Some Beekeeping Lessons

I lost my one and only hive over the winter, probably to mites. I called my friend Gil to ask what to do.“Tony—you know Tony? My son-in-law. He went up last weekend to a place in Vacaville where they sell bees by the pound. Buy three pounds and you’ll have honey by fall.”

So on Saturday I drove out to Vacaville, about an hour and a half away. I figured I’d just replace the hive I’d lost. A friend decided to join me and we took off early Saturday morning along Highway 80. After about an hour, we turned off the main highway and snaked along a small country road. Farmhouses and small cottages hid amongst oaks and grasslands. The address was so obscure, we had to double-back several times looking for the dirt road cut-off that led to Bee Happy Apiaries’ driveway. A sign at the fork read: “Drive past white house and up hill to barn”.

When we reached the barn at the top of the rise, we drove into a line of cars and waited our turn. A young man came by, we slid down the window and he asked how many pounds of bees we wanted. On the spur of the moment, I decided to get a second hive and pay for two three-pound packages of bees. Each package came with one queen.

The scene around us was amazing. The barn, an open aired large metal building, was stacked sky high with hive boxes, while human worker ‘bees’ scurried everywhere, filling packages and handing them off to customers in cars. Bees swarmed around the stacked supers, or hive boxes, by the barn, but there also were dozens of supers lying in a large ditch by our idling car, so bees were swarming around the waiting cars as well. My friend turned the motor off and we got out. A young, attractive dark-haired woman wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and jeans was showing the people in front of us how to take care of their new starter hive. She had a thick Italian accent and talked animatedly. I daydreamed I was in the European countryside surrounded by the bustle of centuries-old beekeeping tradition.

When our turn came, the young man brought out two boxes made of wire and wood. Each box was about the size of a large shoebox. The top, bottom and ends were made of wood, while the long sides were made of plastic mesh. An upside down tin can covered a hole at the top. This housed the sugar water that fed the bees. A slit in the top of the wood by the tin can held a much smaller box, the size of a matchbook. Also made of wood and mesh, inside this box was the queen.

“Put them out in the cool of the evening. Just pull off the feeder, slide the queen box out, and dump them all in the hive body. Use a shallow super.”

A ‘super’ is a generic name for a single hive box. Supers come ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’. Deep supers are exactly that—deeper by about twice the shallows. Each super has room for ten frame or combs. These frames hold the ‘foundation’ of either plastic or wax that the bees build their wax honeycomb cells on. Shallow supers are used for honey while deeps are used for brood. This is mainly because when a shallow is full of honey it weighs about fifty pounds versus one hundred pounds for a deep super. Imagine lifting that off the hive!

“Is it alright to put these in the back of the truck? Will it be too windy?” He didn’t think so.

“These are for free,” he said referring to the freeloader bees that swarmed around the outside of the wire netting. There were hundreds of bees clinging to the outside of each box. “They’ll probably stay on there all the way back to Marin.”

The humming of the bees, the activity on the ground and in the air, created a whirlwind of activity that I was reluctant to leave. The road back seemed too tame.

The day was hot for mid-April and when I arrived home the back of the truck was swarming with bees. The freeloaders had made it all the way back and were creating quite a raucous in my cul-de-sac. A neighbor woman and her two kids walked over to ask me to vote ‘yes’ on the local school bond. With all the bees swarming around, she asked what was going on around my truck. When I told her what I was doing, she pulled her kids out from the car and had them come over for a bee lesson. I brought them inside and showed them fresh honeycomb. Then we all had a taste of homemade honey.

Even after I had moved the 3-pounders out of the back of my truck, the freeloader bees kept swarming the truck bed. I drove to the store for an errand and the bees accompanied me into the Safeway parking lot. I drove back home and the bees were still there. I wasn’t sure why this was so. Back at Bee Happy, they had told me that they just scooped up bees from hives and combined them with reared queens. That would mean these bees hadn’t even gotten used to this queen’s pheromones. Why they had hung on so, I wasn’t sure.

My friend from the morning ride returned with her teen-age son to watch the ‘release’ that evening. The empty supers were ready and the bee boxes were seated nearby. My guests kept their distance while I worked one box at a time. First I pulled off the tin sugar can. The bees were balled up in the box keeping warm, and maybe also imitating a swarm. I had to shake and shake the box in sharp, jerking motions in order to force the bees out of the 3” circular hole into the empty super. My friend later told me she could barely see me through the masses of bees flying over my head and body. There was a certain power in shaking a ball of 12,000 bees over and over again with abandon. The energy of the swarm produced a phenomenal feeling in my body.

When I moved onto the second box, the tin can was stuck. I yanked again and again but couldn’t release the can from the hole. I put my foot on the top of the wooden box and pulled the can with all my might. I did this over and over again until, just when I thought I’d need a tool, the can released. I was nervous, because the one thing bees’ dislike is abrupt and sudden movements. I started shaking these bees into their super. I suppose the cool air must have made them docile, because they easily slipped into the large hive box, no worse for wear because of all my pounding. Besides, these were carnelians—honeybees bred for their gentleness and they definitely exhibited that.

Next I took the small box with the queen in it and hung it between two frames. I had placed pushpins in the side to hang it better. The idea is to allow the bees’ time to become used to the new queen, through pheromones, so they will accept her. Two or three days are usually enough time. The people at the apiary told me to slip the queen into the hive body that evening. Prudence told me to ‘just make sure’. If the bees didn’t ‘accept’ this queen, they’d destroy her. I repeated the procedure with the second hive. Two days later I’d return to the hives and pull the small cork that confined the queen inside the box. The bees chewed most of the cork away, trying to free her. She slid quietly down into the dark bowels of the hive.

I’d been checking on the bees fairly regularly and both queens seemed to be laying nicely. But a few weeks ago I noticed one of the hives was weak: the laying pattern just wasn’t right. I checked about a week and a half later and found no eggs, larvae, or capped cells of larvae. That was how I knew this hive no longer had a queen. I had been watching the hives periodically from my office window and could tell that one had strong activity and the other much less. But finding no larvae came as a surprise. I immediately ordered a new queen by mail. My dilemma was this: It takes 21 days to grow a worker from an egg. Bees live for only three to six weeks in the summer. My three pounds (12,000 bees) were already declining and no new eggs were laid. I had to obtain a queen, get the bees accustomed to that queen, and get that queen laying, plus have bees left over to tend to the larvae and the queen before new bees hatched. It all seemed a close call. I called my friends Bob Kaufman and Gil Thompson, both old men with lifetime experience in beekeeping.

“Don’t worry ‘bout that.” Said Gil. “You’ll have time. I’m sorry I can’t help you requeen as I’m going on vacation.”

Bob was more scientific about it. “Too bad you already ordered a queen. What you could have done was take a frame of fresh brood from your other hive and put it in your queenless hive. The bees would make a queen.” I never thought of that! Those are the nuances of experienced beekeeping. But of course that’s true. Bees can sense they are queenless within hours and will start enlarging the cell around an three-day old or less larva. In my case obviously no eggs were present with which to make a queen with.

“But you’d have to be sure there were fresh eggs in that frame. Do you know how to recognize eggs?” I told him I didn’t. “You have to train your eye.”

If a young egg or larvae is present, the bees make a specially constructed cell and start feeding the larvae Royal Jelly, a special food made in the glands of young. That food is what turns an otherwise common worker into a virgin queen. When the queen emerges, she must be the one and only. She kills all the other queen larvae and fights an old queen to the death if one exists. Within a few days she leaves the hive for her first and last time to mate.

“But there’s no drones in my young hive, so where would she find drones?”

After I asked this I realized it was a stupid question. She only has to mate once in her lifetime, with probably 15 to 18 drones, or male bees. From the sperm of all these drones, she’ll create a smorgasbord of genetic material. She wouldn’t want to mate with her own genetic kind.

“The drones come. They’re around and she goes to the place where they are.” He sounded like he shared a secret that only bees knew.

Within a few days the queen arrived by mail with a few attendants, some of whom died in transit. But she was intact. The wooden cage was identical to my previous ones, but this had a sugar plug instead of a cork. The sugar feeds the queen from the inside while the bees in the hive eat her out of the cage from the outside. I put her in a dark cupboard till I was ready the next day.

A friend was supposed to show. He had expressed interest in my bees when he saw them at a party.

“I could do that! I have space in my backyard. Yeah, I could do that.”

“Do you wanna go in with me sometime?” I asked.

“What do you mean ‘go in’?”

He kept expressing interest and I kept offering to take him inside the hive. Curiously, he never seemed to understand what I meant. I think he thought the bees never needed watching or tending. Of course, in the ‘old’ days, before the mites, pre-1990, old-timers tell me that’s almost how it was. Put on a few extra honey supers in the spring; take them off in the fall. But when the mites came over from Europe, the bee population was decimated. They had no resistance whatsoever. Ninety percent of our wild honeybees were killed! Now commercial and hobbyist beekeepers need to pay much more attention—put in mite strips in the fall; periodic requeening; and high hive losses.

But I think my friend had no idea that one went ‘into’ the hive. I got him an extra hood, but he never showed. When I called his house, his daughter said he was getting milk at the store. He just forgot. Maybe he had an allergic reaction just to the idea of going in!

So I requeened without the company. It took only a few moments and I left it for three days. When I returned, the bees had almost eaten her out of the box through the sugar plug, but she was still trapped inside. All the attendants were dead, but she looked very viable. Queens, unlike workers, live a long time, up to six years.

I carefully pulled the staples from the screen so as not to damage her. Worker bees crawled all around her and over my hands. I suppose they were anxious to get her inside now that they were used to her scent. Or, at least I hoped they were accepting of her. The workers could still kill her if they decided to.

My assignment was to come back in 3 or 4 days and look for eggs. Bob had drawn me a picture of a comb cell with an egg inside. He neatly sketched a hexagon.

“It’s not to scale,” he told me, which made me chuckle to myself because he had drawn it big. He explained that the queen will lay the egg right in the middle of the cell. “It looks like a dot with a little tail. It’s white and easy to see.” Worker bees that start laying will attach their egg to the side of the cell wall because their abdomen isn’t long enough to insert all the way to the bottom. A laying worker will only produce sterile drones, and since drones do not work, the hive will eventually die.

So today, I decide to check my hive for eggs. I’ve been tired from relentless foot pain. I got my bees originally because of a mysterious arthritis that plagued me on and off for the last twenty years. Diagnosed as ‘reactive arthritis’, it affected tendons and other soft tissue in my hands and feet. I’d tried everything, but only cortisone seemed to work. In the midst of trying it all, one of the crazier and more painful ‘remedies’ I did was bee therapy, which basically meant stinging therapy. The idea was to grab a bee with some tweezers between its abdomen and head joint, gently rub its butt on a pre-marked spot, and the bee will release its stinger into that spot. I got quite good at this. I’d mark my spots with ink x’s, then grab a bee right off of a flower with my tweezers, and just rub it on the x-spot. Some people say to leave the stinger on until it dries up—maybe five to ten minutes—others swear that the first one to two minutes delivers all the venom. The stinger, including usually part of the bee’s insides, sits on you and pulses away, pumping venom. The poor bee crawls off to die, its insides torn literally outside. A bee in the field has nothing to defend and will almost always abscond if disturbed. I began feeling angst every time I had to ‘kill’ one.

People who do lots of stinging usually collect bees from a hive and put them in a jar. The jar then goes in a dark cool location and you feed them honey. I did this for a while too. One thing you notice is that the older the bee, the less likely it is to sting you. You can tell the older ones by sight because they get darker in color and shinier, as their hairs rub off. With an older bee I might sometimes have to push its abdomen, literally, over and over again into my skin. This was definitely tortuous, for the bee, and me because I kept expecting the sting that never came.

The most diligent I ever was with this treatment was 5 to 6 stings at a time, 3 times a week, for about 6 weeks time. At the end, I saw no difference in my arthritic sites. What I did notice was a sense of euphoria and energy after the stings that lasted a few hours. The body releases endorphins as well as cortisol in response to the venom, and this in turn does boost the immune system.

What I did get out of the treatment was an interest in beekeeping. I’m really just a mild hobbyist, yet it’s the experience of ‘going into’ the hive that keeps captivating me. Oddly enough, with all the activity, humming and buzzing, it’s very neurologically calming. I know what will happen when I go ‘in’ for that fifteen minutes or so: I will be transported, fascinated, focused, and calmed down. ‘Going inside’ takes over ones’ consciousness. It’s an awesome experience when you open a box with 50,000 bees, buzzing, humming, crawling rapidly all over the frames. I just forget to be afraid, forget that these bees even can sting. Sometimes I have to take the hive apart to get down to the bottom super. By the time I’m down there, thousands of bees are flying all around me. Imagine if someone took the roof off your house, and then poured smoke inside. How disorientating!

I once took a workshop at the home of a man who kept over a hundred hives professionally. Only two of us showed up for the workshop, so in the afternoon the four of us (husband and wife team) began opening up several hives at a time. The wife was working the hives in shorts, a t-shirt, and a hood. Hundreds of thousands of bees flew around us as we searched deep into the bottoms of several hives at a time. This man was moving and talking so fast that I barely could keep up. He found a frame with lots of queen cells. He took that frame and put it in a weaker hive. Then, as he searched the frames, he found one with an emerging queen. We watched as the queen emerged from her pupae.

I asked the almost naked wife if she’d ever been stung badly dressed as she was.

“Only once. I was unloading hives from the back of a truck, when I dropped the hive box. That was bad! One time my daughter was badly stung and had to go to the hospital.”

After that workshop, I’ve never worn gloves. The smell of the smoke from the smoker, prying off the frames (that are sealed with bee glue or propolis from tree resins) and pulling them out to inspect for honey or brood, watching the bees dive head first into the cells to drink up honey when threatened by the smoke, looking for drone cells and queen cells—there’s always so much to do or see ‘inside’ that I forget myself completely.

I stoke the smoker, don my hood, and open the hive in question. Although I had two large supers for the hive body, I know the queen will probably be in the bottom one. I briefly inspect the top box and find that it is all honey, so I pull the box off and go into the bottom super. Queens usually like to lay in the middle of the box, while the honey to support the brood goes on the outside frames. When all ten frames are in the box it’s hard to move around so I pull off the end frame and set it gently down beside me. Then I go directly for one of the middle frames. I pry off the bee glue and nudge the frame out of the box. I hold it to the light. I see nothing in the cells, I take the frame out of the shade of the tree where the hive body lay and walk into the sunlight. I look and look, but through the netting of the hood I can’t distinguish any eggs. The white plastic frame underneath just shines back at me, making it that much harder to see white eggs.

“I don’t think you’ll see eggs. I can’t.” Gil would later tell me. “Bob has good eyes.”

I repeat this procedure with the next frame. Still no luck. By the third frame I’m getting nervous. Have I lost my queen? I hope they haven’t killed her. I decide to give the bees as well as the cells a harder look. I watch the bees busily moving around and over the cells. They are all workers, no drones. All the movement fascinated me and I am mesmerized, motionless. Suddenly, I see her. The queen! Unmistakable! I’ve never found the queen before in my hives. With a full and active hive, she is hard to find and most beekeepers only see her on occasion, if at all. But there she is, so much larger than the other bees, and much, much fatter than just a few days ago. Her abdomen is swollen with eggs! I watch her for a while. I felt she is oddly vulnerable and I want to put the frame back in the hive. I step toward the hive and she disappears into the mass of bees on the frame. I feel I need to keep her in view all the way back into the hive in order to make sure she’s safe. I look for her again, remembering what Bob had told me.

“I didn’t used to be able to see her. At the demonstration hive at the county fair, my wife could always spot her, but I never could. When I asked her how she did it, she said it was so easy ‘cause she looks so different. Not just bigger. The secret is that she’s shiny…shinier than all the other bees. She lives a long time and all the other bees keep rubbing her. Eventually they rub off all those hairs on her thorax and abdomen and she’s just shiny.”

I am elated. I put the frame gently back so as not to hurt her, close up the box, and go inside to call Bob.

“I saw her.”

“You saw you. Wow, you actually saw her.”

“I did.”

“You know what that means? They’ve accepted her. She’ll be laying now. Did you see the eggs?”

“No. I looked and looked but couldn’t see them.”

“You’ll just have to train your eye. It’s easy. You’ll just have to train your eye.”