One of my long-standing ambitions has been to keep bees – to contribute to the fight against bee death, to help the environment in general, and specifically with my garden. Then a friend sent me a link to a new kind of hive that looked really cool, and in a moment of madness I ordered one, so now I had to figure out what it would take to actually do it!
After some snooping around I found a woman my age who keeps loads of bees, and was willing to teach me and provide me with a start-up miniplus (a small nuc, or society).
Our initial meeting wasn’t promising at first – her husband was clearly no fan of bees, and the mere mention of her taking me on as her student had him leaving the room – but once we were in the meadow across from their home things started to look up. Alexandra was clearly in her element, and moved from one mini-hive to the next with the grace of a Tai Chi master. Me, I felt quite clumsy in my new astronaut outfit but it’s interesting and fun, and for the most part the bees are very good-natured, which helped.
A couple of times the hives that we check do react rather aggressively but more often than not the bees let themselves be handled without any apparent concern at all – Alex even reaches in with her bare hand and pushes bees out of the way to show me stuff, something which I wouldn’t have thought possible in a million years.
And there is a lot of stuff to take in: reading the size of cells to determine what kind of bee is being bred; learning what signs to look for to see if a bee is a worker or a drone, old or young, of one species or another; looking at the hive’s behaviour to see how the queen is faring (and vice versa), and so on. It’s rather daunting, and the notion of a full-sized hive feels quite overwhelming, but I guess all beginners start out that way.
After three sessions I am deemed to be ready to care for my own bees (or rather, to not make a complete mess of things), and so I find myself early one morning driving home with a styrofoam box in the trunk filled to the brim with 3,000 new friends. With the exception of bringing my newborn children home from hospital I have never driven this carefully, albeit for different reasons! If these guys get out inside the car it won’t end well, and no lullaby in the world will change that. But nothing happens, the bees stay calm inside their sealed-up box, and accept their new home without fuzz.
The change is noticeable immediately. I never lacked for insects in my garden, but now there are bees on every flowering plant. Oregano, thyme and rocket are still in bloom, and there is a buzz of busy bees there from sunrise to sunset. I take paternal pride in just watching them going about their day – bringing back pollen from my butternut squash (protein rich for their young), making honey (sweet carbs for those long cold nights to come) and generally flying about, discovering their new surroundings.
The work doesn’t end here for me, however: the hive needs protection from mice, woodpeckers, badgers, other bees and the dread varroa. Then the girls need sugar to help them build reserves ahead of winter – as much as six kilos of sugar water before the temperature drops, but not so much as to block the queen from laying more eggs – making winter workers the colony will also need to survive.
And speaking of the queen: she should have been marked before she came here, but wasn’t, so under the carefully watching eyes of my teacher I have to reach into the seething mass of bees, pin her down gently with a finger (the queen, not my teacher), extract her with my bare hands, and paint a dot on her thorax with a marker, all the while having bees all around and all over me. It’s quite daunting, and I have to be reminded to breathe several times during the process, but it goes well, thankfully.
When I’m done Alexandra laughs. I ask what so funny, and she admits she’s never seen a beginner do that on the first attempt. Most bee keepers would use extraction tools and certainly never take off their gloves when performing this operation, she adds. I stare at her, disbelief mingled with pride – it apparently pays to not know what is supposedly not possible when attempting the impossible. I look back at the frames where my newly crowned queen is being greeted by her adulating subjects – one of whom I could arguably be said to be – and I can’t help but laugh, too; clearly this – and I – was meant to bee.
