Bees

The Saturday after Easter, at about 9:30 at night in a Denny's parking lot in Commerce, I picked up a starter colony of bees. I had ordered them from livingthehivelife.com, a family-owned apiary that pollinates cranberries in Wisconsin and almonds, watermelons, and avocados in California. The young woman, Sarah, who owns the business focuses on creating and selling new hives.

When you start beekeeping, you're faced with a number of choices that as a novice you are ill-prepared to understand, let alone answer. Langstroth, Warre, or top-bar hive? Ten or 8 frame? Deep, medium, or shallow hive bodies, or a combination of all three? And the one I found toughest - where are you going to get bees?

I made the plan to become a beekeeper last year. I did a bit of reading, found a company online for the basic stuff I'd need that seemed to mesh with my outlook (beethinking.com), and bought some hardware. I got a nice setup for a Langstroth hive, which is the traditional stack of boxes you'll see professional beekeepers using. (When you read about a semi full of beehives tipping over on the interstate, those are Langstroth hives that spilled out all over the road.) I went with the larger, square hive bodies (like a wooden box with no top or bottom) that hold 10 frames each. (A frame is what I'm holding in the picture above.) Found a good deal on a bee suit and smoker and was ready to go. My plan last year was to catch a swarm of native wild bees, or to rescue a hive in someone's tree or walls or something. I was going with a more natural approach and I thought it would be cooler to use local native bees.

That plan didn't work out. I got a couple of calls from people who found swarms or hives, but I could never get one. They were either gone by the time I arrived, or too high up a tree for me to get to them, or otherwise inaccessible to me. So no bees last year.

I also learned there are no native honeybees in the United States. All the honeybees we have were brought by European settlers. So much for going local and native.

This year, I was determined not to miss out again. After an early attempt to capture a feral hive failed, I bit the bullet and decided to buy bees. Which raised another set of options. The simplest setup is to order a package of bees. You get a smallish box with about three pounds of bees in it, and a queen in her own little personal cage. You pour the package of bees into a hive you've set up, and install the little queen cage and wait for the workers to chew her free. As a total novice, this option had me worried. It seemed to have plenty of chances for things to go wrong. Bees eat honey (duh) and with a package, there is no honey for them to eat. So you have to feed them a lot of sugar water for the first months while they get busy building wax comb and making their own honey. With a package, you rarely get to harvest any honey the first year, because the bees have to work so hard all spring and summer to get their hive going.

Another option is to order a nuc hive, which is what I did with slight modification. A nuc - or nucleus - hive is a smaller than normal hive body box that is only big enough for five frames. But instead of buying an empty box with some bees in it, you get five frames that are already drawn out by the bees with wax comb. Usually three of the frames are full of brood (baby bees), and the two remaining frames are full of honey for the bees to eat. Buying a nuc seemed much easier to me. You just take the five frames out of their small box, put them in a normal-sized hive body, and fill it in with 5 more empty frames so the bees have room to grow. Off and running.

So that's what I did, but instead of buying a small nuc, I got a full-sized deep frame body (brood chamber) that had the five full frames and also had five empty frames.  No real installation needed. Just set it down and open it up.

I'm now about three weeks in. It is hard not to keep bugging the bees. I go sit in the back and just watch them. Now that I've got them, I'm reading all about them and, well, invested.