Show Me the Honey Page 9
To fortify this getup, one must also wear the proper clothing underneath the suit: thick jeans and a hoodie. And don’t forget your feet! Never do what I once did accidentally and wear a pair of open-toed sandals while tending a hive. A big juicy stinger planted firmly into my big toe was the best reminder not to do that again. Woollen socks and ankle boots are the mandatory finishing touches. Wearing a baseball cap under the veil, which makes you look even dorkier, will prevent facial stings. But even with all of these unfashionable clothing precautions, are you actually completely protected from getting stung?
The answer is no. I have had several wardrobe malfunctions in this department and, as such, speak as an expert. Bees have made it through my suit on four occasions and even snuck inside the screened head veil. Each horrifying trespass can be directly attributed to a word that begins with the evil letter z. When it comes to bees, bears, and people, there is no such thing as an impenetrable outfit or enclosure. There are always small holes and tiny openings to be discovered. I have seen that determined wasps, ants, and mice will eventually gain access to the best-guarded, most-sealed beehive. And I am sure that one of these days we will go up to the outyard and a bear will have broken through the electric fence. As for people, there are countless examples of bank heists, museum breakins, and forced-entry home burglaries that are a testimony to ingenious ways of getting into places we are not supposed to be.
Since bees have the capacity for reason and the ability to communicate with one another, I believe they figured out long ago how to outsmart modern protective-clothing manufacturers. Scientists believe bees have been around for millions of years. In a paleontology book, I once saw a picture of a bee found embedded in a translucent piece of amber rock from a mine in Burma. The carbon dating of the amber nugget was 100 million years. Something tells me that any bug that has been on the planet for that long has had to figure out more difficult challenges than penetrating a cheap zipper. Compared with surviving the ice age, sneaking into a bee suit is a piece of cake.
One place that will test your suit’s mettle is the outyard. In the outyard there are hundreds of thousands of bees coming at you from every angle, conspiring with one another to figure out a way to get into your bee suit. In each instance when a bee has gained unlawful access, I swear I did the zipper up properly and even had Jeannie double-check it. But after 20 or 30 minutes of vigorous beekeeping movement, the zipper somehow came partially undone in the middle. The problem, of course, was that the suit had a cheap plastic zipper. When the zipper of a bee suit splits open at the back of your neck, it creates a tiny opening that acts as a welcome sign for bees. Since that malfunctioning zipper hole was out of sight, I was unaware of the danger, which would eventually lead me to a catastrophic and painful meltdown—every beekeeper’s worst nightmare. It’s hard to believe the pain and anguish I experienced was due to three or four separated zipper teeth.
Few things are more terrifying than having a bee trapped on the inside of the protective veil. You have to remember that once a bee is inside that cramped canvas cavern and crawling on your face, there is zero chance to get it out. You can’t simply unzip the veil and remove the bee because in the outyard there are too many other bees zooming around. So you just have to whack the invader with your hand, bashing the side of your face as you miss the bee. It keeps buzzing around, getting more and more agitated while trapped within an inch of your sensitive skin. The buzzing noise blasts in your ear the whole time, amplified tenfold by the acoustics in the hooded veil.
That seminal moment of realizing that you have “a bee in your bonnet” is terrifying and shocking. Consider this: while at the outyard, because the air is thick with hundreds of thousands of bees flying around, you will always have between one and two dozen bees crawling on the outside of the see-through mesh veil. They are one inch from your eyeballs, nostrils, and lips. Their six legs are facing you, and their tiny stomachs are rubbing against the screen. But you don’t have to worry because they are safely on the other side of the protective mesh. They are always there, but not a threat. Then, imagine the moment when you spot the reverse image of a bee—you spot the back of one. It is crawling on the same mesh with the rest of them, but its wings are facing you. You realize it’s on … the inside.
One day Jeannie and I were at the outyard and a nice lady named Judy, who was up there tending her own hives, suddenly stopped, looked hard at me, and said, “Dave, don’t move. There is something wrong. Don’t panic, but I think you have a bee flying around on the inside of your headgear.”
She might as well have stuck a revolver to my forehead. I launched into hyperanxiety and lost my breath as she swiftly and deftly grabbed the loose head veil cloth and squashed the bee inside the mesh to death with her gloved fingers. I narrowly escaped the worst of all stings: the facial sting.
The second time a bee snuck past the zipper and got too intimate with my face, I panicked and ran like hell while hitting my head with my hands over and over again. I must have landed a lucky blow because the bee died before it could sting me.
The next time I visited the outyard, I carefully put on the suit’s head veil and tightly zipped it up. Then, as an extra precaution, I duct-taped the zipper shut. Even with this extra safety measure, a bee penetrated my defences and got inside. I didn’t see this bee; I heard it, because it flew directly into my ear. It actually crawled inside my ear. I panicked. Again, I ran like hell, violently slapping myself silly in the ear with both hands and arms. I hit myself so hard I almost popped my eardrum. Thank goodness I got this bee before it got me. I smacked my ear 20 times in a row with so much force that I somehow squished it. After we wrapped up that hellish outyard hive inspection, I asked Jeannie to check the back of my suit. The cheap plastic zipper had come undone, again. The bee, apparently intent on becoming an ear dweller, had somehow manoeuvred through the duct tape, then through the opening in the zipper. What the heck she wanted to do in my ear I’ll never know. Maybe she mistook my ear for a small six-sided hive cell and sensed that it already had some wax in it.
After that string of accidents, it was time to take charge. I complained to the bee store where I bought the shoddy suit, and they exchanged it for a new suit with a hardy metal zipper. I could now venture back to the outyard with confidence, knowing my days of facial assaults were behind me. I test-tugged the new zipper on the suit and could not tear it apart. It was bulletproof!
As it turned out, the fourth attack on my face at the outyard, which happened while wearing that new suit, was the scariest and most miserable of them all. It was one of the hottest days of the summer. To this day, I remember it as the day I almost gave up on beekeeping entirely.
When I am in the bee suit, I wear jeans and a heavy sweater underneath. Being sealed up in the suit on a hot day wearing all that clothing and lifting heavy boxes can feel like being inside an oven. The pea-sized beads of sweat that flow from your brow and down your forehead probably weigh about the same as a honeybee. Come to think of it, the little drops are about the same size as bees too. On those “turn your oven up to 350 degrees” days, gravity pulls the beads of sweat off your forehead and down your cheeks. On that fateful day, I could feel warm drops of sweat slowly dribbling down my face at about the same speed that a honeybee crawls. I couldn’t tell if it was sweat or a bee, or even several bees crawling on my chin, lips, and nose. Three times I have had bees crawling on my face and it always felt just like this. If Alfred Hitchcock were still alive today, I would send him this book’s manuscript and suggest it as a follow-up to his classic movie The Birds. My horror flick, however, would be called The Bees and would open with a scene of me in the outyard sweating it out in a paranoid state of incoherent, trembling fright. The camera would pan from the sweltering hot hives to me, pale-faced behind the mesh, and then dissolve into a close-up of a nervous twitch on my glistening cheek just before I scream in horror as a giant bee slowly inserts her massive razor-sharp stinger into my soft flesh. The scene would be in black and whi
te and slow motion, with an eerie solo violin soundtrack.
That calamitous afternoon at the outyard was a real-life thriller. The bees were aggressive and mad because it had rained earlier and was so hot. I had the suit on for less than five minutes when I got stung on the wrist. Bull’s eye! Some little suicide maiden managed to insert her pointy-ass stinger through the cotton canvas fabric just below my left hand. Distracted by the pain, I walked away from the hives for a moment to catch my breath. A cloud of angry bees followed me. The pheromones released after the dying bee had planted her first stinger in me alerted thousands of other bees to come after me and attack. Pheromones in this case are like an SOS distress call. They signal: “Danger is present, girls. ATTACK the big white unfashionable geek predator.” My suit was soon covered with hundreds of berserk bees stinging the suit fabric. After a minute of being a human dartboard, I retreated to Jeannie, and she couldn’t believe how many stingers were stuck in the suit. We estimated over 100! Without the suit, I would have been dead.
I would not call it quits, though, never, not me. A few minutes later, I was back to work, assisting Jeannie in tending the hive. That’s when it happened. I got a solid direct hit square in the face. It wasn’t from the inside though; the new zipper was working. It came from one of the dozens of bees crawling outside of the suit on the see-through mesh. It is important to keep that mesh veil from touching your face—hence the baseball cap. The brim of the cap holds the mesh away from your face. I had an old Seattle Mariners cap, but it was back in my car at home. I know, I should have to wear a dunce cap as punishment. But another form of punishment was swiftly administered. With the mesh touching my face, a bee planted her little bee bum, armed with an atomic-powered toxic stinger, right through the screen and into my chin. The venom exploded under my skin, and the side of my face swelled up immediately. I looked like I was hiding a tennis ball inside my right cheek.
The vicious circle continued with more SOS pheromones released from the latest sting, attracting thousands of new attacking bees, resulting in hundreds more stingers planted into my suit. The bees were ganging up on me. Each stinger sounded the alarm to come and kill me. I felt like such a loser. Why does this always happen to me? Jeannie and my sister get stung only occasionally. I was now a human pincushion.
With two stings in less than five minutes, I needed to take some time out. I left the fenced outyard and went to sit on the ground next to Jeannie’s truck. I sat there in the dirt with a thousand of my closest new “frenemies” swarming around me in the hot, humid air. I wondered if I had kept the receipt for the newly exchanged suit. Then that awful nervous paranoia entered my consciousness again. Was the slow crawling sensation on my face a bead of sweat or a bee? I slapped myself a few times and the creepy feeling stopped. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to relax. But the sensation returned, this time on my lower lip, then my upper lip.
Then I had an unsettling thought: sweat doesn’t drip upward. I felt six tiny legs crawling on the edge of my nostril and slowly up the bridge of my nose toward my left eye. I shot up off the ground and screamed for Jeannie, and then began running as fast as I could away from the truck and the outyard and the concentration of bees. As I ran, I felt the bee on my temple, then it touched down on my eyelid, and then it settled on my forehead. I relentlessly bashed myself in the face with my hands. When I was so exhausted I could not run anymore, I fell onto my knees to catch my breath. There were still too many bees around me in the air so I couldn’t take off the headgear, but no matter how hard I punched myself, I couldn’t kill the bee inside the veil. It just kept crawling all over my face. Then the sensation of the bee stopped. There was no more buzzing. Had I killed her? Had I imagined the whole thing? Was my brain playing tricks on me? Because I had become so paranoid, because of all my bad experiences up there with faulty zippers, was I starting to lose my mind? I felt like I was about to throw up, and what could be worse than barfing in a bee suit?
Anyone arriving at the outyard during the moment I bolted in terror would have seen a pretty funny sight. Fans of Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts will remember the character Pig-Pen. Pig-Pen always had a cloud of dirt surrounding him wherever he went. I had my cloud of bees. They must have been bees of the Usain Bolt variety, because no matter how fast I ran, they kept up with me.
Just as Jeannie arrived after running down the 100 yards from the hives, I looked up to the corner of the head veil and saw two big bee wings facing me. The possibility of another sting on my face scared the living hell out of me. I was still in a bit of shock after the first two. Luckily, Jeannie had her wits about her and quickly reached out her hand. She grabbed the veil, crumpled the fabric where the bee was, and killed it. I got up off my knees and ran farther down the bumpy dirt forestry road. When I sensed that instead of hundreds of bees surrounding my head, there were only dozens, I frantically unzipped the claustrophobic, overheated veil and pulled it off my head. I tried to breathe in as much fresh mountain air as I could to calm myself down. Crestfallen, I sat in the dirt, catching my breath and hoping to slow my accelerated heart rate. I took off my left glove and touched my bare hand to my cheek and lips. I could feel the throbbing and the swelling. Beekeeper down!
Because of my panicked quick release of the head veil, I will never really know how that last bee got in. I tore the headgear off too quickly without checking if the zipper was properly fastened. Did she enter through a hole in the zipper or a leg or arm opening? Who cares—she was dead now, and I had more important things to worry about, like the venom from the sting on my chin spreading to my neck. Not to mention the two dozen bees still circling me, refusing to go back to the hive.
That’s when we decided to call it a day. Jeannie finished loading some frames into the back of the truck by herself and then climbed into the front cab still in her full beekeeping gear. As I opened the passenger door to join her she said, “You can’t come in here; you still have too many bees swarming around you!” She was right. I just couldn’t shake them. So I went to the back of the pickup and crawled into it with all the empty boxes, sticky sweet-smelling frames, and the various pieces of beekeeping equipment. Sitting on the hard metal floor of the truck bed, I hardly felt the jarring bumps because my mind was more focused on my now grapefruit-sized chin. We couldn’t get away from that torturous outyard and back to a bee-free zone fast enough. I still had a dozen hangers-on even as Jeannie slowly accelerated. It wasn’t until the grade of the road improved and Jeannie was able to accelerate to about 15 miles per hour that we were able to lose the last stubborn bees circling around me. I couldn’t have been happier to leave them in our dust. A few more miles down the road, Jeannie let me back into the truck’s front compartment, and after 40 or 50 more miles, we were back at Jeannie’s place, where I could finally relax.
I took the suit off and carefully inspected the zipper. I zipped and unzipped it three times, and each time the teeth fell into place with military precision. How the hell did that bee get in?
I held the suit above my head to inspect the fabric with the sun shining behind it. Maybe it had a tiny hole somewhere? As I lifted the suit, the bee Jeannie had killed fell out of the veil and onto the ground. The lifeless body landed on its back, legs reaching for the sky above. Rigor mortis had set in to those six motionless legs, and her stinger was still perfectly intact. I found it ironic that after such a valiant and heroic penetration of my bee suit, she never had the chance to unleash a lethal stinger blow to my face. She had come so close.
With the bee lying there on her back, I observed the symmetry of her body parts and the beauty of the yellow-and-brown colouring on her stomach. Then I carefully turned her over so I was looking down onto her wings. I gasped, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and my knees felt weak. Just the sight of her wings facing me put me into shock, a particular kind of PTSD: pollinator traumatic stress disorder. It occurs when you know the excruciating pain and humiliation that awaits when you spot the terrifying sight of
a set of wings facing you and know there’s a bee crawling on the inside of your veil. It’s basically a living hell. Having observed bees from both sides now, I prefer to see their bellies crawling outside my mesh veil.
Wasps, Mashed Potatoes, and an Etch a Sketch
One September day, I got all kitted out in my bee suit, grabbed my hive tool and a roll of duct tape, and went to inspect my hive. A sad sight greeted me: 100 dead bees at the entrance. I opened the hive only to find a baseball-sized pile of bee corpses. Worse yet, I pulled out a frame to see dozens of wasps stealing my honey.
Remember when I replaced the queen in my hive not once but twice, and after a few false starts she finally began laying eggs? I got all excited over fresh brood and hope sprung eternal, but in the world of beekeeping a lot can happen in a few months. In the end, the second new queen turned out to be “all crown and no cattle,” earning a D minus in the reproduction department. I have no idea what the new Hawaiian queen was doing in there, but she did not lay nearly enough new eggs to kick-start and sustain my hive. A couple of months after the new queen was installed on her throne, every inspection revealed fewer and fewer bees, less brood, reduced stores of honey, and increased mites and disease. Because of the queen’s infertile nature, my faithful hive—which had produced the award-winning Houseboat Honey—was going steadily downhill. The wasps were taking over.
Wasps are so darned intuitive and smart they can actually detect the scent of a sick hive. It is impossible for us humans to smell it, but a sick hive exudes olfactory evidence of weakness, illness, and stress. When wasps detect this telltale scent, they attempt to enter the hive. Once they overpower the guard bees, they mark the outside of the hive with a pheromone, then leave to bring back hundreds of reinforcements. If the hive radiates a healthy and robust smell, the wasps only work the base around the hive, scavenging and eating up the occasional dead bee lying there. These are the kinds of guests you don’t want to come a-calling at your hive.