Show Me the Honey Read online

  When it was finally time to open the hive, the only good news was that the newspaper had almost completely disappeared and the two tribes, having eaten through it, had merged peacefully into one hive unified by a new smell: the rich fragrance of solidarity. The bad news was that if the newspaper had still been there, its headline would have read: QUEENLESS AND EGGLESS HIVE LEADS TO BEGINNER BEEKEEPER BEING CHARGED WITH NEGLIGENCE. Don’t ask me what happened. Maybe the queen was hiding. Maybe my bees couldn’t accept her smell and killed her. Maybe a wasp got in there and murdered her. Maybe she got injured in my pants. Maybe she just flew off somewhere else. All I know is that after half an hour of searching as hard as I could, I couldn’t see a queen anywhere in the hive. I didn’t see a single new egg either. Jeannie and I agreed it was possible the new queen was in there and I had just missed her, although there should have been signs of egg laying. We decided to give her another week to make sure she wasn’t in there hiding and about to go on a delayed egg-laying spree. Uh-oh. More patience required.

  Seven more extremely long days passed before I popped off the hive lid. What I saw then was nothing but lots of honey and a few newly hatched bees from the brood I had borrowed. In terms of fresh-laid eggs from the queen, I couldn’t find one, not one measly egg. I knew it took 21 days for an egg to hatch, so I knew that the baby bees in there were not from my queen. She was dead, gone, or infertile, but one thing was for sure: she wasn’t producing. I felt like the $50 I had given Arnold had grown two wings and flown off with the missing queen. I was back to square one. But, looking on the bright side, at least I was learning some of the beekeeping basics.

  I was on two months of borrowed time now, with not one egg laid in that entire period. The hive was on its last legs and would most certainly die soon. I had been told that beekeeping was fun, but it was turning out to be a stressful deathwatch. The old hackneyed expression “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” is especially fitting for new beekeepers like me. I wasn’t about to give up. Good thing I had a plan “bee.” I’d get another new queen for the hive; however, this time I’d go to a bona fide queen supplier. A morning Google search led me to a bee supply store in Richmond, a nearby suburb, which I felt would be a lot more legit than meeting some stranger on a back street.

  Bob, the old gentleman who owned the place, told me over the phone he had just gotten a fresh supply of really good queens from Hawaii, and he would sell me one for $45. It is common for bee suppliers around the world to get their stock from tropical locations. He was open until 5:00PM, the price was right, and I’ve always liked hula skirts and ukulele music. So I hopped in my van and bolted over to BC Bee Supplies. Bob’s queen cage was a bit different from Arnold’s plastic one; it was wooden with a fine metal mesh screen on the front of it. And the queen wasn’t alone; she had half a dozen Hawaiian attendants in there with her, feeding her pineapple pollen or macadamia nut nectar, I suppose. This time I knew it wasn’t as simple as plopping her in the hive and having eggs the next day. Even if the queen survived in my hive, it was too sparse on newborn nurse bees; I needed to introduce more. So, on top of my order of a new queen, I asked for “a side of brood.” Then, just like in some greasy spoon diner, I barked out, “To go, please.”

  This time I got only one frame of brood from Bob, with no bees—only the capped brood. After pulling the frame out of one of his hives, Bob used a soft kitchen broom to gently brush off the bees. One frame with no live bees was all that he was willing to sell me, and I was okay with that since some of Miriam’s three frames of brood were still in my hive. It was almost like déjà vu driving back to the float home, a bit more carefully this time, carrying a caged bee about to be plunged into the darkness of the hive box, along with the frame full of egg brood in my trunk, which would ideally hatch in time to nurse the eggs I hoped she would lay. I reflected that although we humans perceive nature to be simple, we tend to complicate things when we intervene. All I wanted was a few jars of damned honey. It would have been a lot easier to just go to the supermarket.

  When I got back to the river, I settled the new frame into my hive. Since it had only brood eggs and no bees on it, a newspaper wall was not necessary. However, the entire hive had to get used to the tropical suntan lotion smells of the new Hawaiian queen and her attendants, so, like last time, I placed the small, closed wooden cage in between a couple of frames and left it there for two days. When the time was up, I slowly pulled the cork out of the top of the wooden box, exposing the cotton candy to the escape hatch. I chuckled when I saw the stencilled black letters on the back of the box indicating she was a Kona Queen. If this worked out like I planned, she would become a River Queen, and if she was going to stick around like I hoped she would, it was going to get a hell of a lot colder in the winter up here in Canada than it did in Hawaii. After again tucking the queen in her cage safely between two frames, I put the lid back on top to seal the hive, and the waiting game began. Again. A few days later, I went back into the hive to check, and the cage was empty. Good start.

  So the new queen bee was in the colony, but as Shakespeare would have said way back in the 1500s when Elizabeth I was doing her best to produce offspring: To lay or not to lay—that is the question. The answer would take another week. In another week, when I lifted the box lid, there they were: eggs, glorious eggs! Row upon row of tiny white diamonds with a slippery, wet sheen, each one bursting to the seams with endless potential—the bees of tomorrow.

  I knew by their appearance the new queen had just laid them in the last day or two. With a healthy queen in my hive laying thousands of eggs a day, I could finally relax. The journey from being queenless and clueless to reviving my hive had taken a few months, but there was a real sense of satisfaction knowing I had created the right environment for the new queen to do what she was meant to do, which was to lay a million eggs over the next few years, each single egg a tiny white, creamy, perfect little grain of life.

  Standing in front of my hive, holding up the frame so the sunlight could shine into the back of each six-sided cell, I marvelled that in another day or two the eggs would slightly quiver and become little worm-like larvae. Then the larvae would lounge and incubate in their cells and eat and eat and eat—honey and pollen and royal jelly and anything else the young nurse bees would feed them. Bees need the same honey we love to put on toast and in tea, to sustain life, to grow from egg to bee. Nine days later they would be 1,000 times the weight of the original eggs. About three days after that, the worker bees would seal the tops of the cells. That’s when the enclosed creatures enter the pupa phase of development. They do not eat or drink until day 21, when they emerge as perfect brown-and-yellow bees.

  By now you know what their first task in the hive will be: cleaning the cell they emerged from. Then, after a couple of days, they become nurse bees. The circle of life keeps on spinning with Mother Nature taking over. Despite my clumsy, incompetent beekeeping skills, I had set up my new queen to succeed. By ensuring eggs would keep flowing daily out of the back end of my precious Royal Hawaiian Highness and were cared for, we—Queenie, Mother Nature, the nurse bees, and I—saved the hive.

  After learning how important the queen is to the hive and how hard she works, I decided not to indignantly mark her with a red felt pen. Instead I gave her a tiny tropical fruit-motif tiara, a miniature version of Queen Elizabeth’s, studded with microscopic diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, which is far more fitting for a regal, productive, incomparable insect of her stature.

  The Mighty Mite

  I arrived home one day and found a handwritten note from one of my cleaning ladies: “You are out of dishwashing soap, also we found 1,274,867,325,012 ants in the house. The plastic bag that has the beekeeping equipment in it is teeming with them.”

  She was right: the ever-present ground enemy of the honeybee had infiltrated my float home. It was my fault of course; I had left some empty hive frames and small tools in an open plastic bag in the spare bedroom.

  My bees
and I have this in common: neither of us wants ants in our humble abodes. Ants are attracted to sweets like sugar and chocolate, and when they visit the float home they go straight for my kitchen counter and the honey jar. I have come home in the past and caught half a dozen of the irritating little black arthropods adhered to the jar’s loosely attached lid, pigging out or gobbling drops of honey oozing out of the sticky hole on top of the plastic honey-bear’s head.

  In the great outdoors, ants go straight for the honey source too: the beehive. Ants aren’t the bees’ only problem though. Bees get attacked not only by ants on the ground but also by predators in the sky, such as wasps, bees from other hives, and airborne diseases. Then there are the tiny parasites called mites. It’s a wonder the poor bees can make honey with all the time they spend keeping would-be attackers at bay and dodging microbes.

  Wasps and bees may look similar but they are completely different, as different as cats are from dogs. Wasps eat meat. I’ll leave it at that for now and let you arrive at your own conclusions about which insect you would prefer to spend some quality time with. Wasps eat honey too, but of course they are incapable of making it themselves. So, just like ants, they try to illegally enter the hive to steal honey. In law-enforcement terms this is called a Bee and E.

  With armies of ants, legions of wasps, and foreign bees attacking the sweet honey stash, what’s a beehive to do? Well, just like at Buckingham Palace, beehives have guards stationed at the entrance. You already know that shortly after bees are born and clean their cell, their first task is to become nurse bees. Being a nurse bee is a slack and safe job—all they have to do is scrub cells and crawl around, ensuring all the baby bees have enough honey to eat. After only two weeks on that job, the nurse bees develop flight muscles and stinging glands and become capable of defending the hive. They are then promoted to guard-bee status. Healthy hives have up to 100 guard bees on duty during peaceful times and can recruit thousands when a threat occurs. It’s pretty straightforward. The guard bees position themselves at the hive’s door and give the sniff test to any intruder. No passport or credentials are required for entry into the hive; the pheromones the insects emit are identification enough.

  As beekeepers, we can assist guard bees by narrowing the size of the wooden entrance through which bees access the hive. We use a special piece of wood called an entrance reducer, which is typically 15 inches long and half an inch high. It has an assortment of different-sized openings or holes to choose from. If we observe an inordinate number of suspicious-looking characters hanging around, we can reduce the size of the hive’s entrance down to 2 or 3 inches wide, allowing the guard bees to be more effective and threatening. It’s like a bouncer at a nightclub keeping out the rowdies—their job is easier if they’re guarding a 3-foot cubbyhole rather than a 30-foot barn door. Bees, like nightclub bouncers, challenge aggressive antagonists, but bees will fight it out with a ne’er-do-well wasp or ant until one of them drops dead. If you ever get a chance to stand near a hive and observe the entrance, it’s pretty fascinating.

  Wasps, ants, and bees from other colonies are easy to spot. I have learned that robber bees from other colonies are often a slightly different size and colour, and they may display more aggressive behaviour than the bees in my hive. While these intruders can be controlled to a certain degree by adjusting the hive’s entrance size, it’s the pests you can’t spot that cause the real havoc. Enter the ferocious, mighty, yet nearly microscopically tiny varroa destructor mite.

  Any parasite that has the word destructor in its name is not a welcome guest in my hive. These little villains threaten beehives all over the world; they are universally nasty. Interestingly though, the varroa mite was not seen in Europe until the early 1970s and didn’t make it here to North America until 1987. Since then, hives on this continent have been dying or “collapsing” at an alarming rate. It may be that modern beekeeping practices, which often position many hives in close proximity to one another, are providing prime conditions for the varroa to thrive. These big hives are then trucked en masse all over to pollinate various monoculture crops, thus helping varroa mites migrate as unwanted stowaways. If you talk to any beekeeper who has been around for a while, you’ll hear that the infestation of this strain of mite kills off more hives every year.

  It gets worse. The little creeps are bloodsuckers. Technically, though, bees don’t have blood; they have something similar called hemolymph. But you get the idea: varroa mites are mini-vampires that literally suck the life out of your bees and thus your hive.

  There are books, research papers, and lengthy Wikipedia entries written on the varroa destructor mite, all of them hard for the average person to understand and a tad on the dull side unless you have your master’s degree in entomology. But it’s really pretty simple. Varroa destructor mites are black and about the size of a coarsely ground grain of black pepper. They make it past the guard bees and into the hive through ingenious, sneaky manoeuvres. A pregnant female varroa might, for example, attach herself to an innocent worker bee out there in the field minding her own bee business, foraging around the pretty flowers. When that worker bee comes back to the colony, she passes the sniff test from the guard bees because the stowaway varroa is odourless, and the tiny freeloading mite enters the hive undetected. Then that pesky pregnant parasite hops off the innocent bee’s back and starts looking around the hive for a cell with a bee larva that is ready to be capped by a nurse bee. Once the varroa crawls into the larva’s cell, the tiny mite is happy in the private, capped environment because she can feed on larva protein and begin laying her own microscopic eggs in a perfect incubating chamber.

  The eggs the varroa lays in comfy bee-larva land are typically one male egg and a few female eggs. The mite eggs hatch in the capped cell and then the male mite mates with his female siblings; they like to keep it in the family. Next thing you know, the tiny cell the varroa has infiltrated is packed with more malicious mini-mites. This is big trouble because the mites could eventually take over the entire hive.

  After the newborn mites leave the cell, they have free rein to wander throughout the entire hive, and all hell breaks loose. This is where watching those old vampire movies will give you a leg up on beekeeping knowledge. These parasites live by sucking the life out of the worker bees. I have actually put one of my honeybees under a powerful magnifying glass and spotted two mites on the poor girl.

  Life in the hive is highly organized, and the bees have a ton of work to do. Between distributing pollen, cleaning up after one another, raising babies, filling cells with honey, defending the entrance, and dozens of other jobs, each bee is, as the expression goes, busy as a bee—until the varroa mite sucks the energy out of them, that is. A deliverer of deadly danger, that evil arachnid can quickly wipe out an entire bee colony. There are several ways to eradicate the mighty mite. A cross at the hive’s entrance and a clove of garlic are not among them. I’ll address the two most popular, one gentle and one horrid.

  Icing sugar has a consistency kind of like chalk dust. If you gently go through your hive and sprinkle icing sugar all over your mite-infested bees, they get covered in the stuff and then preen each other to get it off. While they are using their tiny bug arms and hands to rub, clean, and scratch each other free, they also manage to knock off many of the varroa destructors. The mites fall down to the bottom of the hive through a wire mesh screen and onto a white plastic collector board, where they eventually starve to death. The upside for the bees is that icing sugar residue is food for them, and after their preening session, they get to eat whatever icing sugar fell off. This method is interesting and safe, but not as effective as the nasty, heartless one: vaporizing.

  Oxalic acid is a poisonous industrial chemical used for bleaching pulpwood and cleaning rust, as well as various uses in the laundry and textile industries. It is also used to seal marble statues and to remove magnesium and iron deposits from quartz crystals. When half a thimbleful of the salt-like white oxalic grains are heated up to a sup
er-hot temperature, the process rapidly creates a toxic vapour. For some strange reason, honeybees are not affected by it. However, it is not recommended that beekeepers breathe it in. I have had a whiff go up my nostrils, and it is harsh. As for mites, it kills them instantly. This process is called vaporizing your bees. Beekeepers fall into two camps: those who vaporize and those who don’t. It can be a touchy topic, but the sad truth is beekeepers who don’t vaporize often see their hives die off.

  The guy who invented a gizmo to vaporize bees belongs to Jeannie’s bee club, and he sells them all over the world. It is a flat, grey, cast-iron plate about the size of a deck of cards with a heating coil attached to it next to a small pocket that holds the acid. And get this: a car battery powers the whole ingenious contraption. First, you pop the hood of your car, drag out the battery, and haul it over to the hive. Then you place the vaporizer under the hive, hook up a couple of wires to the positive and negative terminals of the battery, and let it sizzle under the red-hot electrical current for one minute. It is kind of like jump-starting your hive. After filling the hive up with the deadly gas, you leave it sealed for 10 more minutes. Then, holding your breath as you come back, you remove the vaporizer. To keep the mites at bay, you must repeat this procedure every few months or when needed. And a tip for new beekeepers: don’t forget to put the battery back in your car.

  Years ago when Miriam was a beginner beekeeper like me, she treated her bees for mites. The next day, not thinking it through, she harvested a few dozen pounds of honey. A week later, she jarred the honey and gave it away to grateful friends. Lying in bed one night, she remembered reading a warning that after treating your bees for mites, you should wait two weeks before pulling honey from the hive. Tossing and turning on her mattress, she feared the worst that long, sleepless night. Fortunately, most of her friends had not opened the jars, and the ones who had, lived. Their constitutions must have been stronger than that of the average mite.