by Andrew Coté
The first time she dismissed him was when she was upset that one of her beehives had been knocked over during a hurricane. “Martha, that storm knocked down a dozen trees on your property, too. And the bees are fine.” For whatever reason, it stuck in her craw, and Norm was told his services were no longer needed. But two weeks later she started writing to him about the bees again as if nothing had transpired. So he kept going and didn’t mention it. He never said it to me, but I know he was happy to be back. The second time she thought she would try having one of her other workers, a landscaper, take over. He claimed he had taken care of bee colonies back in his hometown of Cuernavaca, Mexico. We are always a bit suspect of this sort of claim—loads of people we meet tell us, “Oh, I took care of bees in my country,” wherever that may be. Anyway, after one honey-free season and four dead beehives, Norm was reenlisted.
One day, during his third installment, Norm was casually talking with the property manager, and a few of the other workers were there—including the fellow who’d had a brief tenure as beekeeper. Norm and the manager were chatting about this and that, and as the help are wont to do, may have been jesting a bit about the lady in the “big house.” Norm noticed that there were feeders on the beehives, but it was far too early in the year for that, and it was not good for the bees to have that cold liquid potentially dripping onto them while they were clustered together trying to stay warm and dry. The property manager was saying that Martha disagreed and had ordered the feeders on (this was probably not the case—it was more likely one of the workers who felt he knew best and did not want to back down—Martha is savvy enough to defer to experts when it matters). Norm explained that keeping the feeders on was just not advisable. He tried to soften the blow since he knew that probably whoever made the poor suggestion was there and Norm did not want him to lose face or have a confrontation. So he tried humor. “You tell Martha to just stick to baking the cookies and leave the beekeeping to me,” he told the property manager. The fellows around laughed, but not the property manager. He just made a sour face. Norm realized he may have stepped in it. In fact he was sure that he had.
It is one thing to blow off some good-natured steam at the expense of the matriarch; it is quite another when she hears about it. And so Norm’s time, and by default mine, at the estate came to an abrupt end. No more of Martha’s garden tomatoes for the Coté clan.
*1 So that’s two to five seconds of lovemaking for a six-week lifetime—which seems brief—but to be fair, if a human man lives to be sixty years old, and a drone lives six weeks but copulates for even two seconds, that figures to be the equivalent of more than half an hour for the human. Not so shabby—especially considering it is his first time. And theoretically, unlike his bug-eyed brother, the human might repeat the act.
*2 In warmer climates, the opportunity for mating exists year-round.
MARCH
Jim said bees wouldn’t sting idiots; but I didn’t believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn’t sting me.
—MARK TWAIN, Huckleberry Finn
Spring begins to spring. Skunk cabbages blossom. New Yorkers walk around with their coats unbuttoned. The chimes from the Delacorte Clock in Central Park start playing “Easter Parade.” Nearby, the Shakespeare Garden shows off blooming forsythia, Arabis, daphne, witch hazel, crocus, and snowdrops, and a few tulips and daffodils peep up from the cold ground. Later in the month, if I am lucky, I have time to see the cherry trees bloom just east of Strawberry Fields. Soon my bees shall feast upon the bounty within Central Park and beyond. This banquet will culminate in a unique and light honey found nowhere else in the world, thanks to the blend of nectars from a grouping of nonindigenous flowers all concentrated in the park’s eight-hundred-plus-acre playground. Once harvested, the honey sells as fast as I can bottle it to tourists visiting the city and to New Yorkers wishing to consume the local pollens in the raw honey to stave off seasonal allergies.
For me, March always brings a sense of excitement, as there is so much to look forward to with the promise of a new beekeeping year. This is tempered with a mild sense of foreboding, as I know the huge amount of work that lies ahead. For the bees themselves, it is a risky time. Even if they survived their sequestered state within the hive with nothing to feast upon other than what they gathered the previous year, starvation is still a threat. The bees cannot safely leave their home to look for nectar if the external temperatures are not at least 55 degrees Fahrenheit, so a colony lucky and strong enough to have survived the long winter may be in danger of starvation just because it is cold outside and they cannot leave the house. Or the temperatures may rise just enough that they can fly around in search of food, but with relatively few flowers having blossomed, there may be little to none yet available to them. If there are reasonable reserves of honey, there should be a steady increase in egg laying by the queen. If so, there will soon be many more mouths to feed, and if the weather doesn’t cooperate, the winter supplies may be gobbled up without an opportunity for the bees to gather more.
Additionally, the bees will have likely broken their winter cluster by now, but if a cold snap descends on the area, it could devastate even an otherwise healthy and well-stocked colony. The bees might sense the temperature dropping and rush to regroup themselves, inadvertently creating two clusters, neither of which will be able to sustain the necessary temperature. In this case, the entire colony would perish.
So March is exciting, yes. But it’s risky. That’s why at this time of year, a beekeeper will often feed fondant or sugar water to the bees until they can start to gather their own nectar. This in no way impacts the honey that will be harvested later in the year. While there are those who believe that under no circumstances should honey bees ever be fed sugar water, I equate feeding honey bees emergency sugar in the off-season to giving a child an unhealthy snack like a bag of chips when a real meal is still a few hours away; it’s a necessary evil that isn’t so sinister.
As the daylight hours start to increase, and if the temperature is agreeable, a beekeeper might take a furtive look under the cover of the hive just to see if the girls rallied through the winter. Frames should not be exposed to the air if it is below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and even more care should be taken if the winds are high. This is to protect the eggs, or the baby bees* who are just coming up in their world. But for the purposes of a quick pre-spring check, there is no need to remove frames and do a full inspection; a brief look to see if there is life will suffice. If yes, rejoice. If not, time to clean out the equipment and hope that there is no mold or wax moth damage, or that mice have not made the dead-out beehive their abode (and eaten the wax for good measure). On the odd warm day, the bees will take what is called a cleansing flight. Since honey bees, as a general rule, will not empty their bowels inside the hive—only her majesty the queen may plop her royal poop within the hive with reckless abandon, and that regal excreta is carried out joyfully by her attendants—they will hold their own bowels until the weather permits them to fly out and void them. This is even true in outer space.
Whereas astronauts may at times wear diapers—which NASA calls maximum absorbency garments—while on missions, honey bees will do their very best to hold their bowels until they can leave the beehive. In 1984, aboard the space shuttle Challenger, seven thousand intergalactic honey bees had to keep their three pairs of legs crossed until they got back to Earth. Conducting an experiment testing the impact of microgravity on honey bees demonstrated a few things. Honey bees can actually feel gravity and use that to hone their honeycomb-making skills. In space, the lack of gravity influenced the bees to build their honeycomb at odd angles and not to the perfect pitch of the Earth that they normally would. They also, initially, could not fly, and just walked around, but by the end of the week they had worked out how to fly in their new environs. Honey bees are quick studies. And lest one think that honey bees on the space shuttle is odd, they are
n’t by a long shot the most curious creatures taken aboard the various shuttle missions. Sea urchin sperm, worms, and jellyfish have also made the voyage into space.
Back on planet Earth, specifically when I was growing up in Connecticut, our wonderful neighbor, Mrs. Berger, a German woman and the mother of five boys, always washed her family’s linens and hung them to dry on a line in the backyard that was fairly close to my father’s beehives. Every springtime, she would assert, “Something must be coming off the trees and marking on my sheets!” in a German accent as thick as the butter she would spread on my toast. For decades, this lovely woman has believed that the trees dividing our yards shed something that caused brownish yellow stains on her crisply washed and hung white sheets. No one has had the heart, or courage, since she is as tough as she is kind, to tell her that the streaks are, in fact, bee Schiesse being released from above by our bees each spring. If you are reading this, Mrs. Berger, thank you for letting us use your pool for all those years, and for all of the sodas you snuck me when I was little. And on behalf of my father and our bees, I am very sorry about the sheets.
All worker bees are females, and at this time of year especially, they live up to their name: They are workers. And they are, all of them, sexually underdeveloped queens. Had they been afforded a nutritious diet of royal jelly for their entire incubation from eggs to pupae to larvae to emergence from their cells—a twenty-one-day journey from being laid to biting and scraping their way out of their cells—then they would have developed ovaries and become queens. So every worker bee—that is, every female bee—could have been a queen had she been provided a finer repast. But, as it plays out, the nurse bees (worker bees, of course), whose responsibility it is to decide which fertilized eggs will become queens, make those decisions on an as-needed basis. A kitchen cannot function with all chefs, and a beehive cannot run without the vast majority of its population being worker bees.
A worker bee generally lives about six weeks, with roughly half of that time spent on indoor tasks and the other half spent on foraging for various items needed by the colony. From the moment the worker bee chews her way out of her cell, she commences a life of toil. During the first two weeks or so, she will work in part as sanitation engineer, cleaning out cells and making the area impeccable for the next round of eggs.
Worker bees also function as undertakers, dragging out the dead from the beehive. Sometimes the dead are not even all the way dead. Watching undertaker bees drag out placid and sick or injured-but-still-living bees puts me in mind of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where a man is pushing a cart during the Dark Ages collecting bodies, one of which protests “I’m not dead. I’m feeling better.” Then he’s clobbered and heaped on the cart with the other corpses. But whether it involves the dead or deadweight, a beehive or a plague-infested village in the Middle Ages, housecleaning must be done. And as honey bees are immaculate creatures, the corpses will be removed as far as possible from the hive to avoid disease.
These young worker bees are also caterers and waitstaff to the baby drones, since the young men cannot yet feed themselves. And, still in the first fortnight, some of the young workers are charged with taking care of the queen. This includes her grooming, feeding, and guarding. So they are beauticians as well. They also disperse the queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) throughout the hive. Since the honey bee world relies heavily upon scent, the spreading of this scent is essential to a healthy and functioning community. When the Royal Standard flag is flown at Buckingham Palace, it is an indication that the queen is in residence. The QMP that is spread by young worker bees is something of an olfactory equivalent. It lets the general population know that their queen is stalwart and that all is well in their world. So in this sense the worker bees are disseminators of information.
The queen bee eats only royal jelly, and royal jelly is secreted from the head of the nurse bee via the glands in her hypopharynx. So add caterer and chef to the job description. Lest anyone think that only bees eat strange things produced from their own bodies, in the same month and year that beekeeping was legalized in New York City, there was a well-known chef in Manhattan who made and sold cheese made from his wife’s breast milk. “I prepared a little canapé of breast-milk cheese with figs and Hungarian pepper,” he told the New York Post. Chew on that.
Sometimes the bees themselves are the meal. In Japan, there is a region in a remote mountainous highland valley area called Kamikōchi (上高地), where one of the more esoteric culinary specialties is honey bee larvae. It is paired with horsemeat. Emperor Showa, formerly known as Hirohito, was said to be a big fan of eating honey bee larvae.
If they escape the chopsticks in that highland valley, during the third week the worker bees become warehouse workers and professional organizers, taking the pollen that their elder sisters bring back to the hive and storing it in the honeycomb. They are also chemists, as they mix the pollen with a bit of honey to create what we humans call bee bread, a concoction used to feed the babies. This third week they also become HVAC technicians, as they use their double set of wings to circulate air within the hive in order to keep the temperature down.
Add military adviser, bodyguard, and security guard to the list of jobs for the third week, since from about the eighteenth until the twenty-first day of their lives worker bees keep a wary eye out for any shenanigans from intruders. Or in their case, five eyes, each worker being equipped with three ocelli eyes that are simple and read light intensity, as well as two larger compound eyes with nearly seven thousand facets apiece built for detecting movement. These guard bees will maintain their vigilance at the front door of the hive with increased numbers in late summer or early fall, for when winter is coming, the chances of being attacked and robbed increases. It is no game of drones.
Still in the third week, workers become structural engineers, craftswomen, architects, and day and night laborers when they begin to build honeycomb. Honeycomb is built from wax that the bees produce from their own bodies—another reason to give bees sugar water in the early part of the year, as it stimulates their ability to produce wax. Bees convert sugar from honey or syrup into wax, which they push out of pores in their abdomens in small flakes. They produce this wax in a similar fashion to how humans produce ear wax. The workers then chew on the wax to render it pliable and use it for the construction of the honeycomb, which is their home; to seal cured honey; and for other construction projects.
Gunga Din had nothing on honey bees. Like all living creatures, honey bees need water to survive. The water carriers work in tandem with the fanning bees in order to keep the temperature of the hive down on hot days. In the 1930s, trains in India may have taken a cue from honey bees when they would position fans behind huge blocks of ice in attempts to lower the temperature of the carriages. And speaking of honey bees and India, there is a hill station in the southern state of Kerala called Munnar. I have been there and stood in wonder at one particular tree on Mattupetty Road where there hang about three dozen feral beehives. The comb is exposed, rather than hidden in a safe cavity as is usually the case with honey bees, and the colonies somehow live more or less in harmony. Oddly, the many surrounding trees are untouched by the bees. For many years they have adorned just this one tree.
Surely the best-known job of the worker bees is that of forager, which is their role for the last three weeks of their lives. Essentially, foragers fly out from the hive, beginning with short expeditions to orient themselves. In time they alternately gather water, resin (to make propolis, which is a bee glue, and used to seal cracks in the hive), nectar (to transform into honey), and pollen (their source of protein). Though they are able to sting, workers will do so only to protect themselves or their colony. Their stinger is a modified ovipositor—though worker bees generally do not lay eggs. Though queens and workers evolved stingers from an ovipositor, both can lay eggs via the sting chamber. But not to worry; honey bees found on flowers are harmless a
nd have no interest in stinging anyone or anything. They just want to do their job.
Just as March ushers in the spring and much of nature begins to stir, we beekeepers become more active as well. This is the month when the New York City Beekeepers Association finishes up its basic beekeeping course. Since 2007, the NYCBA has rented out a hall and taught courses to beginner and wannabe beekeepers over several weekends during the winter months.
We started by renting out small rooms at a YMCA in Chinatown in lower Manhattan, and then moved into a basement conference room of a high-rise hotel where I maintained beehives on the roof of the seventy-second floor in what is the highest apiary in the world—though not the most productive, as the poor foragers have quite a time making it the one-third of a mile to the top of that building, fully laden with nectar and pollen, and in sometimes brutal winds. More recently we have been using space at the New York Institute of Technology on Broadway and Sixty-first, and it is by far the best space, equipped with large-screen monitors to display the hundreds of videos and photographs that accompany our courses. What started off as a dozen or so students in 2007 rapidly grew to what now has to be capped according to room capacity. The classes have been full since 2010, when beekeeping became legal in the city. The week that the city of New York was to hold public hearings on the issue of legalizing beekeeping, The New York Times published an article about it, which read in part: