Show Me the Honey Read online

  The seemingly innocuous honeybee has lots of enemies. In addition to the mighty mite, which is a significant threat to bee colonies worldwide, there are spores, fungi, and other sorts of micro-organisms that if left unchecked and untreated will destroy your hive. I call these the “mean microscopic maladies.” They are really disgusting and have names that you have probably never heard before like nosema, chalkbrood, and the dreaded American foulbrood. There are noxious chemicals to treat them too.

  American foulbrood is the most serious; it is caused by a spore-producing bacterium. About 2 percent of hives in North America will get this nasty disease, which has no cure or fix. You have to burn all of the wooden frames, inside covers, and the bottom board of an infected hive. Then you have to get a torch out and scorch the inside of your boxes to rid them of all foulbrood spores. These bacterium-ridden spores mean business, and nothing short of fire will stop them. Not only does American foulbrood wipe out your entire bee colony, but you have to replace most of your equipment too.

  Thinking about all these different insects, parasites, and microbes, something struck me as ironic. Most hobby beekeepers get into it for the love of nature, to do something good for the environment. We love our honeybees and work hard to protect them. But wasps, ants, mites, and slime—well, they are part of nature too, yet we do our best to wipe them out. It feels a bit hypocritical. I wonder if, by interfering with nature to help our bees, we’re really doing as much good as we think. Maybe by using chemicals to help our bees thrive, we will throw off the mite population, which will throw something else out of whack, which will come back to bite us, literally. One thing that for sure never changes is human nature. As long as bees keep my honey jar full, I’ll watch their backs. Too bad for the mites. They haven’t figured out a way to make something I’d find as valuable as honey; otherwise I’d be pampering and protecting them too. But for the time being, when I come back in my next life, I hope I come back as a honeybee and not as a varroa mite.

  Show Me the Honey

  Most how-to beekeeping books are written by well-meaning zealots who are so enthusiastic about their labour of love that they invariably leave out some of the less desirable parts. At this point, you might actually be considering keeping bees yourself, and if so, there are a few practical things you should know. You already know you’ll get stung repeatedly, there’s intense hazards in transporting hives, you will have no opportunity to travel, and invaders and parasites are par for the course. However, you may still be considering doing it yourself. Now, I don’t want to be a Doroghy Downer, but if you want to keep bees, get out your wallet.

  Don’t get me wrong; beekeeping is a great hobby. Simply stated, though, there is no money in honey. How many rich people do you know who made their fortune in honey? Oil, gold, stocks, or real estate, yes. But honey? No. Most amateur beekeepers I have met have either low or no expectations about a return on their investment. They have a toned-down, realistic attitude. If you ask them to describe their hobby, they’ll probably say it’s interesting, rewarding, and good for the planet. Being a self-proclaimed capitalist apiarist, it’s important to me to get some kind of return on my investment—show me the honey!

  I was so happy that first year when we harvested 100 pounds of award-winning Houseboat Honey. But I really had very little to do with the process; Miriam and Len did all the heavy lifting. After that promising start, I was skunked with little or no honey to show for my efforts. In a perfect world, I figured my hive would produce 30 or 40 jars of honey every year to give away to friends and an additional 30 jars to sell for $15 each to cover my expenses. Those were my two simple objectives. But if I eliminated the first year of beginner’s-luck honey and looked at my honey yield from when I took over maintaining my own hive, well … let’s just say I couldn’t exactly call the back deck of my float home a profit centre. It was more like a sticky money pit.

  Let’s take a closer look at the first objective: gifting. In terms of giving jars away to family, friends, and colleagues, there is no better gift. Most of us occasionally get invited over to a friend’s place for dinner, and it seems customary to bring a bottle of wine or flowers. A nice one-pound jar of honey wins out over a bottle of vino or lilies every time. Honey is extremely popular. I have never experienced anything but sincere gratitude and praise after handing over a jar of homegrown golden syrup recently harvested from a fresh comb.

  I have plenty of experience trying to create housewarming offerings. My homemade wine tasted awful, and the homemade beer I once brewed had a nine-inch foamy head, making it impossible to drink. The lettuce and radishes I grew from seeds and threw into a salad I once brought to a potluck party were puny, deformed, and full of small wormholes. Mushrooms from the forest make iffy appetizers because they could well be poisonous. With gifts like these, it’s almost guaranteed your hosts will not invite you back. But there is no such thing as a jar of poor-tasting honey. The bees don’t screw up; their honey is always sweet and delicious. It exceeds all expectations in the wholesomeness department, and it never goes bad. People perceive honey as having high value—jars of the size I gave out to friends from the first year’s yield sell in stores for over $15.

  When I took over the hive, I thought, unrealistically, that I’d sell my excess honey. My imagination wandered off to a cute little roadside honey stand, kind of like the Kool-Aid stand I had as a kid. But alas, I have not sold an ounce of honey yet, and, come to think of it, that roadside Kool-Aid stand never made any money either.

  Despite the start-up expenses and elusive profits, beekeeping is still a worthwhile hobby and a great thing for the environment. However, feeding birds is good for the environment too, and a bag of birdseed sells for about $12. I’ll cut to the chase: getting started as a beekeeper costs about $1,000. And that’s for only one hive. Get two hives, though, because then you don’t have to go to your sister’s place to steal her frames of bees.

  Here’s what you need to buy to get started:

  Wooden Boxes ($150)

  This is the mini high-rise condo bees live in. You will need three to five boxes. Bee supply stores sell them unassembled and building them is easy, but easy is a relative term. Easy for whom? I barely passed Mr. Chambers’ grade-eight woodworking class and was one of the few students not allowed near the electric band saw. I failed an assignment in class to build a footstool. It’s a good thing that beehive boxes are easier to build than footstools. They have interlocking wooden dovetail edges that fit nicely together. All you have to do is line up the edges and then bang them together, using small nails and glue to keep them in place. This involves a level of skill only slightly beyond putting together Lego blocks. After I build my bee boxes, I like to paint them wild colours using mistinted paint from the thrift store. Traditional beekeeping white, which is often used because it reflects light, is oh so boring. My boxes are a mix of peach, orange, and turquoise and have goofy cartoon bees painted all over them because my girls are special, and I want them to feel special. Their high-rise condo is the grooviest in Western Canada.

  Frames to Go in the Boxes ($200)

  These are the separate walls in the bee condo. Each box stores about 10 frames, so you need about 50 to get started. In case you are doing the math, the frames cost about $4 each as they are made out of cheap wood and stuck together with small nails. The frame foundations are cool to look at closely because each one has thousands of slightly raised, six-sided plastic cells. These cell imprints get the bees started in building the wax comb required to store honey and raise baby bees. They are the blueprints for the hive. In nature, hives grow in tree branches and hollowed-out logs, and so they grow into weird, wild shapes and configurations. Beekeepers want to regiment, control, and standardize the hive. The best way for us to grow the hive to our specifications is to give the bees a floor plan and to confine the hive’s growth inside four box walls. Don’t go looking for frames and boxes on Craigslist. It is not a good idea to buy used bee equipment, as it may be infested wi
th microscopic spores and diseases.

  Beekeeper Suit ($125)

  They come in white or white. When I got my new suit, I took out some fabric paint and wrote my name and, because I was so smug and full of myself after that first year’s huge haul of honey, a dumb slogan in big, bold letters on the back. I advertised that I was “The Man, the Myth—the Beekeeping Legend.” Everyone at the outyard must have thought I was an idiot. What kind of guy shows up in a pristine bee suit and a slogan like that? I have had a lot of laughs over it, and it’s nice to at least have your name on your suit, since they all look the same. In the next chapter I’ll expand on why it is important to have a good beekeeping suit. I learned that I probably should have spent more time selecting mine than drawing on the back of it.

  Beekeeping Gloves ($25)

  Thick leather covering your sensitive skin from fingertips to wrists will give you the confidence you need to reach into your hives. These rugged gloves could easily handle a rope tow and could double for ski gloves if you were really in a pinch.

  Smoker ($50)

  You may have heard the expression “smoking the hive.” Basically you need a way to introduce smoke into the hive in order to keep the bees from getting agitated and ready to sting you when you do your inspections. You could maybe just stand there holding a newspaper on fire, or you could adopt the bad habit of smoking cigarettes and puff away while going through your bee frames. But both of those are bad ideas for hopefully obvious reasons. A beehive smoker is a metal container; it looks like the oil can Dorothy carried around in her basket for the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. The can is attached to bellows. You deposit wood shavings, burlap, dried pine cones, and whatever burnable items you have on hand into the container, then light the ingredients so they smoulder and create smoke.

  There are two explanations for how smoke affects bees. The first explanation is scientific. In a nutshell, the chemical composition of smoke masks the alarm pheromones released by the guard bees or bees that are unfortunately injured during a hive’s inspection. Sadly, it is inevitable that sometimes bees get injured in the beekeeping process. Opening the hive’s lid, moving frames around, and sticking your thin metal beekeeping tool into the hive results in bee injuries and, in some cases, death. I try to avoid this, but when it does happen I resignedly call it collateral damage.

  I like the second explanation about the smoke’s effect better: the bees smell the smoke, deduce there is a forest fire, and fear it will soon destroy the hive and its store of honey. The smoke stimulates a feeding urge, and the bees all go to the honey pantry to eat like crazy. After they gorge themselves, their bellies become bloated, making it difficult to make the necessary flexes in order to sting. Both theories are considered legit in the beekeeping community. Either way, it is a good idea to have some smoke on hand when entering the hive. Plus, dispensing the smoke is mesmerizing and Zen-like and makes inspecting the hive more ritualistic and mystic. Maybe I’ll put some incense in next time.

  A Couple of Good Books on Beekeeping ($50)

  This is not one of them, but there are heaps of them out there. I recommend two: The Backyard Beekeeper: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden, written by a bee zealot named Kim Flottum, and The Beekeeper’s Handbook, by Diana Sammataro and Alphonse Avitabile. If you ask three different beekeepers the same question about your hive, you may just get three different answers; however, between these two books, you will pick up most of the fundamentals.

  Bees ($200)

  If you are going to keep bees, you need to get bees. Here’s where it gets weird. Remember that Hawaiian queen that immigrated 2,700 miles to my hive? I have never been able to figure that one out. What’s wrong with homegrown queens? Why did mine have to come all the way from Hawaii on an Air Canada flight?

  When you go to the bee supply store to buy an entire hive of rank-and-file bees, they come in a long, round cardboard tube called a nuc (short for nucleus colony). It contains the queen and thousands of workers. After buying one nuc, you unplug one end of the tube and pour the colony of bees into your empty hive boxes. All the bees, including the queen, spill out into the boxes and frames. And so they move in. Well, it’s not quite that simple. The nuc, as the name would imply, is the heart of the colony and will grow and grow as the queen throws her reproductive organs into high gear and the nurse bees do their duties. The most common place for the nucs to come from, though, is—get this—New Zealand! Up until now, everything I have learned about bees relates to how sensitive their systems are to light, air pollution, hive positioning, radio waves, temperatures, and any subtle change in the environment. I just don’t understand how you can ship these poor little creatures halfway around the world and expect them to adapt. But they seem to. Hey, my Hawaiian queen was working out, so who was I to knock imported bugs?

  Jars and Labels ($100)

  Two quick pieces of advice: Buy small jars and give honey away sparingly. You never know how long it will take until you get your next haul. The second tip is to get creative with the label. Come up with a cute name and design for your honey operation to enhance its appeal.

  Miscellaneous ($150 to infinity)

  There really is no limit to the amount of hard-earned dough you can lay down for the holy purpose of keeping your bees. A beekeeper cannot live without the infamous, generically named beekeeping tool. It’s a little gadget we carry, a bit bigger than a can opener, to help us move frames, cut wax, and separate boxes. It is as easy to misplace as my reading glasses. If you throw in an uncapping fork tool, a synthetic beehive brush, and a mini beekeeping entrance feeder, you can obtain a little package online for about $35 that resembles the assortment of utensils usually found in a kitchen drawer. The sugar to feed the bees and the chemicals to ward off diseases and to kill mites will cost you another $100. Once you get into beekeeping, as with any hobby, you’ll discover there is no shortage of accessories and handy gadgets you can buy, such as tiny doormats for the hive’s entrance to brush pollen off their wee legs. I am serious. You can also spend your money on a mouse guard, a small metal gate that fits over the hive’s entrance to keep pesky rodents at bay. I wish I had one for the inside of my float home, too!

  Adding up the total cost of materials and figuring out my beekeeping return on investment has certainly been an eye-opener—indeed a bit shocking. During the first year I raised bees on my own without as much assistance from my expert sister, brother-in-law, and girlfriend—to whom I give most of the credit for the original 100-pound honey haul—I personally extracted about five pounds of honey. That is the equivalent of five jars. Each jar, then, cost me about $200.

  I am left wondering if friends who invite me over for dinner might prefer me to hand them 20 crisp $10 bills instead of a jar of honey as a host/hostess gift.

  Show me the honey!

  I’ve Looked at Bees from Both Sides Now

  Beekeeping is all about function and not about fashion. It is impossible to look sexy, attractive, or important while wearing a bee suit. Though you will get a strenuous workout while beekeeping and it is great for your cardio, don’t expect to look even remotely sporty or fit while wearing the suit. In full regalia, beekeepers look like nerds. While wearing my extra-large suit, I feel like a combination of astronaut, clown, and Pillsbury Doughboy. But, safety first. By wearing a quality suit with a sturdy, well-made metal zipper that properly fastens on the head veil, thick leather beekeeper’s gloves pulled up high to your elbows, and inset fabric elastics properly sealed around your ankles and wrists, you are well on your way to keeping the bugs where they belong: outside of your suit.

  Even so, four of the suit’s possible entry ports are the two leg bottoms and the ends of the two sleeves. Most suits have Velcro fasteners and elastic cuffs on the wrists and ankles expressly designed to block out the bees. If you are not satisfied with the design of those protective features, then good old-fashioned thick grey duct tape works extremely well to wrap around your limbs as a double safety
precaution. Duct tape, I have learned, is an essential part of beekeeping. Duct tape is an essential part of modern life; it has a light side and a dark side, and it is the force that holds the universe together.

  There is a fifth port of entry, and that is the neck zipper. The first zipper was showcased at the world’s fair in 1893; however, it didn’t take off until an enterprising front-runner in fasteners named Gideon Sundback made some modifications to the prototype in 1913. Since then, zippers have helped to secure, fasten, and close a variety of modern conveniences, from luggage to sportswear, but most of the time we never give zippers much thought. An errant zipper rarely creates panic, pain, or paranoia. Zipper flaws or accidents in daily life at worst result in a partially opened jacket on a cold day. A partially open zipper fly may cause an occasion to blush. But nowhere is a zipper malfunction more dangerous and alarming than in the world of beekeeping.

  As far as I’m concerned, the zipper is the most critical detail when selecting a beekeeper’s suit. A suit with a strong metal zipper to attach the all-important sealed head veil is paramount. Since a large part of this chapter will deal with the efficacy of a 12-inch zipper (talk about a boring subject), it is really important you understand exactly where this zipper is located. Imagine the round collar on the top of a T-shirt; then imagine that collar as a zipper, and that it attaches to another zipper fastened to a paper bag–shaped hat the size of your head, only the paper bag is really a protective veil with screened mesh on the front of it, similar to the mesh on a screen door. The veil with screened mesh is the only thing between your face—eyes, nose, lips, rosy cheeks—and a tribe of potentially angry, unsettled bees. Get the picture?