Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  There was no need for all of the triple protection. Norm and I had sealed the hives, and there were few free-flying bees. All these guys needed to do was carry the hives from the truck about fifteen feet to the squat wall along the dock where they were placing them until they decided where on their roof they were going to keep them. All was well until halfway through the transfer when one of the fellows, for reasons known only to him and G-d, started unscreening the hives that had been placed on the wall next to the water. This sent the bees, all of whom had just been rattled and bumped for a couple of hours driving in stop-and-go traffic on Interstate 95 and bouncing down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, furiously flying out of their homes. Chase was again ensconced in his Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man–like suit, but there were several people—curious observers invited by Chase, I suppose—who hovered nearby wearing no protective gear at all. The second half of the transfer was tough to watch as arms flailed and witnesses scattered. Spring had by now indeed sprung and the bees were active and making their presence known; the season was very much upon us.

  The remainder of the hives were offloaded soon enough, and Ben and I shook gloved hands, exchanged knowing looks through our veils, laughed, and parted.

  Ancient Egyptians considered it good luck to meet a swarm of bees on the road—though a non-beekeeper might wonder what bad luck looked like if a swarm of bees was good luck. For myself, I never put much stock in luck. It may not be an original thought, but the harder I work, the luckier I get. In dealing with honey bees, one needs to be respectful, cautious, attentive, and diligent. “Hardworking” does not even begin to describe the ethic needed to manage colonies of honey bees on a scale beyond that of the hobbyist. So with spring underway, dandelions splattered all over the lawns, the days getting longer, and the bees flittering hither and yon, if one chooses to work with honey bees, one needs to remember the work and perseverance this choice demands. Shortcuts and sloppy labor will result in painful problems like stings. The bees will immediately let a person know their displeasure, a quality that I admire. I have absorbed my share of stings, enough to keep me humble and to remind me, when I get a bit puffed up, that I still have plenty left to learn from these celestial creatures. More than dispensers of stings, honey bees are communicators of love. Sometimes love stings.

  * That is, larvae, or immature bees.

  APRIL

  I’m a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me because of the image they’ve made of me and that I’ve made of myself, as a sex symbol….They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman’s and I can’t live up to it.

  —MARILYN MONROE

  When Lucifer, the most beautiful angel, was cast out of heaven, he took a third of the angels with him upon his departure. When bees swarm, about a third to half of them alight from the hive to seek out a new kingdom in a manner similar to that of the fallen archangel (but with more sweet than evil intentions).

  In our neck of the woods, southern New England and New York City, April can be the start of swarm season, though it’s certainly not the height of it, as most swarming usually takes place between Memorial Day and Independence Day. A swarm is the way that colonies propagate themselves. Or, more simply put, it’s when one colony of honey bees splits into two. There are a couple of reasons why this may happen. Perhaps the hive was strong enough to survive the winter but is not well tended in the spring—meaning not given the room it requires to expand. As the egg laying of the queen increases and the colony repopulates quickly, without proper care it may easily and quickly become overcrowded, and swarm by April. Even without overcrowding, if the colony is poorly ventilated, it may swarm as well.*

  Evolutionarily speaking, swarming is a sign of a healthy hive, but it is not necessarily ideal for half of the bees to leave the hive on their own terms: A good beekeeper will instigate an artificial swarm—that is, split the colony in two, preventing the loss of bees and increasing his or her apiary.

  Prior to a swarm, the queen will do what a lot of women do before a big event like a wedding or a class reunion—she’ll fast, and at best she can lose as much as 30 percent of her body weight, because the queen will need to be light to alight from the hive. The queen has mandated help for this—it is really her daughters’ idea as they just feed her less to help her achieve their goal. Whereas on some days she will lay thousands of eggs, at this juncture the queen will cease laying eggs for a spell. When she eventually leaves her home, in addition to abandoning about half the population of younger bees, she’ll also leave several populated queen cells. From these queen cells will emerge new virgin queens. Hopefully one of these virgin queens will be born successfully, have a fruitful mating flight, and become the new mother of the colony. At this time the oldest foragers are already searching for a new home outside of their current one.

  The transition will not be bloodless (though honey bees don’t actually have blood; they have hemolymph). There will be a dozen or so fertilized eggs that have been groomed to be queens, and whichever emerges from her cell first—sixteen days after being placed—shall wear the crown. Her majesty’s first order of royal business is to visit the still-incubating would-be queen bees and sting them to death as they lie helplessly cloistered in their cells. The queen’s cell is elongated, like a peanut, not the small, flat cell of a worker bee or the bulletlike protrusion of a drone. The first queen to emerge from her cell will either sting her competitors to death through what will shortly become their peanut-shaped coffins, or bite a hole in the side of each cell so that worker bees will finish the job and dispatch the would-be royals. On the occasion that two or more queens are born more or less at the same time, they will detect each other through scent, locate one another, and battle to the death. Sometimes a virgin queen is born and remains in the hive along with her queen mother for a short time. The worker bees keep the two queens, the old established queen and the newly born one, apart from one another. Or not! Most people believe that a colony cannot tolerate more than one queen at a time, but this is not the case. Many colonies do just this. But in the circumstances being described here, this is a temporary situation leading up to a swarm.

  So if and when they deem it necessary, the workers make a collective decision to depart from the hive. As a final preparation, they load themselves up with honey for the journey. They usually do not go too far at the onset. Generally, if one is available, the bees will fly to a tree no more than twenty feet from the original hive. There the bees will cluster, in a more loose-knit manner than in the winter cluster, around the queen bee. This cluster usually ranges in size from a grapefruit to a soccer ball. Since the swarm has no brood to protect and they are full of nourishment, they are at their most docile and least likely to sting. While the majority are gathered there on the limb or trunk of a tree—or, if in Manhattan, perhaps on the umbrella of a hot dog vendor’s cart in Times Square, the side-view mirror of a car parked along the West Side Highway, the front door of a high-end restaurant near the downtown federal courthouses, a fence on the deck of the USS Intrepid, a traffic signal, a fire hydrant, or the center field wall at Yankee Stadium just hours before a big game, to name but a few places where city bees have swarmed—the scout bees head out in search of more suitable living accommodations.

  Scout bees are worker bees with the most experience foraging. As many as one hundred of them take on this role. These experienced pilots strike out from the cluster and seek out an easily defensible, dry, cool, dark cavity somewhere—perhaps a hollowed-out tree, maybe a void in a section of a stone wall—where the group could set up a new home. Upon finding a suitable new abode, a scout will return to the group and indicate the coordinates of the option via dance. Other scouts will also return with options, also relayed via dance. Scouts will confer with other scouts, maybe collectively check out one another’s findings, and eventually, be it within a few hours or a few days, like Quakers, they will co
me to a collective agreement. They will fly as far as a mile away to their new home and commence building honeycomb and carrying out the usual tasks associated with their lives. If a beekeeper is able to be in the right place at the right time, he or she may capture the swarm as they are in that limbo between their former home and the new home they seek. Those bees can be relocated into a new beehive and put to work for the lucky soul who captures them.

  The life of the queen may not be all it is cracked up to be. A productive queen must lay up to two thousand individual eggs per day during the peak season of early spring. This effectively boils down to laying her own body weight in eggs every day. She determines the gender of each one by fertilizing or not fertilizing it as she plops it down into the cell, by inspecting each cell before she lays into it. That is, if the workers construct her drone cells, she lays drones, and if a worker cell, she lays workers. Again, the workers are in control even of the gender of their future siblings. The queen is responsible for the welfare of the hive in continuing the population of the colony. Though she is in charge of the hive in one sense, the workers will rise up, and destroy and replace her should she falter—that is, if she fails to produce the required number of viable eggs and queen pheromone for the community. So she is a queen, but in a gilded cage. She is more a slave than a monarch. In the beehive, the workers are truly in charge of the means of production and have all of the power. Marx would have approved.

  Usually, a queen leaves the hive only once in her life, for her mating flight. After she has her one afternoon of multiple trysts in the sky, she is relegated to a lifetime of reflection and toil; years of pushing out babies to ensure the survival of the hive. She is, in a sense, a prisoner of her own daughters. Unless she swarms, she will not see daylight until the beekeeper tips back the lid of the hive and pokes around during an inspection. Fortunately, the queen is modest and would just as soon not see bright light, which irritates her and sends her scrambling for a dark corner quicker than Blanche DuBois.

  When the hive needs a new queen, it creates several of them from ordinary eggs. For though a queen is born a queen, when she is implanted into a cell as an egg, she’s no different from any of her sisters. When a new queen is required, a few wee larvae less than thirty-six hours old are selected by the workers and cultivated expressly to wear the crown. If the need is not the result of a swarm or an impending swarm, it’s likely to be due to the current queen’s poor egg production, the beekeeper perhaps accidentally squashing the queen bee, a blue jay gobbling her up as she returned from her mating flight, or some similar calamity. In this case, the replacement process is called supersedure.

  Under normal hive conditions, all larvae are fed a diet of royal jelly for at least thirty-six hours. In fact, all eggs are fed one thousand times per day and bathed in royal jelly, completely saturated in the nutrient-rich substance, which is secreted by the hypopharyngeal gland in a young worker bee’s head. After that enriched soaking, for most eggs, it is a steady diet of honey and pollen for the remaining days until emergence from the cell. Unfertilized larvae become drones (males), spending twenty-four days in a cell, while more become workers (females), but without functioning ovaries, spending twenty-one days in the cell. But queen bees, which start off as larvae selected by nurse bees, are fed only royal jelly, and as a result, they grow bigger, more quickly, and mature in far better condition than the sterile worker bees. Plus, their diet of royal jelly awards them functioning ovaries.

  Based on the anatomy of the worker bee, one may wonder how a queen is able to sting and not die. Unlike the stinger of the typical worker bee, or the phallus of the drone, the queen’s stinger is not adorned with barbs, and she may sting as often as she likes. Yet she will sting only another queen. This allows beekeepers to handle the queen without fear of being stung, and unsatisfied worker bees to usurp power and commit regicide without fear of immediate royal retaliation.

  Thanks to her steady diet of royal jelly, the queen can live for two to four years; workers and drones live for six and eight weeks respectively, on average. However, the queen generally starts to slow down in her egg laying after the second year, so much so that if a beekeeper does not replace her, the bees may take it upon themselves to create a batch of new queens. Some beekeepers are game to allow nature to take its course and let their colony requeen itself. I am of the school that believes the hobbyist beekeeper, particularly at my latitude, is better off buying a properly mated queen from a reputable breeder. But consensus is not common in the beekeeping community. An old and true adage is that if one were to ask ten beekeepers for an opinion on any beekeeping matter, there would be eleven different responses—and each would be delivered with certainty and exactitude. Like in all specialties, there are many opinions held by different beekeepers.

  We must remember that we have taken a mild departure from nature when we decided to put honey bees in boxes and bother them all year long, prodding at their homes with our metal hive tools and filling their faces with exhaust from our smokers. So while many market themselves as “natural” beekeepers, it makes no sense to imagine that one method is much more “natural” than another, if we are talking about humans trying to keep bees in boxes, whatever the configuration. So, to have the bees engender their own queen rather than to purchase one of battle-tested genetics might not be ideal for the hobbyist hoping to harvest. Aside from all else, allowing the colony to mate a queen on its own would mean a long delay in production, with waiting for the queen to hatch, go on her flight, be impregnated (perhaps with drones of questionable genetics), return, lay, and then for those eggs to develop and for those workers to mature enough to be able to leave the hive and be useful on the outside. This would not only adversely affect the excess honey to be harvested, but could negatively impact the hive to the point that the delay could render it impossible for the colony to gather what it needs to survive the winter. Say one lets the bees do things their way. The beekeeper might end up with two queens who battle it out to the death. The better fighter may win that regal battle, but be a disaster when it comes to laying. This always vividly reminds me of my first marriage.

  * * *

  —

  Each year in early April, often over Passover and/or Easter, my father, brother, and I drive one thousand miles in each direction to pick up millions of bees from Wilbanks Apiaries, a large commercial apiary (“commercial” meaning more than one thousand colonies) in Claxton, Georgia. Lately we have also been sourcing hundreds of packages from an apiary in Northern California called Olivarez Honey Bees, which specializes in, among other types, Carniolan honey bees.

  These bees are not all for us. Thankfully, we have never needed to replace all of our hives. Currently the national annual average for bee loss is above 30 percent attrition, and we are usually near that mark. But we continually get new clients, or we may want to bolster weak hives, and so each spring we replenish many of our colonies. Mostly, though, we acquire these packages to sell to other beekeepers in the five boroughs whose own hives did not overwinter successfully, or who are new to the beekeeping game. We also procure them for beekeepers all over New England, both hobbyists (who have a few colonies mostly for their own pleasure) and sideliners (who usually have a day job but have a greater number of hives than hobbyists and who try to make a side living via their honey bees), who meet us at a New York or Connecticut location and pick them up from us there.

  Most beekeepers who are more than hobbyists need to make their living not only through the obvious sale of honey but through sales of bees and beekeeping equipment, the provision of pollination services, by giving talks or classes, or through the removal of colonies of bees that have taken up residence in a structure. In other words, through whatever manner of sales and services that might help them eke out a living. It is often said that a boat is a hole in the water surrounded by wood into which you pour money. Beekeepers say that the way to make a small fortune in beekeeping is to start wi
th a large fortune and spend it as your hobby increases. That sounds about right to me.

  Like honey, honey bees are sold by weight. Most packages are three pounds of bees, which at four thousand or so per pound means about twelve thousand bees per three-pound package. Also in the container is a small queen’s cage, in which a single queen resides, protected over the long journey from the workers who may not immediately recognize her as their elected official. Her cage usually houses a few workers as well, who act as ladies-in-waiting, tending to her needs. Rather than instantly injecting her into a colony that might perceive her as hostile and kill her, the beekeeper often plugs the cage with candy, like confectionary sugar or marshmallow, so that when it is placed in with the general bee population, the queen will be released slowly as the workers eat away the sweets. This delay allows time for her pheromone to spread, helping the bees to accept her as queen. The package itself is traditionally a wooden box, just slightly larger than a shoebox, with screened sides that comes replete with an inverted can of sugar water to allow the girls some nourishment during their journey. In the past few years, some outfits have begun using plastic box cages instead of the traditional wood and screen. We don’t prefer them for several reasons—not the least of which is we don’t need more plastic floating in the oceans. But I find that bees respond better to natural materials.