knows for whom the doorbell tolls? Actually, a brown-uniformed guy with heavy boxes knows: it tolls for me.
The boxes on my front porch have come from a beekeeping supply house, Dadant, the country's biggest and oldest. As I move them into the house, they make the sounds of wood rattling together like the top notes of a marimba. I'm expanding my bee yard, adding another hive, and adding some honey supers to the others. But first there's a lot of pounding and painting to do.
Opening the cardboard boxes, I'm greeted by the sweet smells of pinewood and fresh beeswax. Even devoid of mental associations, they smell wonderful, but throw in a few weeks of anticipation and a few years of memories and I'm nearly knocked over as I begin the process of nailing together the hive boxes, then the ten frames that go inside each one. Those frames each consist of four pieces of pre-cut wood that need to be nailed together into a rectangle. Into that frame, I need to coax a sheet of fragile, thinly pressed beeswax and nail a long narrow strip that theoretically holds the wax in place. Most of the job is not hard, but it is repetitious. It is hard to mess up the frame too badly, but it is easy to wreck the wax sheet. Barely thicker than construction paper, it can crack by accidentally flexing it a little too far while laying it into the frame, or clumsily punching a hole through it with the hammer while pounding in the tiny nails, poking out just a millimeter or two from the wax, that barely hold the thin strip of wood that barely holds the wax in place, hopefully long enough that the bees will cement it into place before it falls out.
FIRST BEEHIVE
When I mention my beekeeping, people sometimes ask “how did you get started?” (and sometimes “In the name of God, why?!?”). I wish I had a story that shows that I'd had noble environmental intentions and coherent motivation. But honestly, I got into beekeeping in the same way I've made a lot of big decisions of life, love, career, and philosophy—by stumbling into them in an unfocused, whimsical, and alarmingly superficial manner.
When I think about it, most of those decisions turned out all right. Either there's method in my madness, or I've been pretty damned lucky. As a case study, here's how I stumbled into beekeeping.
Ant Farm on Steroids
Blame the shortcomings of ant farms for my introduction to beekeeping.
Remember ant farms? My several siblings and I got one as a present one year. At first it was fascinating, elbowing the others to get a better vantage point while watching the ants digging new tunnels through the virgin sand. Not much time passed, though, before the farm collectively became just another ignored and neglected pet. The tipping point came when the soil was thoroughly dug and the farm became a depressing existential hell filled with depressed and moping ants with absolutely no purpose in the world. Worse, their numbers slowly dwindled, as they died off one by one to be buried by the survivors—for reasons not fully explained—in the northeastern corner of the farm. When the farm got down to just one of the social insects listlessly pushing a clump of dirt pointlessly from point A to point B, it was more than a tender heart could bear.
The ideal would've been to have gotten a queen ant. They lay eggs so the colony wouldn't die out. They also have pheromones that keep an ant farm both motivated and populated. But ant suppliers don't provide queens and when digging up my own ants I never found a queen, so I finally gave up on ant farms.
Then, a decade after my last ant farm, I found something even better, something like an ant farm on steroids: a fully functioning observation beehive. The best part of it was that these bees looked happy and industrious, and I soon saw the reason: they had a queen. They had eggs and larvae. It was a working, thriving community that looked as if it were purposeful instead of tragic. I wanted one.
I Got One . . . Sort Of
It was only a year or two later that I saw a newspaper feature about a local guy who built and sold observation hives. I called him up right away, drove to his house in San Francisco, and bought one. Well, the box anyway. No bees. He suggested finding a local beekeeper and asking to buy a couple of frames of bees and a queen. No problem.
With some effort, I found the name of a beekeeper. I had already arranged to keep the bees in the library of a small counterculture “hippie” school where I taught middle and high school students art, phys ed, history, film, and so on for a very modest wage. One snag: when I called him, he wouldn't sell me just a couple of frames. What he said made sense: “An observation hive is so small that it will be just barely self-sustaining. You'll probably need to add bees to it now and again, trade out old frames and add new ones full of larvae if you lose your queen, and so on.” He suggested I get a whole, standard beehive and use it to keep the observation hive going. “You might even get a little honey out of it,” he added.
“You might even get a
little honey out of it,”
he added.
20,000 Bees—Postage Paid
This was getting more complicated than I'd intended. It wasn't like I really wanted to interact with bees. They scared me to death, actually. I'd just wanted to watch them from a vantage point that was safely behind Plexiglas.
In those pre-internet days, finding out what to do next wasn't that easy. I did what I usually did when confronted with a great unknown: I went to the library and found a book on the subject. Bolstered with book learning and absolutely no direct knowledge, I discovered that I could buy equipment and bees from the only retail establishment foolish enough to issue me a credit card, Sears, Roebuck & Co., back when it was a retail powerhouse. Besides its huge general catalog, it issued a dozen specialized ones, including Farm & Garden.
I was making $8,400 in 1980 and I'd already spent about $100 on an empty observation hive. A beekeeping starter kit, complete with a build-it-yourself hive body box, smoker, “sting-resistant” canvas gloves, book, and protective veil cost maybe $60, and three pounds of live bees with queen, another $30. This was becoming a very expensive whim, but I was halfway in and I couldn't quit because an empty observation hive would be as depressing as a dead ant farm.
Luckily, the kit came first. It gave me the chance to put everything together, read the book, try on the frighteningly flimsy gloves and the gap-prone veil. With it came a notification that the bees would arrive in a few weeks when the weather warmed up a bit. “No hurry,” I thought.
In 1980 a beekeeping
starter kit, complete
with a build-it-yourself
hive body box,
smoker, “sting-resistant”
canvas
gloves, book, and
protective veil cost
maybe $60.
Weeks
