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!

The Beeswax of Which it's None of Your...

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
--John Muir

For those who are unfamiliar with John Muir, he was the Scottish born 19th century naturalist who became known in his adopted United States as the “Father of the National Parks” – most of his time was spent in the wilderness.  He founded the Sierra Club, and spent a great deal of time in Yosemite, and probably tramped more through the Sierra Nevadas than did much of the wildlife there.  His perspective on nature was predominantly focused on wild places, but his wisdom rings true for backyard naturalists, as well.  When you tug on any one strand of your gardening environment, you find that it is all connected.  What happens a thousand miles away has a dramatic impact on your tomatoes, or your trees, or your vine-shaded pergola.

So, too, with bees.

The rules for the organic certification of honey point to the dilemma of trying to live a healthy life in the 21st century.  For starters, an organic bee hive must be no less than 2 miles distant from any recognized source of any kind of substance on a lengthy list of inputs which would contaminate the honey supply – this includes things like any agricultural facilities where chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides are employed, and also includes things like plastics processing facilities, plants producing fire-retardant chemical foams, petrochemical facilities, even something as seemingly innocuous as a maraschino cherry packing plant.  And organic honey from an urban bee hive?  Forget it.  Not going to happen – not unless you convince your city to give up automobiles, air conditioning, lawn fertilizers, hairspray, and probably electricity.

There has been a considerable increase in interest in backyard beekeeping since the introduction to popular consciousness of terms like “colony collapse disorder” and “Varroa mites”; paralleled with an increased interest in local foods and sustainable agriculture, one would think sustainable beekeeping would be on everyone’s lips.

One would be wrong.

Not only are beekeepers faced with the aforementioned organic obstacles, but “natural beekeeping” is not really all that popular an approach, either.  At least, it hasn’t been historically.  Myrtle is jumping on a bandwagon which has just left the station, however, in the form of an ancient method which is making a comeback.  It goes by the nifty handle Top Bar Beekeeping. 

Basically, the default setting for any information search on how to start keeping bees will reference a type of hive which has had almost unanimous market share ever since it was invented – the Langstroth hive.  This is the contraption most people immediately envision when thinking of beehives, complete with the keeper in his hazardous materials suit and thick mesh veil.  But bees have been “kept” for thousands of years, and the boxes of hives (built for suitability to human purposes, not the health and happiness of the bees themselves) have only been around for less than two centuries.

What did people do in order to harvest honey prior to the invention of the Langstroth boxes?

The earliest honey harvesters, of course, simply raided natural hives in trees.  And if you want to be a “natural” beekeeper, this would seem to be the most natural method.  A little compromise seems in order, though, given that there is no way to harvest the “natural” hive without destroying it.

The next step up was a type of hive called a “skep” and this is the type you’ll find in much of Eurasia to this day – it is basically a “wild” hive in form, like an upright log or a clay pot or some such, covered with a straw “hat”.  Much like wild honey, however, honey in a skep can only be harvested by destroying the hive.

The final step on beehive evolution before we get to the “modern” hive is the top bar hive – literally just a box (sizes and dimensions varying from place to place and culture to culture) with bars across the top, along the bottom of which the bees build their honeycomb just as they would in a tree.

The chief advantages to the top-bar method (as compared to wild honey harvesting) involve the ability manipulate the bars – that is, you can take out one bar at a time and (after gently brushing off the bees) cut off the comb and harvest the honey and wax.

Langstroth hives are the technological “advance” from this concept, wherein bees are forced to build their comb on a frame, going up rather than down and in a square rather than in a naturally drooped comb.  In addition, numerous “improvements” on bee culture have been made in Langstroth hives, including the ability to sequester the queen in one section of the hive so that brood only inhabits certain parts of the comb, leaving other parts to be entirely comprised of honey.

Langstroth hives, in short, are built for maximum production for humans.  Top bar hives are built as a compromise position, allowing the bees to behave as naturally as possible while still allowing for human consumption.

Which approach is more likely to be healthy for the bees, and as a consequence, for the surrounding environment?

If you have to ask which we would prefer at Myrtle’s place, you haven’t been paying attention.  Langstroth hives are symbols to us of all that is wrong with the human relationship to our food sources.  It is little wonder to us that in an era when billions of dollars are spent on apiculture, Varroa mites and various bacteria, parasites, and viruses contrive such a thing as colony collapses. 

Bees, in short, are smarter about apiculture than people could ever hope to be.

Case in point – next time you venture near an herb garden, pay especial attention to which flowering herbs attract the most bees.  Some are obvious – basil (particularly the pungent anise-flavored basils such as African Blue) will literally buzz because the bees love them so much.  They are rich sources of pollen, and it is only natural that the bees should love them.

Other plants, though, like lavender, are also buzzing, in spite of not being a tremendous food source for bees (or any other insect, for that matter).  Lavender has a great deal of nectar proportionally to the size of its blooms, but those blooms are rather small, and they are chock full of irritating oils to boot; and while it smells lovely to humans, lavender is not particularly appealing to bees, who only make lavendar honey when (such as is the case in much of France) humans force them to by monocropping the plant for miles and miles.  Why would bees flock – in rather impressive numbers – to a plant that does not provide them with the nutrients they need?

The reason bees flock to lavender, it turns out, is that lavender is noxious to mites.  Commercial beekeepers use many tons of chemicals every year to combat Varroa mites, with the result that they are genetically selecting stronger and stronger mites, and putting poisonous chemicals in their honey.  They ought to instead be spending much less money to plant natural remedies around their bee fields – lavender, juniper, cedar, creosote, and a host of other plants which in addition to making the bees healthier, make their honey tastier.

Unsustainable practices such as chemical treatment for mites are a natural consequence, though, of the shape of agriculture generally, not just of apiculture.  The vast majority of bees in this country are kept not for honey production, but for pollination.  Huge flatbed truckloads of Langstroth boxes go flying down our highways and byways each season chasing after the next crop needing fertilization.

Doesn’t this strike anyone else as just plain odd?  Why do we have to truck in bees to pollinate our almonds and apples and peaches?  Don’t answer, it was rhetorical.  We know what the industry says – it is “more efficient” to mass produce monocrops using trucked-in bees.

But the fruit doesn’t taste any better.  It isn’t as nutritious.  And the honey, frankly, sucks.

Wouldn’t it be better to have smaller hives in smaller orchards, producing better food? 

We certainly think so.  We have been privileged to live on the same half-acre as a wild hive for the last five years, and have only a couple of stings to show for our nosiness.  We plan on offering our bees a new home this Spring, a 30” top-bar hive of our own construction, with a viewing window on the side.  In exchange for letting us have some of their honey and beeswax, we hope to make our bees as safe and snug as we possibly can.  Maybe not organic, maybe not even entirely natural, but a fair sight better than what we see going on in American agriculture generally.  We’ll keep you updated.

Happy farming!