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  Show Me the Honey

  Adventures of an Accidental Apiarist

  DAVE DOROGHY

  To my mother, Susan, who always taught my sister and me that the more things in life you are interested in, the more interesting your life becomes.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Preface

  Waggle Dancing on a Tidal Estuary

  The Sting

  The Process of Creating an Almost-Perfect Food

  The Outyard

  God Save the Queen

  The Mighty Mite

  Show Me the Honey

  I’ve Looked at Bees from Both Sides Now

  Wasps, Mashed Potatoes, and an Etch a Sketch

  Sugar, Sugar

  Conventional Wisdom

  Swarming Bee Club

  Bee School

  Fly United

  Old Man Winter

  All My Bees Are Dead

  Splitsville

  Photo Gallery

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Foreword

  I’ve known Dave for over 30 years, and he often jokes that I introduce him as “Dave, the honey guy.” In recent years, I’ve indeed enjoyed jars of honey from Dave’s hives, but you might be surprised to hear that our connection started with a global burger chain. Long before Dave became the honey guy he was my “McDonald’s guy.”

  A series of fortuitous events led Dave to join my Man In Motion World Tour team. I had been on the road and all around the world for over a year, but the Tour was far from a fundraising success. In fact, I was on the verge of losing hope. At this time, Dave was a junior ad man with Palmer Jarvis advertising agency, and for over a year had been on the McDonald’s account doing advance promotion work of the Tour from Vancouver. This involved developing promotional materials, fundraising manuals, and even sewing McDonald’s patches onto the track outfits that Nike had donated.

  It was nothing short of providence that George Cohon, chairman of McDonald’s Canada, happened to spot me on NBC’s Today Show with Bryant Gumbel talking about my journey around the world in my wheelchair. What also caught his eye that day was the logo on my shirt, one of the ones Dave had diligently sewn on to garner exposure for the restaurant.

  George was passionate about worthy causes, and I was lucky that my dream to find a cure for spinal cord injury and to raise awareness of the potential of people with disabilities was one he wanted to get behind. George contacted Ron Marcoux, McDonald’s Western Canada vice president, to bolster McDonald’s existing sponsorship of the Tour. Dave possessed an entrepreneurial spirit and energetic attitude, which made it a no-brainer for his boss, George Jarvis, to ask Dave to pack his bags for the year to join me on the last leg of the Tour from the East to West coast of Canada.

  Not only was Dave tasked with being my advance man, he was also given the goal of helping McDonald’s raise a quarter of a million dollars for the Tour on the homestretch. This was no simple feat, but Dave rose to the challenge. Over the course of nine months, Dave and I forged a friendship along the Trans-Canada Highway.

  I marvelled at how organized each McDonald’s restaurant was when I arrived in town. Each one welcomed me with a banner that said “We’re with you Rick.” McDonald’s, I thought, must have had to produce hundreds of those welcome banners. I was surprised to find out later that there had only been one banner! After I left the restaurant in each town, Dave and the local restaurant manager would set up a ladder and climb up on the roof to unravel the signage. The banner would be rolled up and shipped on a Greyhound bus into the next town, ready to go up on the next McDonald’s roof before I arrived.

  Dave was one of our most energetic scout bees, and this is just one of many stories that I could tell you about his relentless energy and professionalism. I will forever be grateful for Dave’s role in the success of the Tour, but even more so for his friendship and support in the years that followed. Dave has always possessed a natural curiosity and ambitious spirit that allows him to jump into sticky adventures with ease. It came as no surprise to me that Dave had begun chasing new dreams as an apiarist. As I read his memoir, I was struck by the parallels between building a thriving bee colony and the fine margins between life’s victories and failures.

  It can be easy to look back on memories of the Tour and only remember its triumphs. I can recall thousands of people lining the streets for our homecoming and marvel at the millions of dollars raised. What I’ll never forget is that the journey unfolded because of the amazing energy of thousands of individuals like Dave who played an important part in manifesting a positive outcome for us. Similarly, when we enjoy a dose of honey, be it drizzled in our tea or smoothed over a peanut butter sandwich, it’s easy to lose sight of where it came from.

  Life is an intricate tapestry of events that connects us to the greater world around us. Dave approaches the challenges of becoming an accidental apiarist with humour and thoughtful observations. His story reveals the complex and vital roles that bees play in maintaining the delicate balance of a vibrant and healthy planet. Bees, while small, are mighty clever in the way they collaborate to make a difference to our environment. If we look closely, the world is made up of many difference-makers like Dave and his honeybees. Dave’s story of his bees is a reminder that we don’t achieve anything on our own. Our success is dependent on actions, big and small, of many. Like bees, we all have an important role to play in making this life worth living.

  —Rick Hansen

  Preface

  Beekeeping is a sticky, time-consuming, and expensive hobby that often yields little to no honey after carrying out many laborious beekeeper tasks and getting stung so many times you end up feeling like a worn-out, frayed human pincushion. In practice, I have turned out to be a lousy beekeeper. As with so many things in life, I kind of accidentally stumbled into it. I suppose you could say it chose me.

  My sister Miriam and brother-in-law Len have been serious beekeepers for years. As is typical with my sister, she took up the hobby with intense focus and vigour. At family dinners, the conversation often turned to drones, queens, nurses, guards, and female workers. Sometimes we would talk about bees too. Then I met my girlfriend, Jeannie, and coincidentally her sister kept bees. Shortly after we began dating, Jeannie started keeping bees herself, and before I knew it, everyone in my immediate circle was decked out in white costumes with wire mesh veils. A cliquey club of honeybee nerds surrounded me, and, all of a sudden, I was the clueless outsider asking dumb questions. I felt alone and excluded—like a bee unable to get into the hive.

  All of that changed one spring day a few years ago when I became an accidental apiarist. It happened by chance, and, from the start, I have displayed a tendency to be clumsy, absent-minded, and sloppy around my bees. It’s a miracle my girls are alive today. Well, sort of alive.

  I’ve made dozens of dumb beekeeping errors and oversights, which this book will explain in ignominious detail. But along the way I also carefully observed my hive, took notes, and tried to learn from my mistakes. I soldiered on. And I learned to appreciate that being an apiarist offers incredible insight into what bees—an important linchpin in our planet’s delicate ecosystem—can accomplish daily through their highly advanced and well-ordered instinctive collaboration. I cannot say I found the same joy in my official studies of the apiarist craft. I took classes and found the material terribly dry and boring, and the same goes for books I picked up at beekeeping conventions. The truth is, I mostly just looked at the pictures and never made it too far past chapter 2. I have been a part-time college instructor for 30 years, and I find most concepts
are best learned when enticingly wrapped up in humorous short stories. Mixing some drama and quirky details in with the important, necessary facts increases engagement and helps us remember key points. But maybe I should have finished those “boring” books after all. While I was writing this book, Jeannie harvested over 1,000 pounds of honey and Miriam and Len harvested 400 pounds. What was my yield? I will let you read on to find out.

  I wish I could say it doesn’t matter to me, that I’m only in it for the good of the earth, but I am more aligned with the famous expression from the 1996 sports movie Jerry Maguire, where the NFL football star, played by actor Cuba Gooding Jr., loudly proclaims to Tom Cruise, “Show me the money!” Except I will exchange the m for an h. If I am going to invest significant dollars and hundreds of hours of my time in a hobby, I want a return. I want something sweet to smear on my blueberry muffin as a reward. Call me a capitalist apiarist or an entrepreneurial entomologist, but “show me the honey!”

  Jeannie claims I don’t love my bees enough. She says I am not in tune with their needs, that I’m too focused on the honey. I disagree and say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Hey, wait a minute! All of my bees are small. And worrying about them has caused me a few pounds of sweat.

  We do agree on one thing, however: I enjoy writing about bees almost more than I enjoy keeping bees.

  Waggle Dancing on a Tidal Estuary

  I am not a conventional honeybee expert. Let’s get that straight from the start. There are so many fascinating facts to learn about bees and beekeeping that it would take a lifetime to become an expert. For starters, how do these fuzzy yellow-and-brown bugs know where to find the floral cornucopia that yields the sticky pollen they collect on their spindly, hairy legs and the nectar they suck up through their proboscises (a fancy word for bees’ tiny nectar-sucking noses)? More importantly, while loaded down with this bounty, how do they find their way back home to their well-organized, factory-like beehive to process the nectar into honey? I have discovered that the hive functions like a harmonious commune with female worker bees collaboratively carrying out an array of specific tasks, and that bees have a remarkable ability to not only adapt but actually thrive after a serious curveball is thrown their way. I will confess that through my beekeeping ignorance and short attention span, I threw my girls many curveballs. Consequently I’ve discovered those jars of honey we reap from bees are nothing short of golden miracles.

  Before I tell you about my initiation into the secret world of bees, my unintentional adoption of 15,000 sensitive, needy insects, and that fateful day I reluctantly first donned the baggy white astronaut suit with the screened hood, you need to know a few important details. One is that I live alone on an old, sea-worn wooden barge. Seventy-five years ago, my barge was used to drag sawdust up and down the Fraser River in British Columbia. Eventually, someone converted the boat into a four-bedroom floating bachelor palace. My 25-by-50-foot red houseboat leaks and it’s drafty. Sometimes, depending on weather or tide, it lists to one side. To add to the fun, my water pipes often freeze in the winter, leaving me without water for days. But this houseboat affords me one of the most amazing and breathtaking views on Planet Earth; it floats in front of a small, uninhabited group of islands on a quiet riverbed, a pristine spot that is off most people’s radar. I am alone here and no one bothers me. This bucolic setting on the Fraser River is conveniently located only 20 miles from the city of Vancouver, where I used to work as a sports marketing executive with the NBA and the Olympic Games. One important detail is that the elevation of my home rises and falls with the tides, often grounding in the grey, silty mud when the tide goes out. One more thing: the barge has just enough room on the lower back deck to fit a hive of bees.

  Whenever my sister Miriam came out to visit me on the houseboat, she would marvel over the lush vegetation on the riverbank and the wide variety of bushes, flowers, and plants on the islands 300 yards from my dock, as well as the miles and miles of crops lining the narrow two-lane farming road leading to my barge. Raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries are cultivated in huge fields across from where I live. Miriam thought it would be honeybee heaven out here, a veritable all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of pollen and nectar.

  “Dave,” she asked me one day, “how would you feel if we brought a hive of bees out here? I think they would thrive living on your back deck. Len and I will take care of them, so there won’t be any work for you to do.”

  Always game to try new things, I loved the idea. Especially the no-work-for-me part. Having a hive at my place would allow Miriam, her husband, Len, and me to spend more time together. And since I was about to semi-retire from the business world of pro sports, having a new interest suited me. I pictured bees happily flying throughout my river neighbourhood, spreading joy and pollen, while I slathered fresh honey all over my whole-wheat toast and watched the rising sun from the back deck of my floating palace.

  As Miriam was selling me on the idea, she gave me my first beekeeping lesson. She explained that bees fly up to three miles from their colony to gather nectar where the gathering is good. Bear in mind that these little creatures’ brains are one twenty-thousandth the size of ours. But despite brain-size limitation, and without the aid of a GPS, bees have the uncanny ability to return to the exact same spot after every single flight, to the hive they originated from, which in this case would be on the deck of my houseboat. Even with my relatively giant brain, I often can’t remember where I parked my car at the local shopping mall.

  Bees, my sister went on to tell me, can also travel up to a remarkable 15 miles per hour on the equivalent of a mini two-stroke engine. The two strokes that propel them are a fragile pair of tiny wings that flap 11,500 times per minute.

  Miriam stressed that honeybees care about only two locations when they are out flying around: the nectar and the hive. What I liked most about my first primer on bees was the whimsical name for how bees communicate to one another the direction and distance to these two important locations. This über-scientific beekeeping term is the waggle dance. Bees leave the hive every day to seek out abundant nectar flows; when they return to the hive, they need to let hundreds of other bees know where to go. Since they don’t know how to talk, they dance to communicate. The waggle dance is a highly specialized and sophisticated bee boogie that points the way to robust nectar flowing in plants and flowers in the neighbourhood. The complexity and effectiveness of what happens when waggle-dancing bees get down, get funky, and bust a move in the hive are truly unbelievable.

  Here’s how it works. While the worker bees are out gathering nectar, they rely on solar navigation to pinpoint the best blooms. Each bee cross-references the exact position of those plump, juicy flowers with the sun’s location in the sky at the precise time she is there. She memorizes the sweetest spots within three miles of the hive and then produces a mental road map that will direct her sisters to the floral treasure. After she returns to the hive, the real work begins on the dance floor.

  Once inside the hive, she spins in circles and waggle dances in an elongated figure-eight pattern with the axis tip pointing in the direction of the blooming flowers. This visual is tough to describe; type “waggle-dancing bees” into YouTube to watch it. As she dances, hundreds of her fellow hive sisters gather around to touch her, crowd into her, and rub against her, absorbing and interpreting her frenetic energy. They are memorizing her report of the exact direction of the best flowers and details about how to get there. The length of time that she waggles communicates the distance to the flowers. The longer she waggles, the farther away the flowers are; the shorter her waggle dance, the closer the flowers are. One second of waggle equals about 0.6 miles. How the heck scientists figured this out is beyond me. I had to see it to believe it. So one day my sister invited me out to her place, where she pulled a frame of bees from one of her hives. I stood back amazed as together we witnessed these disco-dancing bees getting down. In her white protective suit, Miriam held out a single frame of cells with hundreds o
f bees crowding and pushing to get in close to the one extremely popular and knowledgeable waggle-dancing bee. Miriam told me that once the bees interpret and memorize the waggle dancer’s instructions, they go and find those exact patches of blooms, as well as other good blooms along the way, and, in turn, pay it forward. Some of them waggle dance when they come back, and the beat goes on; they waggle on, and the information sharing minimizes the energy the hive collectively invests in foraging missions. Bees are collaborative, and nowhere is that trait more evident than in the waggle-dance process.

  For bees, the waggle dance has very little to do with dancing and everything to do with survival. But, of course, it reminded me of learning some of my best dance moves watching American Bandstand and Soul Train on television in the early ’70s. Remember how Dick Clark would interview couples after each song and ask them to rate the tune? After dancing to the latest hit, I never heard the answer “I really liked the beat. The song was easy to dance to, and by observing how my partner moved in circles and flapped her arms, I can tell that there are some really prime begonia blooms 1.5 miles south of here at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.” The teenagers dancing on those shows may have been looking to get some honey, but it was a different kind.

  At the same time that Miriam was introducing me to the waggle dance in preparation for her hive’s debut on my back deck, my girlfriend, Jeannie, was busy with her own new beehive and consulting with her own beekeeping sister.

  Jeannie kept her bees on the lawn of her lovely half-acre property, which she occasionally rents out as a vacation home. After acquiring her hive, she discovered that some guests are not fond of bees. I suggested that when she has bee-phobic guests, she simply move the hive to a more secluded location on her property. She then taught me one of the countless guidelines that seasoned beekeepers know: Always keep your hive in the exact same place. Don’t ever move the bees. The general rule of thumb among apiarists is that beehives can be moved only about two feet. Oddly, they can also be moved a distance of two miles or greater. However, moving them any distance in between those two measurements messes with their internal GPS units. Here is the rub: the bees get used to their hive being in a certain location, and all of their finely tuned waggle-dance flight paths are programmed from that location. Thus, if you move the hive a few inches, it is no big deal. They will find it. But if you move the hive 15 feet, let’s say, they will get lost as soon as they leave the door to forage for neighbourhood pollen. And since they don’t scatter bread crumbs behind them like Hansel and Gretel to find their way back home, their return voyage will be hampered as well. Studies have shown that if you move the hive a few miles, the bees quickly reprogram their adaptable bee brains to accommodate the switch. I told you they were smart.