Honey bee hovering over a crocus.
Photo by the author.
March 25, 2010
I started keeping bees last year for the honey. I love honey, but I also love mead and mead making. My husband and I had experimented with a couple of different recipes, made perfectly drinkable concoctions, but only on a casual basis. A five-gallon batch of mead takes between 10 to 15 pounds of honey, and we didn't always have access to that much flavorful honey. Interesting mead demands varietal honey, not monotonous supermarket honey. The best mead we've made so far was brewed from Bennet's Honey Farm's Piru Canyon Wildflower Honey.
When I moved from the elbow-to-elbow confines of arid Southern California to a rural spread in upstate New York, I decided to start three bee hives. I read Kim Flottum's The Backyard Beekeeper, researched online, made lists of equipment, dithered over if I'd gotten the right equipment, agonized over where to get bees, and finally found the local beekeeping club. I asked more questions, got more answers than I knew what to do with, took a basic course with the club and another with the Dyce Lab at Cornell University. It wasn't until I gently installed my first bees into their pristine new hives that I realized an important thing.
I still didn't know what the heck I was doing.
A honey bee dives in before the flower fully opens.
Photo by the author.
I had just assumed responsibility for 30,000 tiny insects who, with proper husbandry, would reward my care with pounds and pounds of raw honey. Thirty thousand insects who (so the books said) cared more about getting nectar and pollen than about stinging me as I poked about in their home, nosey, curious and completely inexperienced.
I got stung through my work gloves.
I donned my full bee gear every time I went to my hives - head to toe - and marveled at my bee club's veterans who waded through clouds of bees in their jeans and T-shirts without so much as a nick.
Gradually the honey bees became more interesting to me than the honey. The cold, rainy days seemed to always coincide with the times I could visit my hives, thwarting my nosiness. I had way too few opportunities to open them and see what was going on (or not) in the bee world. Despite that, I grew more attached to the bees' activities. If I had the chance to watch (from a very respectful distance without my equipment) then I'd grab it, always in danger of letting "just a quick look" turn into "where the heck did you go for the last hour?" I did get some delicious honey in the fall (mead results still pending), and I buttoned up the hives to get ready for the northeast winter.
Then I fussed over whether I'd sufficiently prepped the hives for winter, and wondered if I would have any bees come the spring. I had a well-traveled snowshoe path between my three hives by February.
Honey bee covered in pollen, will a wad of pollen
on her back legs (the "pollen basket").
Photo by the author.
Only one colony survived. I probably lost one in December when we had a nasty cold snap, and the other in late October or early November when the bees decided to find a more hospitable place to live. I visit my lone survivor frequently, putting an ear to the boxes to reassure myself that they're still buzzing. With only one hive, my status as "beekeeper" (instead of a "bee-haver") seems more precarious even as the weather improves.
With the early spring plants blooming, I just had to check to see if the bees had found the flowers yet. They need the protein in pollen for the bee larva. This time of year is important for honey bees as they rebuild the colony's population in preparation for the April and May nectar flow (which will give me some spring honey.) I didn't have time to grab my bee clothes, but I couldn't squander my time getting dressed up.
The hive bustled with healthy activity. Bees arrived and left in a constant stream, and they had a mellifera traffic jam at the hive's small winter entrance. I watched for a while, completely unmolested. The bees had better things to do than sting me.
Then I realized I was squatting right next to the hive -- no more than a foot away -- rapt.
Bare-handed, I wiggled the hive's winter entrance and opened it up some. (Beekeepers call this an "entrance reducer" which keeps mice out of the hive in the fall.) The bees poured out of the new opening. Some of them just walked around, some of them checked out the pollen-laden bees coming in, some of them hovered then took off on a foraging expedition. A couple checked me out, and deemed me boring.
At that moment I realized that I'm no longer a new "beek". My one year under the veil has at least given me the confidence to be near the bees with minimal apprehension, and far more anticipation. I want to watch them, learn from them and enjoy their activities. Oh, yeah. And get some honey.
I wanted a hobby. I found an infatuation.
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