of the change curve.

What we are interested in is teaching people to care about the idea that we should minimize the harm we are doing, and maximize the good we can share.  Plain and simple, why don’t we all try to do what will be of most benefit to the most people?  Sounds simple… but it is a radical idea.

We would like to interject at this point that we are not talking about some utopian ideal.  Socialism, communism, fascism, libertarian capitalism… all of these economic and political ideologies are based upon prima facie assumptions which are not founded in any kind of scientific principle.  And all are inconsistent with the physical realities of human existence.  No economic theory, after all, has ever been formulated with the thought in mind that basic economic activities in and of themselves have an impact on the viability of ecosystems. 

The basis of economics is exploitation, and we do not mean that in a pejorative sense.  It’s the simple truth – some raw material is plundered, molded, and bartered in exchange for either another manufactured good, or else for currency, which may then be used to purchase a manufactured good.  But all of it, every last bit, begins with the extraction from nature of a raw material.  Economics of any ideological stripe are by nature at odds with the environment.

Slowly, humanity has become aware of the impact this friction has imparted – crop rotation, an invention of American farmers in the late 18^th century, is an example of an adaptation humans have made to a uniquely human-caused problem, soil depletion.  There are other examples, and it is no accident that they come primarily from industries in which humans exploit other life forms.  Forestry is largely the study of how to rejuvenate woods which have been exploited for lumber.  Fishery science largely relates to management of fish populations exploited for human consumption.  Even the field of microbiology is inundated with studies related to molds, bacteria and viruses which have undergone wild evolutionary shifts due to human behavior.

So – human beings are changing the world in ways we do not always immediately perceive.  Some of those changes have consequences we would probably not have invited upon ourselves had we been aware beforehand, but since it is too late now to remake those fateful first choices, what ought we to do about it?

*Revisit cosmological assumptions – most world religions (Buddhism being the most notable exception) place humanity at the center of existence.  Even historically, this makes little sense, but it is especially narcissistic and asinine at a time when we know that the universe has been expanding for  14 billion years, and that even if there are other self-aware beings elsewhere in that vast, inconceivable void, we will likely (the laws of physics being what they are) never encounter them.  The basic problem with most human religions is… the stage (aka “The Universe”) is far too big for the drama (aka “our measly little human problems”).  No offense to anyone, of course.  We’re just not really that important, universally speaking.

*Redefine our values – note we do not say “change”; we must merely find a way to restate our human values within a more realistic context.  There is an almost universal moral aversion to murder, for example.  Perhaps we would be better served by asking ourselves why we share so many fundamental moral opinions.  In context of global warming… are there things we would not be doing if only we had the perspective from which to see what impact they are having?  Who would consciously buy a Hummer, for example, if they realized that guzzling gas at a ridiculous 8 miles to the gallon was causing every man, woman and child in Vanuatu to be homeless?  Yet, that is precisely what has happened.  You drive a gas guzzler, you are guilty.  QED.

*Educate ourselves to the degree possible/plausible.  Not everyone is capable of reading through a Scientific American article and making heads or tails of what has been said/described/discovered/discredited.  However, everyone is capable of reading more than one source (yes, I’m talking to you, FOX News viewers), and paying attention to what kinds of consensus are being built around given ideas.  You would never know from talking to a member of John Q. Public who is a “climate skeptic” that 97% of the scientists who study climate hold the belief that not only is warming happening, but that humans are the primary cause of warming.  This is because the general public, in general, chooses not to be educated.

TheU.S. National Climate Assessment released earlier this year is an excellent place to start, for those who do not truly understand the issues involved.  For one thing, over 300 different scientists both in and out of government worked on this document.  For another, the issue is broken out into a variety of contexts – global warming is discussed in terms of each sector of the economy, and for each section of the country, and response strategies are laid out (both for government and the private sector).

Perhaps the saddest (most telling?) part of the whole story is that much of the American South – home to some of the most closed-minded, bigoted, ignorant climate change deniers in the world – is actually experiencing either only modest temperature increases, or even (particularly for large swaths of Mississippi and Alabama) declining temperatures.  For a self-absorbed population with a history of egocentrism (okay, too polite – we’ll go ahead and say it, racism), it makes perfect sense that there would be an inelegant ignorance of what is happening in the rest of the world.

But make no mistake, we are all in this same lifeboat together.  There are few local advantages to be gleaned from a collapse of global ecosystems.  Adaptation and survival will depend very much on not only our own actions, but also on the actions of our fellow humans hundreds and thousands of miles away from us – we must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.

As a healthy place to start, we humbly ask that you read the U.S. National Climate Assessment.  Even if you find it a bit dry, we promise… it’s better for your brain than turning on the tube to find out what that wacky Kardashian clan is up to.  Seriously.

Happy farming!