by Dave Doroghy
The three traps were a success. They killed hundreds of wasps. All three traps were loaded with wasp carcasses, and when I inspected them more carefully, I was astonished that not one bee fell for the trap. Bees are attracted to nectar and pollen, not banana peels, stinky cheese, and tuna. I told you that bees were superior to wasps.
Yet, even with a few hundred dead wasps in the traps and the 50 or so I’d killed earlier in the day, I was losing the war against the 5,000-strong army. But I had one more trick up my sleeve.
My last-ditch effort was a total hive lockdown, kind of like what you hear about on CNN when a building gets a serious threat. Well, the wasps were definitely a serious threat—the wasps’ ability to get past the guards, gain access to the vulnerable hive, and go on a killing rampage conjures up some very disturbing present-day analogies. So one night I locked the whole hive down. In the world of modern beekeeping, locking down the hive so nothing can get in or out can buy some time and may even rid your hive of wasps if you do it properly. As I prepared to lock down my hive, I briefly wondered if CNN would send Anderson Cooper out to cover it.
Here’s how it works: At night all the bees return to the hive, and, theoretically, the wasps go back to their nest. Like us, bees and wasps have circadian rhythms; thus, they sleep in their own homes. Late at night, before you go to bed, you completely seal the hive by blocking the two hive entrances with pieces of foam. I cut pieces out of those colourful swimming pool noodles.
In the dark, with all of my girls safely at home, I shoved a big piece of blue foam into the entrance door and sealed it with duct tape. Now there was no way the wasps could get in the next morning. But since the bees can’t go out and forage, how do they survive? That’s where a giant jar of sugar water comes in. You leave the bees with a survival kit in the form of a jar of sugar water to feed them and a jar of plain water to hydrate them. Then you leave them locked down for three days and hope the wasps dropping over during that time lose interest in the hive after they discover they can’t get in. Hopefully they find some other weak hive and go and raid it instead. You also hope your bees survive while trapped inside.
Well, it sounds good on paper, but here is where the wheels fell off of the plan. It was my own fault. I gave the girls their survival rations and blocked the two entrances. When I was about to go to bed, I had an uneasy feeling. I felt I should double-check the hive early in the morning when it was still dark, before the wasps came back, so I set my alarm for 4:00AM. But when the alarm rang, I sleepily shut it off and slept for two more hours. It was just light out when I got up, but I decided to check the hive anyway. When I unblocked the hive’s front entrance, I quietly observed dozens of my girls take magical slow-motion flight. I watched them ascend to freedom in their circular, carefree flight paths, and it made me smile.
Then, when I looked down into the hive, I was dismayed to discover half a dozen wasps inside. Instead of robbing honey, they were killing bees and robbing sugar water. My hunch to double-check had been a good one. But while I tried to squish the wasps with my leather gloves, scatterbrained me left the lid off for a couple of minutes, and more wasps flew in through the opening. Next thing I knew, dozens of wasps were back in the hive and it was impossible to get rid of them. While I was killing newcomers, more came in. Then, when I put the lid on, I didn’t want to lock down the hive, as a couple dozen new wasps were in it. My six-hour lockdown had been useless. Again I had to take off the beekeeping head veil and put on a beekeeping dunce cap.
Sadly, the wasps won the battle against my hive. They killed enough bees to severely weaken it—to the point where it was questionable if the hive could even survive until summer’s end. To make matters worse, the militant mites were back in full force, too. I also discovered a disease in the hive called chalkbrood, where the tiny cells get filled up with a spore-forming fungus that kills the bee larvae and makes them look like little pieces of white chalk. Although chalkbrood rarely kills a hive, it can weaken it and reduce honey production. Like a classic battle during the Second World War, my hive was being ambushed. My girls and I were losing each bloody battle, but could we win the war? I went to the library and took out a biography of Sir Winston Churchill and memorized some of his quotes. My favourite was “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
I was failing at controlling the wasps and had completely screwed up the lockdown by forgetting, I later discovered, to block a third entrance on the bottom of the hive. At least I was learning. Everything I was doing, I was doing for the first time, just like when I was a kid. Blocking entrances, concocting poisonous potions, zapping intruders, and wearing a crazy white outfit—it was pretty much the adventures boyhood fantasies are made of, but it was all new to me as an adult.
I drifted back to my childhood. How much fun would those outdoor dinners have been if the electric tennis racket had been invented and my mother had tasked me with defending the roast chicken dinner? Or, better yet, if she had gone inside after the first wasp arrived and come back with our vacuum? What a thrill it would have been for a seven-year-old to save our family from the attacking wasps. My mum, who was from Switzerland, would have proudly exclaimed in German “Die Wespen sind tot,” which means “The wasps are dead.” I envisioned adulation over my vacuum-hose technique as my granny incredulously sat there enjoying a wasp-free dinner. But, come to think of it, the powerful vacuum nozzle may have been a bit much for a seven-year-old to handle; I probably would have accidentally plugged it with mashed potatoes as I went in for a kill.
Sugar, Sugar
After the invasion of the marauding killer wasps, the hive was hurting. The girls were stressed, exhausted, and ill. They needed to be refreshed and re-energized. And nothing provides a pick-me-up like good old-fashioned white processed sugar.
The average North American eats about 130 pounds of sugar a year. This insidious, unhealthy, addictive, sweet substance hides in most processed foods. If that weren’t bad enough, we generously spoon even more sugar into our hot beverages and sprinkle it over our meals. My friend Professor Dave Symons—who happens to live in the Beehive State—conducts research on diabetes and cardiovascular disease at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He calls sugar “white death.” You must think I am leading up to a claim that honey is a terrific alternative to sugar. Well, sort of. But before I get to that, here is what came as a real shocker to me when I began beekeeping: beekeepers feed their bees the exact same white granulated crystals we all buy from the grocery store. Yup! Kept bees eat processed white sugar just like humans do, and lots of it. Thanks to beekeeping sugar pushers like me, the average hobby hive gobbles up nearly 50 pounds of white sugar every year. This means, factoring in the bee-to-human weight ratio, the average domestic bee eats even more harmful sugar than we do.
Like most people, beekeepers know that white sugar is bad; thus, we eat as much honey as possible. Yet, despite our knowledge of sugar’s harmful effects, we feed our bees mountains of sugar. I could see giving my bees a small sweet treat or candy from time to time as a token reward for their hard work. However, it struck me as odd when an experienced apiarist first told me to purchase bags of sugar so big they hardly fit in the trunk of my car for the little junk-food junkies in my hive to gorge on. It seemed counterintuitive—like I was taking them out to dinner at Tim Hortons for doughnuts every night and then expecting them to be healthy and fit.
Here’s the rub: northern winters are tough on bees. Through the long cold months, bees burn large amounts of energy while shivering to stay alive; they need to fatten up in the fall if they are going make it until spring, especially if they live on the windy back deck of a float home on a freezing river estuary in Canada. The bees’ only source of wild food, nectar, is obviously unavailable in winter. Like humans, they spend most of their winter indoors, but unlike humans, they don’t have refrigerators full of food. So in the autumn we load them up with extra sugar calories to prepare them for the long haul.
&nb
sp; Contrary to popular belief, bees don’t hibernate in winter. To understand why this point is important, here’s a mini science lesson. In zoology, birds and mammals (like bears) are categorized as endothermic, or warm-blooded. This means that they maintain their body temperatures internally through metabolizing food for energy. Fish, reptiles, and most insects, on the other hand, are ectothermic, or cold-blooded. These creatures rely on their surrounding environment for heat because their physiology does not allow them to produce heat internally. Thus, they are highly susceptible to external temperature changes. This is why you will see a lizard basking on a rock in the sun on a cool day or a toad sitting in the middle of a paved road on a summer night. They are drawing heat from outside sources. Because evening temperatures are usually cooler, ectotherms are often sluggish at night. Remember how night is the best time to move the hives? Not only are the girls at home, they aren’t moving fast.
Because bees are primarily ectothermic, when they are in the hive in the freezing cold, they need a way to generate warmth because they can’t create heat within their individual bodies. With the onset of cold weather, bees will congregate in an inner chamber of the hive in a tightly knit cluster that insulates them from the cold. The bees in the centre of the cluster begin shivering their flight muscles (the same way they do right before taking flight), using up valuable stored glucose to create friction. The friction raises the temperature in the very centre of this ball of buzzing bees to about 92 degrees Fahrenheit, warmth the girls gratefully absorb. Coddled in the centre of this live bee sauna is, of course, Her Majesty. The bees on the exterior of the cluster function to insulate the whole ball, and all of the bees are further insulated by their downy “bee hair,” called plumose hair. It’s easy to see why bees would need a steady source of energy for all that clustering, shivering, and wiggling.
Bees usually create this energy source in the form of honey in late summer. Like squirrels, they pack food away to get ready for cold weather. Bees need the honey they process to sustain the circle of life in the hive year-round. Like us, they eat their stores for energy. Heck, they probably enjoy the taste too. As their first priority, bees squirt tiny amounts of honey into the six-sided wax cells of the comb to provide nutrition for their newly laid eggs. Like us, they put their children first. The remainder of the honey stored, also in six-sided wax cells, is for the rest of the hard-working bees to eat throughout November, December, January, February, and March. Honeycomb does double duty as a bee nursery and food pantry. The amount of honey the bees are able to store in any given summer is their lifeblood. If they have a lot of honey heading into Christmas, they may just live to see Easter.
In spring and summer, beekeepers monitor the hives closely to see if the bees are socking away enough honey in those small cells, and stealing that honey is the selfish motive of beekeepers. In this way we are real-life Pooh bears. But beekeepers have one up on Pooh—knowing full well that the bees are creating winter stores, we trick them into producing more honey than they need. If upon inspection all is well, and we have confirmed there is plenty of honey in the colony, we add a wooden box full of empty frames to the top of the hive. The bees are so busy and focused on gathering nectar that they keep right on filling up those new frames with honey. It’s similar to when humans go shopping at Costco: if we know that we have an extensive pantry at home, we stock up on more and more food. Bees tend to follow an ascending pattern while expanding their pantry. Just like humans building condominium high-rises, sometimes the only way to go is up.
So, sadly, all of the bees’ hard work gathering pollen and producing more and more honey never really pays off. When the time is right, we beekeepers steal their honey. It’s the old bait-and-switch routine. Bait them into making more honey, encourage them to store it in an accessible, unsecured area, and then steal it from under their proboscises. When fellow beekeepers wax sanctimonious about the hobby, I sometimes take a bit of umbrage. Don’t get me wrong; beekeeping has many merits. It’s a wonderful, nature-based learning experience and holds benefits for the environment, not to mention the palate. However, the ugly truth is that this commendable hobby involves ripping off the bees’ winter food source right when they need it most, and then replacing it with a $7 bag of processed white sugar. Talk about lunch-bag letdown. As I admit this skulduggery, I confess I am a bit ashamed of being a beekeeper.
The question every beekeeper fortunate enough to harvest the golden elixir must ask is: Have I left my bees enough honey to get them through the winter? In most cases, after blatantly robbing the pantry, the answer is a cold, cruel no. We reap numerous nice little jars of honey to give to family and friends, maybe even jars to sell, but we’ve left the bees with a big empty upstairs pantry. Because it’s getting cold and the nectar in the fields has stopped flowing, the bees can’t just run out and get more.
For the honey-pilfering beekeeper, this is where aisle seven at the local Safeway comes in handy. Simply take a left at the Pop-Tarts display, go past the brownie and cake mixes, and you’ll find those big 20-pound bags of sugar. It’s easy to spot beekeepers in autumn because they are always bumping shopping carts in the sugar aisle as they hoist five or six large sugar bags into the cart for each of their hives. Just try putting six of those heavy bags of sugar into a rickety supermarket buggy and step back to watch the cart’s frame and wheels buckle under the weight.
To me, feeding bees sugar water seems wrong on so many levels. Granulated sugar mixed into a thick, gooey sugar-water concentration can’t be good for any living creature, especially young bees. Think of what happens to kids when they get too much sugar. They get all fidgety and overly energized and then bounce around like crazy. Come to think of it, kids on sugar act exactly like bees.
It might seem less insidious if we fed the bees natural foods with sugar in them, such as bananas or apples, like many parents feed their kids to avoid that sugar high. Feeding them straight processed sugar seems a crime. Still, it’s better than having them starve to death. I have heard of purist hobby beekeepers who don’t feed their bees sugar syrup, and their bees often don’t survive the winter. So I’ve resisted what my moral compass tells me and implemented the winter sugar-water diet even though it seems insensitive. But what do I know? I am just a bee-ginner, and I don’t have the best track record for keeping pets.
Once, for a very short period, I had a cat named Rusty living with me in the float home. He was a feral cat someone gave me when I had rats living in the hull of my houseboat. Although I love animals, I wasn’t a very good cat owner because I lived alone and was out of town on business half the time. In the end, Rusty left me. One day he just up and ran away, eventually, I suspect, dying somewhere in the great outdoors where he longed to be. For the time I had him, I fed Rusty only the finest cat food. I carefully read the labels of all the cat foods at Safeway and chose the brand that would best keep him healthy while he hunted the giant, mean hull rats. I went for the expensive gourmet Little Friskies brand at $2.99 for a small tin, and Rusty loved it. Knowing Rusty was eating well made me feel good. I feel the opposite every time I feed my bees sugar water. The bees need to be fortified to fight the wasps, just like Rusty with the rats, but I don’t have the option of choosing premium-brand “healthy” white sugar for the girls.
Ask three different beekeepers the same question about anything bee related, and you’ll get three different answers. Sure enough, there’s disagreement over the effectiveness of sugar water. The controversy over sugar water is bittersweet. Although feeding it to bees is a hugely popular practice, I recently heard a claim at a bee club meeting that high concentrations of it can harm the bees’ immune systems and their ability to fight off diseases. According to my friend Dr. Symons, sugar sure messes with the human immune system. I was also told that beehives fed a white-sugar diet over the winter have a different pH balance than hives that aren’t fed sugar. This was on my mind the first time I turned my kitchen into a floating soft-drink bottling plant to prepare winter meals for
my bees.
Unlike wasps, bees are not big on eating solid food. A hard grain of sugar would probably choke a small bee to death, so turning sugar into liquid form—which is a cross between art and chemistry—is just one of the skills you’ll need if you want to keep bees. Mixing two parts sugar and one part water is the first step in creating the thick, sticky sugar-water concoction. When heating the mixture on the stove, I was taught it’s important to almost, but not quite, bring the water to a boil. The maximum temperature to which you can heat the sugar water has something to do with its final viscosity. Turning the stove off just before it boils is key because you are trying to dissolve the sugar, not caramelize it. I don’t like making sugar water because I inevitably spill some when I pour it into the Mason jars I use to feed the girls, which makes a sticky mess on the counter and floor. Then my cleaning ladies leave me a nasty note as more ants march in. Plus I don’t like the anxiety of having to stand in front of a stove anticipating exactly when to turn the burner off before the mixture reaches a boil. Miss it by five seconds and you have ruined the batch. I get distracted while frying an egg, let alone waiting for the precise moment before a gallon of water boils.
The viscosity of the sugar water is important because it has to flow through the tiny holes you poke in the Mason jar lid. To feed the bees, you turn the Mason jar upside down on top of the hive. I like to shout out “Come and get it!” as I do. Then you leave the large jar in there for a day or two until it’s empty. Theoretically, just like a baby sucks on its bottle, the bees come up to the top of the hive and suck on the tiny holes in the Mason jar lid, extracting the sweet syrup. Theoretically.