Show Me the Honey Read online

  Given the pivotal and prestigious role the queen bee plays within a colony, she sure doesn’t stand out visually inside the hive. To the untrained eye, the queen—nestled deep among tens of thousands of her offspring—has pretty much the same shape, basic colour, and markings as all the other bees. Her only distinguishing trait is that she is a bit bigger. I’d say that all the worker bees are about half an inch long and she is about three-quarters of an inch long, or about 50 percent bigger. Given that a quarter of an inch is quite minuscule, the queen doesn’t exactly pop out. Yet, as a beekeeper, when you check the inside frames of your hive, there is nothing more important than ensuring she is there. A queenless hive is eventually a dead hive. When beekeepers open up their hives and check inside, their number one task is to make sure the queen is present, healthy, and laying thousands of eggs every day. If you are ever looking to make conversation with a beekeeper at a party, just ask, “How is your queen doing?” If the response is “I can’t even find her,” you’ll know that person is a beginner like me, or worse, their hive is queenless and will soon be toast.

  I learned from my beekeeping sister that you can use a special red felt pen to mark the queen bee so you can see her more easily. A special bug Sharpie! You carefully draw a dot on the queen’s back with the pen’s bee-safe ink. This sounded convenient, but unfortunately my skills were not developed enough to locate her, adeptly pluck her out with my fingers, and start doodling on her. I’d probably squish her to death, or knock one of her antennae off while accidently painting a dot on her. However, I was intrigued by the concept, and it led my mind to wander away, as it often does, to comparable real-life experiences from my past.

  In 2004 I lived in London for a year, working on the city’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Summer Games. Given my work as one of the directors of this historic bid, I was invited, along with 75 of my colleagues, to Buckingham Palace to meet Queen Elizabeth. The reception was held in a lavish ballroom. This queen, however, was 50 percent smaller than everyone else. Her tiny 100-pound frame made her easy to spot, but it was the diamond tiara on her head that was the dead giveaway. I can only imagine what would have happened if I’d pulled out a red Sharpie and drawn an identifying dot on her turquoise dress. Something tells me that the next yard I visited wouldn’t be the outyard but Scotland Yard.

  Like the queen in my hive, Queen Elizabeth had attendants fussing over her and serving her during the reception. I distinctly remember the queen radiated a lovely royal perfume scent—a cross between roses and lemons, a refreshing combination of scents unlike any I’d ever smelled. The queen in my own hive also emits a pheromone odour perceived as special by most of the bees in her large, busy colony.

  As the queen’s entourage hovered close to the tiny woman and saw to her every need, it was clear to me that, just like the queen in my hive, Queen Elizabeth’s health, well-being, and longevity were paramount to the survival of the colonies. The future of a bee colony, like the Commonwealth, depends upon an abundance of healthy offspring from the central queen. This was where the queen in the hive on the back of my float home had Liz beaten hands down. Whereas Queen Elizabeth produced only four offspring—an heir and three spares—my tiny little queen would lay over a million eggs in the course of her lifetime.

  In my attempt to get up to speed on beekeeping, I had already ascertained that checking the queen’s egg-laying patterns occasionally is a good rule of thumb. History shows us that Britain’s royal queens have at times been subject to a similar vigilance. However, as a beekeeper checking on Her Royal Highness of the hive, I discovered the hard way that you should never leave checking on her until the day before you are about to go out of town.

  I’m sure you know what it is like when you are about to go on holiday—you rush around your house madly, ensuring that everything is okay before leaving. If you are like me, you usually put off the preparations until the night before you go. Such was the case in early May when Jeannie and I were about to depart for a three-week cycling trip from Vancouver to Saskatchewan. After ensuring that the propane on my float home was turned off, the water connection was off, everything was unplugged, and the heat was turned down, I went to check on the bees. Bad idea. Never check your bees when you are about to leave, because if you discover something is wrong, there is likely nothing you can do about it.

  I’ll give you three guesses who wasn’t at home when I scrutinized every frame in my hive. You guessed it: Queenie. But you may also be thinking, “Didn’t he just admit he is useless at spotting the queen? So how did he even know she was missing?” You are right; I am lousy at spotting the queen bee. But a hive without a queen displays some definite behaviours that alert even beginner beekeepers of her absence.

  When the queen vacates the colony, her pheromone smell leaves with her. With her reassuring scent gone, the leaderless colony becomes stressed. Since minuscule amounts of her pheromone perfume are usually left behind, the worker bees immediately start fanning their wings like crazy to distribute whatever essential regulating chemicals are left. Therefore, a queenless hive often presents a louder, more distinctive buzzing than a hive with a queen. It is important to listen to the hive before you open the lid and listen for an elevated buzzing sound.

  The next sign you have a queenless hive makes even more sense. Without the queen, no new eggs will be laid. So, as you look through each 7-by-19-inch frame, you need to peer carefully into the thousands of tiny six-sided cells to see if there are signs of eggs, larvae, or pupae. I don’t want to get too technical here, but since this is a book on beekeeping, it is important to note that three days after a queen lays a fertilized worker bee egg, it will turn into a white, creamy larva in the cell. After seven days, it forms into a pupa, which is like a bee embryo. After 21 days, it hatches into a fully functioning fuzzy little bee. What I just shared is one of the fundamental beekeeping principles.

  If you can’t spot any of the three egg/brood stages, it means the queen has not been there for 21 days. As I inspected my hive the day before my trip, I was delighted that many of the tiny cells were full of delicious Houseboat Honey, but the rest of the cells were void of eggs at any stage of development. My hive had a healthy number of bees, all building comb and packing away honey for a future they didn’t have. With Big Mama gone, the hive was destined to die. In order to emphasize this point, it is important to understand that the average worker bee lives for only six weeks in the summer. Worker bees, the vast majority of the bees in the hive, have an extremely short lifespan; they work themselves to an early death. The queen, however, lives for a few years. It is her job to continually replenish the stock of offspring.

  On that Sunday night before leaving on holiday, I was pretty certain I had trouble on my hands. Was I signing the death certificates of thousands of bees by doing nothing and leaving? The obvious solution was to purchase a new queen and plunk her in the hive. But where do you purchase a queen bee at 10:00PM on a Sunday? I turned to the beekeepers’ best information source: the Internet. I quickly learned that although some people in the Vancouver area do breed queen bees, they are rare and hard to get a hold of late on a Sunday night. So, as I walked up the ramp off the dock early the next morning to leave on our trip, I said goodbye to the girls with a heavy heart, knowing I might never see them again.

  As we pedalled from Vancouver west through two provinces of vast bucolic farms on our way to Saskatchewan, we passed dozens of beehives placed next to different crops, open fields, and treed meadows. Cycling with such enthusiastic beekeepers as Jeannie, Miriam, and Len meant that we just had to stop to have a look each time we came upon some hives. It did cross my mind, given the isolated roads and the total lack of people, to pinch a queen from one of those hives. But I came to the conclusion that ending up in a jail cell in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, because of a bum bee rap wasn’t a good way to begin my new hobby or end my holiday. Besides, how would I get a stolen queen back to Vancouver? My bike’s luggage panniers were full. I had no choice but to pedal onwar
d and hope for the best for my hive back home.

  When we finally returned to Vancouver and I had lugged my gear down the boat ramp, the first thing I did was hustle out to the back deck to check on my hive. I anxiously scrambled into my white bee suit, adjusting the zippers around my neck to secure the head veil and hat, and braced myself for the worst. Given the short life cycle of the honey bee, I knew thousands of bees would have died of old age since we left, and given the fact that no new bees would have been born to bring up the rear, I expected the hive to look a lot different. I expected it to be a whole lot emptier.

  And it was, but not shockingly so. I’d say my hive had about 30 percent fewer bees than it did three weeks earlier. The bees seemed a bit lethargic, but the hive was still very much alive with even more honey stored in it.

  There is a third sign that your hive has no queen, but it takes a few weeks to discover. As I studied each frame, I noted hundreds of large brown cells, crusty and overflowing with a dark brown cap. When a hive has been queenless for a few weeks, some of the unmated worker bees begin laying infertile eggs. They kind of freak out and start laying useless dud eggs that will hatch into male drone bees. A small number of drone cells can be found in a healthy hive, but my hive was becoming overrun by them, confirming I needed to get cracking and find a new queen.

  I got out of my bee suit and went inside to find the contact information for a local beekeeper who, I had heard, raised queens. His name was Arnold, and I chuckled to myself when I called him and said, “Hi, my name is Dave, and I need to buy a queen.” It may have been funny to me, but it was regular business for him. He raised queens for cash and had one that I could pick up in two or three days. When I told him I couldn’t wait that long, he agreed to meet me within half an hour and sell me one for $50. Wanting to get that egg-laying goddess installed and producing offspring as quickly as possible, I sped across town to where Arnold was waiting for me out on the street in front of his house. As I handed this stranger two crumpled-up 20s and a 10, he discreetly reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small plastic cage about the size of a Bic cigarette lighter. It felt like a drug deal. I asked him if she was mated, from good stock, and if he raised her himself, just like you might ask a marijuana dealer about the potency and origin of a bag of pot. Anyone watching us out there on the street wouldn’t have been blamed for calling Crime Stoppers.

  Arnold advised me to keep the queen in my pants pocket on the way home because the warmth of my body would be beneficial to her well-being as I transported her. I was a bit nervous placing a large stinging insect so close to my private parts. I double-checked to make sure the lid of the small plastic cage was tightly fastened. I wanted to ask Arnold how he raised queens, but we were both in a bit of a hurry, so I hastened off with what I hoped was the fertile solution to my hive’s problems.

  The next stop was my sister’s place to pull three frames of bees out of her healthy hives. If the new queen nestled warmly down there in my pants was going to lay eggs, she needed young nurse bees to nurture the baby bees after they were born. Nurse bees feed the baby bees, clean their cells, and generally tend to all their needs (as the name would imply) for the first week of their lives. The role of the nurse bee is one of the first jobs in a young bee’s life. Bees go through several work phases as they mature, with the last assignment being outdoor forager. All of the bees in my geriatric hive were either older foragers or drones, which do nothing but eat. The rough-and-tumble forager bees will have nothing to do with baby bottles and pollen pablum.

  The three frames of Miriam’s young nurse bees and brood would give my future queen’s eggs a fighting chance. My sister’s healthy hive had thousands of bee eggs, or “brood” as they are called, and thousands of young, healthy nurse bees. Mixing and matching bee frames is a common beekeeping practice, I later learned, and it is always good to have someone in your family or a friend nearby with a healthy hive. Speeding over to Miriam’s, I knew one thing: no matter how much the three frames of bees I was getting from my sister’s hive needed warmth, I wasn’t going to put them in my pants. Good thing I had a special cardboard box in my trunk called a “nuc box,” which I would place the frames into for transport. It took about an hour to go through all of Miriam’s frames and find three with just the right mixture of nurse bees and brood. Plus I had to be extra careful not to accidentally steal a queen from her hive.

  After leaving Miriam’s place on that June afternoon with bees on my mind, bees in my trunk, and a bee in my pants, I was distracted. I felt a real urgency driving speedily back to my own hive. I ran through a yellow light and got a ticket. As every hour went by, a dozen or so bees in my hive on the float-home deck were dying of old age. I thought of a depressing new bee acronym: dead bees per hour (dbph). Meanwhile, the new queen was doing absolutely no good sitting in my pocket. I had to get her back to the hive to do some old-fashioned egg laying ASAP. Plus, I had to introduce those three new frames full of bees and eggs to my existing hive. On the way home I tried to recall if I had an old newspaper lying around. I’d need a newspaper for the next step in the transfer process. When you introduce a large number of new bees to an existing hive, as I was about to do, their immediate instinct is to kill the unfamiliar queen. Bees can be real pricks.

  I have to admit here that I like bees the most when there are only a few of them on a flower stem. On a carefree, sunny summer day, I could watch a bee for 20 minutes, observing as it crawls all over a flower’s stamen and navigates the petals and stigma in search of nectar. When just a few of them are flying around, it is interesting to see them playfully interact as they sample the flora. Bees are cute and fuzzy in small numbers. The minute you open a hive, though, they overflow like a volcano—a pulsating, buzzing, confusing, bloodthirsty, single organism that, quite frankly, is a bit gross and definitely scary. They are still interesting, but they lose their charm, cuteness, and innocence when they morph into a mass of 50,000. A bee on its own conjures up childhood memories of Winnie-the-Pooh and silly cartoon bugs. The inside of a beehive is more like a Stephen King horror novel. It’s creepy watching them crawl all over each other. It gets weirder when you realize that, although most people are okay with one or two stings, if all the bees in the hive decided to sting you at the same time, it would probably kill you. And they are not very welcoming to each other when it comes to hosting new bees. Foreign queen bees smell differently than they do, so they kill them.

  Back to the newspaper. To combine a hive with frames of bees from another hive, you start by placing a piece of newspaper, with a few slits in it, on the top box of the existing hive. Then you put another box with the new frames of bees and brood in it on top of that paper. Normally the boxes have no barriers between them and the bees can flow freely. With this method, the thin layer of newspaper will contain them in their respective boxes and eliminate fighting. After a day or two, the two boxes full of agitated and antagonistic bees will settle down. They get used to smelling each other and to the idea of new neighbours moving in upstairs. Their scent travels through the slits in the newspaper immediately, and eventually the bees do too.

  After a day or two, the bees on either side of the paper start to nibble through it, and slowly they migrate both upward and downward. The beauty is that they now travel in peace because they are used to one another’s smells. Hard to believe that a thin piece of paper can have such an amazing effect. I leafed through the latest Vancouver Sun trying to decide which page to use; I knew it didn’t really matter, but I chose one from section “B.”

  So there I was on the back deck of my float home, where I had just introduced two warring tribes of bees, each tribe in its separate box determined to fend off any new smells. Talk about a harsh anti-immigration policy. Their coexistence and future literally relied on a paper-thin détente.

  With the newspaper sheet delicately in place, I was ready for step two in this crazy melting-pot exercise. The new queen was now ready to join the hive and take her rightful place reigning ov
er her subjects: her brood and her nurse bees, her foragers and drones. With plenty of fresh brood and nurse bees from my sister’s frames, I was growing optimistic that this whole half-baked scheme of mixing and matching hives and a new queen might just work.

  Not so fast. The same tendency the rank-and-file bees in my hive had of killing a new queen with an unusual new smell also applied to the way Miriam’s nurse bees would welcome or reject a new queen. The lemony-rose queen smell I experienced at Buckingham Palace didn’t bother me in the least or make me want to harm Her Majesty, but the bees in both the existing colony and the three new frames needed time to adapt to this new queen’s scent. Otherwise, it would be lights out for Queenie. I told you that certain aspects of beekeeping are straight out of a horror novel. The new queen and her distinctive royal odour had to be eased slowly into her new surroundings. When Arnold handed me the plastic queen cage earlier that day, he explained that after I popped the top off, there would be a layer of condensed, sugary cotton candy blocking the entrance, thick enough to take a couple of days for the worker bees to chew through. And chew through it they would. Remember how bees love anything sweet. The plastic chamber is designed so that by the time the bees chew their way through to the new queen, they are used to her smell and will treat her like royalty for the rest of her life, instead of killing her. Sweet.

  Beekeeping goes from moments of excitement and drama to long periods of nothing happening. It is a lot like baseball. With the new queen and new brood in the hive getting used to one another’s smells and chewing through the newspaper and the cotton candy blocker, all I could do was wait for about five or six days before going back in to see if I could spot any new eggs. It was tough to resist opening the hive and poking around, but doing that is disruptive and only pisses the girls off. Patience is not a strong suit of mine. The five days of waiting to see if the new queen had “taken” passed very slowly.