Once upon a time, long long ago, you could order honeybees from the Sears catalogue and get them in the mail. I got a book on the subject and decided to try it. This was while we were living in Peachtree City, Georgia, and my three kids were still little, say, around 1980.
First you need the supers, better known as the boxes to keep the bees in. They have frames inside as a platform for the bees to build honeycombs, and you can expand capacity by stacking more supers on top. Complete the hive by adding a floor, roof, and a queen excluder. This keeps the queen from leaving the hive, which means the rest of the bees come back to her by nightfall every night. The pheremones she emits tells them this is home and that she is the most important member of it. Set it up on top of a few bricks to keep it off the ground, and you are ready to go.
The hive arrives in a raw wood condition. The outside should be painted, but like with homes for many other living critters, latex paint is the only way to go. Chemicals in oil-based paints can be deadly. I picked green, the better to blend in with the yard and draw less unwanted attention from the neighbors, some of whom were problems. (Yes, I mean you, David S., picking carrots from my garden when you thought nobody was watching.) To further separate bees from neighbors, I located the bees on the 2nd story deck behind the house. Anybody messing with my bees would have to be really trying to get into trouble. I figured that way if anybody wanted to sue me for their bee stings while breaking into my hive, they couldn't claim they hadn't intended to do it and just "stumbled over" the hive.
I did all the advance prep I thought I needed to, including ordering the full coverall, gloves, head net and smoker, and ordered my bees. Then there was just the waiting. But while I was waiting, a funny thing happened. While driving over to Sharpsburg to work one morning, I spied a wild swarm of bees in a branch along the road, just at reachable level. Hmmmm....
After mentioning it, I was put in touch with a local beekeeper - a real one, not a wannabe like me - who asked me did I want the swarm? You mean you can really do that? And get honey? And he could help? He was happy to, and arranged to meet me there after work. First I had to go home and get the hive to put the bees in. Once under the swarm, he - the brave one - gave the branch the swarm was on a hard jerk downward, knocking the majority of the bees into the hive. The roof was quickly put back on, and we left. The theory was that the queen was in the middle of the swarm, that the knock had put her in the hive she now couldn't leave, and that the rest of its members would join her by dark. At that time, we'd meet again at the hive, load it onto his pickup truck, and take it to my house. In the morning, the bees would orient on their new location and use the sun to find their way home after foraging for nectar and pollen.
Practice worked as well as theory, and I was now a beekeeper. The only hitch was, I already had domestic bees ordered and no home to put them in. No worries, there was a supplier within a few miles, and I ought to have time to buy another hive and paint it. I did, just, with a couple of days for the paint to dry.
After the size of the wild swarm, I was surprised that my new bees came in such a tiny box. Try as I might, I couldn't tell the queen from the rest of the bees by size alone, and wasn't experienced enough to do it by watching the behavior of the attendant bees surrounding her. Luckily she came in her very own separate container with attendants, inside the bigger box, so I didn't have to guess. The directions said to calm the bees and prevent them from flying by misting them with water from a squirt bottle, so I did this, opened the box, and shook them into the hive. Some escaped, but I knew they'd rejoin their queen as soon as they could.
Unfortunately, I forgot one little piece of the to-do list: put rubber bands around the bottoms of my pants cuffs. Bees that can't fly can still crawl, and when they get to the point on your legs where clothing traps them and they can't go farther, they get mad. When a bee gets mad, it turns kamikaze, stinging you even though it means its own death. At first I was too tenderhearted to just give them a hard swat to kill them before they stung. Besides, my hands were more then full getting the queen into the hive along with as many of her cohorts as possible as gently as possible. But when a trapped bee stings, it keeps pumping its venom into you until its supply is exhausted. It only took me about six of these to convince me the necessity of taking a sec for a swat. They were going to die anyway, so why not be merciful- to me? As it was, I had half a dozen stings showing as 6" red patches on my legs, hot, inflamed, and sore for several days.
Paul Sr., himself allergic to bee stings, was sure that now I would be too, but that never happened. (He had moved out by this time, lest you think I was endangering him by this hobby.)
Now that I had my two happy little hives, it was just a matter of waiting and watching until there was enough honey produced that the bees could spare some for our eating pleasure.
There was an immediate difference between the two hives. The wild-caught swarm was much more aggressive, both in collecting and in defending their hive. Their honeycombs rambled all over the place, welding several frames together so that they had to be cut through in order to lift one out. I found myself hesitant to do this, and as a result harvested little of what I could have from this hive. The domestic bees were slower off the mark, slow to grow in numbers, slow to produce honey. So I didn't get any honey from them, thinking they needed it all themselves yet.
Then suddenly it was time to move, the first of what would be a two-step process returning us to Minnesota. Bees can travel overnight, but not over days in a moving van. I called my bee guy, asking him if he wanted my bees or knew someone who did. Shortly after dark a few nights later, the bees were carried down the deck stairs and loaded in the back of a truck to start new lives elsewhere.
Just like we would.
Several years later, once I had my own home again in Shafer, I thought about starting over with beekeeping again. The city clerk emphatically assured me it was not allowed within city limits, though I still haven't seen the part of the code that states that. We seen to have enough pollinators to cope with all the fruiting and flowering plantings we put in the yard. Occasionally I go out and buy some honey.
No comments:
Post a Comment