Show Me the Honey Read online

  Jeannie once moved her hive 20 feet, and when her bees returned home, they went to the exact same spot the hive had been before they took off. That afternoon, she noticed a large swarm of confused bees flying around in the air 20 feet to the left of the hive. It prompted her to move the hive back.

  The significance of the waggle dance and the importance of not moving the hive were the first two nuggets of entomology knowledge—and certainly not the last—I didn’t pay enough attention to. I would go on to forget, misinterpret, and disregard hundreds of other essential beekeeping facts as I struggled to become an apiarist. Overlooking these first two pieces of knowledge, though, would cause me a great deal of angst on the seminal night my sister and brother-in-law brought the bees out to the barge.

  We are all likely familiar with the moon’s effect on large bodies of water. In my case, that body of water is the mighty Fraser River, with its headwaters up near Mount Robson, the highest point in the Canadian Rockies. The Fraser River begins as a fast stream of clear, pristine mountain water. It winds its way through British Columbia and picks up more and more water as creeks, streams, and other tributaries empty into it. By the time the Fraser reaches Ladner, British Columbia, where I live, the wide, silty river is more accurately described as a tidal estuary. It is so close to the Pacific Ocean that the daily tides dramatically change the river’s height—up to 15 feet each day.

  Many unsuspecting dinner guests have ventured out to my old barge, often arriving around 5:00 PM. They stroll casually down a gently sloped ramp from the riverbank to the dock. You can imagine the surprised looks on their faces when they leave at 11:00 PM and have to ascend the same ramp, now in a steep Mount Everest climb position because the river dropped 15 feet while we dined. It can be a tough scramble back up to the land, especially after a few glasses of wine. At low tide, brown mud replaces all of the sparkling water that surrounded my boat. Most people appreciate that my home sways a bit with the current, or when a big fishing boat goes by, or when the wind blows, but they are unaware of the strong tidal forces that turn my home into an elevator constantly moving between the first and third floors. Recall the apiarist rule of thumb: the hive can be moved only two feet or a few miles.

  Up until the evening my bees were to arrive, I hadn’t put two and two together. What effect would the rising tides have on my waggle-dancing bees? I didn’t make the connection. It’s not as though I didn’t think a lot about the hive on the houseboat. But I thought of questions like: Where on the back deck would we put it? Would the bugs survive the strong westerly winds on the river? How would my neighbours feel about the arrival of tens of thousands of insects with sharp barbs on their butts? I wondered if anyone in my neighbourhood was allergic to bees. I worried that the bugs would create a disturbance flying around outside, annoying my guests when I hosted dinner parties. I never thought of the fact that my back deck would become a moving target with a 15-foot range for my tired, homeward-bound bees just looking for a place to drop off their pollen and nectar load and lapse into a dreamless sleep. This tiny oversight was rather significant; the bees were currently in a van travelling down the highway heading for my houseboat on the tidal river.

  The movement of bees in a van across town is an art in itself. It goes without saying the hive needs to be carefully sealed—really carefully sealed with strong grey duct tape. If you think driving while on your cellphone is a distraction, try driving with hundreds of recently escaped, angry, and confused bees obstructing your vision. When you are transferring bees to a new location, it is best done at night, when the bees are more passive and all of them are at home. If you move the hive during the day, you could leave behind a large percentage of bees that are out foraging. Relocating hives is a nocturnal activity.

  When the evening of the big move finally arrived and Miriam called me from the road to say they had the new beehive tightly sealed and secured in the van, it still hadn’t occurred to me how detrimental the tide’s movements might be to my new six-legged houseboat residents. Why it hadn’t occurred to my sister, I still don’t know. Maybe she thought of it and forgot to tell me; or maybe she knew about the tide differential and thought the hive she was bringing was super smart and advanced and up for the challenge. After I hung up the phone, I relaxed for a few more minutes on the couch with Jeannie and had another sip of wine. Then, suddenly, it hit me.

  “Oh no,” I exclaimed to Jeannie, who sat with her eyes closed and her head tipped back on the couch, looking rather peaceful. “I just realized … I don’t think this is going to work! The tidal movement out here is really going to mess with the bees’ navigation instincts.” Jeannie sat up abruptly. She knew exactly what I meant. We stared at each other in silence. I immediately called Miriam back and told her of my potentially fatal oversight. “Miriam, stop!” I shrieked. As a novice apiarist, I got a little overexcited. “Don’t bring the bees out here! The way my houseboat rises and drops 15 feet each day, there is no way they can survive!”

  There was a very long 10-second pause. That rarely happens with my sister. When she came back on the line, we discussed the predicament at length, eventually deciding that since she was well on her way, and since she and Len were already wearing their beekeeping gear and had sealed the hive, she might as well just come on out and we would stick with the original plan.

  As we nervously waited for the 15,000 bees and my sister and brother-in-law, Jeannie and I discussed how beekeepers try to replicate a natural hive environment. Most wild hives are located in trees or old logs on the ground. The stationary wooden homes we build for bees, called Langstroth hives—many of which look like an old-fashioned, four-drawer filing cabinet—simply try to replicate a hollow space bees might find in a natural setting. But nowhere in nature would bees choose to build a hive on a river. Or, even worse, a tidal estuary. Would a log floating down a river ever be a place where bees would start a hive? No way. This could well be one of the first times ever that honeybees would be raised on top of a river. To clarify my concern, I came up with an aeronautical analogy.

  “Jeannie,” I said, “let’s pretend you are an air traffic controller giving directions to 747 pilots on their individual flight paths. The planes you are directing fly all over the world and need precise instructions on how to get to their exact destinations and back. Unlike a bee, as an air traffic controller you get to actually speak to the pilots and don’t have to waggle around in figure eights, flapping your arms. Unbeknownst to you, the runway you are dispatching the planes from is moving up and down the whole time. You’d have planes crash-landing left, right, and centre.”

  Jeannie and I arrived at the same conclusion as we pondered this crazy predicament: the bees in the van were heading for big trouble. If we thought we were screwing around with their heads by moving them across town, just wait until they arrived at the boat. Were we condemning them to a fruitless, empty life of constantly searching for their shifting hive? I hadn’t yet even taken delivery of the bees and I couldn’t get three detrimental adjectives out of my head: homeless, helpless, and starving. Would the local apiarist community come to know my houseboat as a slave-worker death camp full of directionless bees? But no matter how much Jeannie and I worried that we had made a big mistake, there wasn’t much we could do about it now. There was no stopping what could be one of the biggest biological blunders in beekeeping history; Miriam and Len were just down the road, and we had all agreed to go ahead with the half-baked original plan. We just had to hope the bees would figure it all out on their own once they got settled in.

  Miriam and Len arrived shortly after 10:00 PM looking like a couple of aliens in their white bee suits. Transferring the bees from their van parked at the side of the river to my back deck took half an hour. We very carefully carried the beehive boxes through my kitchen and living room. During the indoor portion of the transfer, I saw one bee escape from under a fraying piece of tape and land on the counter by my sink.

  After the hive was securely in place outside on the
deck, Miriam and Len removed the tape from the hive’s small entrance, leaving the bees free to go out and forage the next morning. I thought to myself, “Girls, after you leave here tomorrow on your nectar extravaganza, good luck finding your way back.” Then a more macabre thought came to mind: “Rest in peace.”

  With the transfer taking place late at night, and Miriam and Len in outfits concealing their true identities, the whole evening felt like clandestine skulduggery, especially with the knowledge that genocide was a possible outcome. I was glad it was dark and no one knew what we were doing. If this ill-conceived beekeeping exercise flopped, I worried I would have an animal welfare inspector knocking on my door with a search warrant.

  After we put the bees to bed and left their front door wide open, we were clearly well beyond the point of no return. The hive, now firmly placed in its new marine location, had 15,000 bees cozily sleeping the night away. Before going back inside, I observed that a few of the bees ventured out of the hive for a midnight snack; I supposed they couldn’t sleep due to all the jostling and being in an unfamiliar place. I was sure they were a little disoriented and hoped they’d return. With all the heavy lifting done and the excitement subsiding, I invited my sister and brother-in-law to stay for a cup of tea with—you guessed it—a big dollop of honey. As the four of us talked inside the float home, it became clear we were in a bit over our heads and needed to seek advice from beekeeping experts.

  After Miriam and Len had changed back into their street clothes and left, I was doing the dishes when the single escaped bee flew up and stung me on the arm. My first sting. Was it some kind of ominous sign?

  In the days after they dropped off the bees, Miriam and Len canvassed the bee intelligentsia for answers to our perplexing question: Could bees survive the daily 15-foot elevation gains and drops on the Fraser? Miriam’s bee club was full of knowledgeable beekeepers, but this question had never arisen before. The experts were stymied. The province of British Columbia has several regional bee inspectors whose job it is to help beekeepers raise bees. When she asked these various officials about our predicament, there was varying conjecture, but no one really knew for certain.

  I carefully observed the bees for the next few weeks as I walked up and down the ramp to my dock. There were always a couple dozen bees hovering around the hive’s entrance. I took this as a healthy sign. On my front upper deck, where I often recline in the sun, I only occasionally noticed one or two bees buzzing about, and they never became annoying. The bees seemed to dwell on my houseboat peacefully, never once bothering me. I guess the foraging in the fields and on the islands was just too good. I did have the occasional errant winged visitor inside. In the past I generally killed any bug that had the audacity to come inside my float home. But now, if I identified the bug flying around my kitchen as one of my girls, she got an immediate stay of execution. I was beginning to like bees.

  About six weeks after dropping off the bees, Miriam returned to my place in her white costume and did a check on the hive. She was amazed at how well the bees were doing. The hive showed no signs of the parasites that often invade and spell the beginning of the end. That day in early June my hive got a clean bill of health—no mite parasites and no slimy diseases, just beautiful new cell formations, plenty of worker bees, and a busy, happy, plump queen planting baby bees into the cells. Best of all, the bees were making lots and lots of sweet, delicious honey. The universe was unfolding as it should in this hive. The girls were not getting lost in their new surroundings; they were finding their way back home.

  Miriam came out again in July. This time she couldn’t contain her excitement as she opened the lid of the hive. “Dave!” she shrieked. “I can’t believe how much honey you have in here and how perfect the hive is!” She told me my hive might produce as much as 100 pounds of the golden elixir—more honey than any of her stationary land-based hives had ever yielded. How exhilarating! Just a couple of months earlier, I had thought our irresponsible hive placement had condemned the girls to a struggling homeless existence at best, and the Grim Reaper at worst.

  Miriam and Len came out a third time in September, this time to remove the hive’s honey frames and take them home to extract the honey. I should have called a Brinks armoured car, because we hit the honey jackpot: 100 golden pounds of amazing syrup stashed away in the hive’s tiny cells.

  Miriam and Len extracted all that honey in September. In October they filtered the honey and bottled it, taking us to what can best be described as the Academy Awards for British Columbia honey producers. Every other year, hundreds of members of the British Columbia Honey Producers’ Association have an annual meeting. One very important item on the agenda is to choose the best honey in the province. Taste is an important attribute, but it is just one of the many categories that a judge weighs. Each jar of honey entered in the prestigious competition is examined against stringent criteria, including air bubbles, density, moisture content, clarity, brightness, and lack of dust particles. Even fingerprints on the jar are a factor. And … drum roll, please … cue the trumpets … the province’s leading honey experts ranked our Houseboat Honey as the second-best amber honey in all of British Columbia!

  When Miriam called me with the news, I raced out to the back deck to congratulate the girls and spend some quality time with them. I was so proud of each and every one of them. As I sat beside the hive, I reflected on what they had accomplished. They had not only adjusted but thrived in their new hive location. They’d adapted to new surroundings, new foraging grounds, and a constantly swaying, moving, rising, and falling home—the first of many curveballs I would throw them. I told them, “Girls, although I am very happy with the way you overcame the adversity of the rising tides and went on to produce 100 pounds of amazing honey, we did only come in second place. Now get some rest, try to keep warm over the winter, and next year we are going for number one! Girls, our motto out here on the float home is ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves’!” As I went back inside my houseboat to put on the kettle, I thought, “This beekeeping isn’t so bad after all.”

  That Christmas I got a card from Miriam proclaiming in her beautiful calligraphy that the hive was officially mine. The drive out from her home to the river to tend the bees had proven to be too long. And besides, I had shown some interest in the bees, and it was time for me to take that big step toward tending my own hive. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We will always be just a phone call away, and besides, Jeannie can help you too.” So much for the no-work-for-me part. But I was excited to learn the ropes. I knew the hive would soon grow threefold over the summer to 50,000 bees. That’s a lot of little creatures for which I was now 100 percent responsible. Like the father of a newborn baby, I was up for the challenge. There was so much to learn, so much to prepare for. A new dimension of purpose and meaning had been introduced to my life, and things were looking good. If the Houseboat Honey haul was any indication, I was about to become a successful beekeeper with honey to spare.

  Anyway, I had no choice. The proclamation on the Christmas card was crystal clear. The transfer of ownership of the hive was complete: signed, sealed, and delivered. The bugs were mine. I had to sink or swim. So for the next few years I did everything I could to learn how to keep a beehive alive.

  The Sting

  Bees sting. Beekeepers get stung. That’s just the way things are.

  The road to becoming a true beekeeper, I was quickly learning, is itchy and sometimes painful. You must respect your bees and be at one with your hive to avoid pain. Occasional stings are inevitable. But how will you know when you have transitioned from a maladroit beginner like me, clumsily poking through your hive, to a skilled and sensitive apiarist assisting in the hive’s overall well-being and providing optimal circumstances for honey production? By that I mean embracing all facets of beekeeping in your heart and soul and respecting the bees for what they are: incredible, industrious little beings who have a right to be here, who truly coexist with us. Though I’ve not yet reac
hed the level of “skilled” apiarist, I’m getting closer. I’ve gone from swatting at bees to embracing them (well, not literally). I am a 195-pound man who now feels genuine compassion and sympathy toward an insect that weighs only about one-tenth of a gram. One could say the tiny beasties have taught me a great deal, changing me in remarkable ways.

  I sometimes wonder how different beekeeping would be if the little creatures didn’t sting. First of all, I am sure more people would keep bees. Also, an entire chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh would have to be rewritten. And finally, beekeeping would not be as much fun because you wouldn’t have to wear the white head-to-toe suit. Being an apiarist allows you to dress up in a crazy costume, complete with headgear and leather gloves, and celebrate Halloween year-round. But we don’t wear the costume for fun; we wear it, of course, to protect us from the bees’ barbed stingers. Stings and the ensuing pain, caused by a bee’s melittin venom, are as much a part of beekeeping as delicious honey. It’s the perfect yin-yang relationship. Hurt and suffering must be endured before you can truly appreciate and enjoy the sweet, golden reward.