BEE YOURSELF: Zen and the Art of Becoming a Beekeeper

I’ve written on this blog before about the importance of gardening with honeybees in mind (see my post, ‘Bee Aware,’ published May 9, 2013). But early in the summer of 2021, with the pandemic focusing me, like so many others, on finding solutions to the environmental crises we face as a planet, I finally decided to put my money where my mouth is. I became a beekeeper.

This was only possible because two years prior to this my husband and I purchased the vacant lot next door. Sadly, our elderly neighbor Lamar had passed away. Lamar was the gentleman who quipped, when I offered him some of my homemade muscadine wine: “No, no, that’ll have me seeing double and feeling single.” A couple from a neighboring town purchased his modest house, but declined to buy the adjacent one-third-acre lot he owned, which stretches from Kent* Street to the woods behind our house, angling into the trees to include a couple of big oaks and pecans. When Lamar’s son offered the lot to Fred and me, we bought it right away, hoping to expand our wildlife-friendly garden and preserve a buffer of undeveloped land on the south side of our property.

It soon became apparent that an expanded garden was not a viable plan, however. The new homeowners erected an enormous floodlight on the back of their property which they burn throughout the dark hours, banishing nighttime for us and discouraging birds, insects and mammals from nesting or breeding on the property. We were unable to persuade this couple to turn off the light, even for just a few hours during the night, or to put it on a motion sensor. Since the floodlight was installed, we have lost the colony of synchronous fireflies whose blinking lights sparkled above our moist meadows every May and June; Photinus carolinus cannot read the flashing lights of potential mates unless they are dancing together in darkness. The owls seem to have moved on, as well, as have numerous mating pairs of songbirds who presumably do not find the prison-yard atmosphere of our garden at night conducive to either nesting or resting.

For the purpose of supporting wildlife, the only possible use of the extended lot eventually presented itself: hosting a honeybee colony. I did as much research online as I could on this topic of artificial light affecting bees, but there was precious little information. Putting the question to beekeepers yielded more practical feedback, including the commercial apiarian who told me that if honeybees have any response to bright light it may attract them, but that artificial lighting affects them only negligibly, in any case, since all bees return to the hive when the sun goes down. I also checked our town ordinances before taking the next step; they do not prohibit beehives.

My single hive and colony were installed in June 2021 by beekeepers Cameron and Riley Spath, a young married couple who live and work among their honeybees in Smyrna, SC. Their company, Honeystrong, sells package bees (nucs) and queens, along with all types of beekeeping gear and equipment. With Covid having disbanded my local beekeepers association, hands-on help was not available except from commercial concerns like Honeystrong or The Landing Board in Bostic, NC, which also proved to be a good source, if a distant one. In the ten months since the Spaths installed my hive and demonstrated some essential skills for me, such as using the smoker and inspecting the frames on which the bees store honey, pollen and brood, I have come to rely on them for practical advice and durable materials.

Now, with close to a year of bee-tending behind me and twenty-eight hive visits, I wear my beekeepers’ suit and hood with authority if not total confidence. I still have much to learn, and after hours spent poring over beekeeping books and websites, I can say with great certainty that the only way you really learn how to be a better beekeeper is to pull on your gloves, grab your smoker, and get out there.

Today felt like a milestone. It was a glorious spring day in the neighborhood: pink buds swelling on the old apple trees in the meadow, the trees in the woods starting to wear the thinnest gauze of green, and the air filled with birdsong as the mockers and thrashers, the finches and sparrows and redbirds and bluebirds, began mating and settling into their nests.

Over the weekend, Fred and I traveled to Smyrna to buy a shallow super to add to the hive. This is a painted wooden box about eight inches deep, with ten wooden frames lined with comb foundation hanging from the bottomless box. (Imagine a file drawer filled with hanging files – that’s what a hive box resembles with the frames in it.) The shallow super allows a crowded hive to expand, but is not so large that the volume added to the hive becomes counter-productive. Too much space, added overnight, can overwhelm bees striving to protect their colony from robber swarms or other predators. A colony which is thriving, however, will increase its population in the spring: therefore, Apis mellifera must have elbow room, loosely speaking.

My Italian girls seem to have made it through the winter in very good shape: I fed them sugar syrup in the build-up to colder weather, and when the days were shortest and the nighttime temps at their lowest (here in upstate SC the mercury can drop into the teens, and we have at least one snowfall every winter) I fed them dry sugar cakes and pollen patties. They rewarded me by remaining busy on those warm days when I made hive inspections, and to encourage them I tried always to have something blooming in the garden for those bees doing the foraging. That’s not so easy in January, but even in deepest winter, my rosemary shrubs sported papery blue blossoms, and in February, it did my heart glad to see so many of my bees buzzing around the ivory, pink and purple cup-shaped flowers of the hellebores (Lenten roses) growing in masses in the shady regions of the garden.

This afternoon I made my way out to the hive with the new super and the new metal queen excluder. In the first year, I was advised to let the colony settle in and get established, letting them keep all their honey as stores for the winter. I was told not to plan on extracting honey for myself until their second season in their new home. The excluder will help me in this: as 2022 moves forward, it will allow all the worker bees to clamber through the narrow slats upwards into the new shallow super where they can store honey in the comb. The queen bee, however, who is slightly larger than all the other bees, will be too large to pass through and will not be able to lay eggs in this box. When the honey begins to ‘flow’ in the spring and early summer, only the top box, or shallow super, will need to be removed in order to access the honey. As I was opening the hive on this visit, cleaning out the feeder tray, scraping propolis off the tray and the frame ends (this is the sticky orange substance the bees produce to make things adhere, and to make the interior of the hive more secure), and using my screwdriver to lift the ends of the frames, heavy with honey, to see how the bees were progressing, I realized that for the first time in twenty-eight hive visits I wasn’t at all nervous about the bees buzzing around me by the hundreds. I was so calm and relaxed as I worked the hive that it occurred to me I should probably be using my smoker more often if I wanted to avoid being stung. So, I gave the bellows a few more squeezes, but it wasn’t really necessary. I had attained zen-state with the honeybees!

Threats to my colony remain, and I will have to address them all in the weeks and months to come: varroa mite infestation, loss of habitat and the dearth of foraging material, aggressive invader bees, and the ongoing concentration of pesticide use, especially the use of systemic pesticides in a class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids (banned in many European countries) which are believed to be the main culprit behind Colony Collapse Disorder. From April 2020 to April 2021, nearly HALF the honeybee colonies in the U. S. were wiped out by CCD. This ghastly syndrome occurs when worker bees, whose neurologic systems are impaired by exposure to neonicotinoids or parasites or both, are unable to find their way back to their hives, thus causing the collapse of the finely tuned functioning of the colony and leading to the death of the colony’s bees.

In my own garden I have worked hard to wean myself off the use of commercial pesticides, especially steering clear of Bayer Complete Insect Killer, Bayer Rose and Flower Killer and Ortho Bug-B-Gone, all neonicotinoid foliar sprays that are toxic to honeybees and other beneficial insects. Even in my vegetable garden, where I am sometimes thwarted by squash vine borers on my zucchini plants, I have more or less decided to let the pests have their portion rather than subject the bees, along with my husband and I who eat these veggies, to exposure from lethal chemicals. Meanwhile, I try to spread the good news about honeybees. In the first place, they pollinate our gardens and crops, making plants bear fruit and flowers. And unlike some other species of bees, they do NOT drill holes in our decks or wood siding: those are carpenter bees, Xylocopa virginica. Painting the wooden surfaces can deter these destructive bumblebees.

Secondly, to state the obvious, honeybees produce honey. For those of us who love this ideal food and have discovered its advantages over refined sugar along with its health-promoting benefits, there is no substitute. One hive with a full colony of 30,000 to 40,000 bees can produce anywhere from 40 to 60 pounds of honey in a season. No wonder the Egyptian pharaohs prized their bees so highly!

Lastly, working with bees is one of the most rewarding activities I’ve tackled in my considerable years on this Earth, and I know that’s true for other beekeepers I have met. The bees exert a calming, anxiety-reducing influence on the people who tend them, and in our strange modern era when we are confronted by cataclysmic environmental threat, brutal war in Eastern Europe, and the continuing risks of a lethal virus unleashed on the world’s population, we need respite from the bombardment of bad news. I don’t delude myself that by tending one beehive I am saving the planet, but this commitment does gratify my need to be doing something positive in the face of so many problems that are beyond my control. I’ve noticed that after finishing up a hive visit and hanging my bee suit from a hook on the porch in order to let the smell of smoke dissipate, I come indoors feeling a burst of creativity. Spending time with the honeybees seems to kindle inspiration, and leads to more time at my writing desk.

It could be that the bees trigger those parts of our brains that are also apparently stimulated by Mozart sonatas, improving our ability to understand order and structure, in what is known as “harmonic consonance.” This makes perfect sense to me, since the bees consistently amaze me with their well-ordered society, characterized by the precision of every individual bee’s function within that society as a worker, a queen, or as one of the minority of drones. Drones are the only males in the colony; they service the queen in order that she may lay eggs. They have a very nice life while it lasts, but as autumn approaches and the queen tapers off her egg-laying, the drones are gradually encouraged to take breaks from the hive. Once they leave, workers prevent them from reentering the hive, and the boys are left out in the cold to die. It’s a ruthless but very efficient system!

While humans chafe at living in societies that are too tightly regulated, it would serve us well, I believe, to take a lesson from the honeybees and apply our lives more steadfastly to a common good. Honeybees are committed to ensuring the longevity and wellbeing of the colony, and without hesitation, they throw themselves at anyone or anything which threatens their singular mission. Can humans claim to be doing the same?