Show Me the Honey

by Dave Doroghy

  In preparation for the meeting, about 150 uncomfortable old black plastic folding chairs had been crammed together so tightly that club members were accidently brushing up against each other as the pre-meeting was called to order. I am fidgety at the best of times and felt sorry for anyone who would have to sit next to me throughout the entire evening’s presentations.

  Beeginner’s Corner turned out to be a talk on the best flowers to plant near your hives. I learned that bees prefer an abundance of white clover and dandelions, but since my float home has no lawn, this was useless information. When the real meeting finally began at 7:00PM, there were not nearly enough chairs for the men and women in the room. Over 200 bee club members had arrived, excited to hear the featured guest speaker: a woman from another club who gave a half-hour talk on the life cycle of the wasp. Having recently killed hundreds of wasps, I felt I was an expert on their death cycle. The final stage of a wasp’s life, as far as I was concerned, didn’t require a half-hour lecture but rather a simple explanation of the differences between an electric tennis racket, a vacuum cleaner nozzle, and a thick pair of leather executioner’s gloves. Everybody politely clapped after the wasp lady finished her talk, offering an unintended, partial standing ovation because of the poor club members left standing at the back even though they had arrived on time. I felt sorry for them because the presenters were using a lame PA system, and it must have been hard to hear the presentation. As the meeting dragged on, the basement room became warmer and warmer with no air conditioning or windows to open.

  After the wasp review came a power point presentation on queen bee rearing, followed by some remarks from the provincial bee inspector, who explained some of the new regulations regarding the transportation of hives in British Columbia. I didn’t plan on moving my hive any time soon, so that talk was not all that interesting to me. But the presentation on rearing queens was fascinating. I didn’t realize that after a queen bee has mated with a drone, she can begin laying eggs within two to three days. I thought back to the dud queen I had bought off that guy on the street and then kept warm in my pocket as I rushed back to the river. She certainly didn’t lay many eggs in my hive. Then I got to thinking, “I wonder if she laid some of the eggs in my pants?” Then I got to worrying, “Have I washed those pants?”

  One club member then told us about a new book written by a woman who talks to her bees and claims they talk back. Apparently every second chapter was actually written by her bees! I considered whether this writer’s bees had stung her in the brain a few too many times. A short discussion ensued on whether the club should invite the author up from Portland, Oregon, to give a talk at the next meeting. I was in favour; I wanted to learn if her bees could proofread too.

  Next, we sweated, fanned ourselves, and shifted in our chairs through some boring housekeeping stuff dealing with overdue membership fees and minor changes to the club’s constitution, as well as directions on where not to park on the street (where I parked). However, I did learn the club’s dues paid for a quarterly newsletter, honorariums for speakers, and the purchase of communal items club members could borrow, such as the bee books and magazines organized into a little library displayed on a folding card table in the corner of the basement. An expensive stainless steel honey extractor, the size of a washing machine, used to spin honey out of honeycomb was also on the borrow list. You could also borrow nifty gadgets like small moulds used to shape wax into candles. I discovered the club sponsored a number of gatherings and events. There was an annual Christmas party where I assumed that members would display the pretty evergreen tree–shaped candles they created from the moulds. There was another event held on the last Thursday of every month called Bees and Beer, where club members rendezvoused at a pub to drink beer and talk bees. I liked the alliteration of the gathering’s title, but I don’t like the taste of beer, and it makes me sleepy. However, it was fun to imagine a club member asking the pub’s server for “another round of honey ale, please,” in a deep, booming voice.

  Interrupting my reverie, the club president announced the bee club had hit a milestone with a record number of members. We took a 15-minute break for coffee and homemade banana bread. The coffee break was my chance to connect and communicate with others, just like my bees do while eating. As such, I chose to join two beekeepers, a man and a woman, conversing by the book display. Nibbling on a piece of banana bread, I quietly stood by, waiting for a break in conversation or a cue to introduce myself. They were heavy in discussion about how the club had gotten too big, and it might be time to split off some of the members who lived in the western part of the city into a new club.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” the man said. “It’s a great club, but I couldn’t find a place to park tonight, and I’m tired of standing. I couldn’t hear half of the wasp presentation.”

  “Yes,” the woman agreed, nodding. “I missed a number of the president’s announcements. We’ve simply gotten too big.”

  Unbeknownst to them, I was hanging on their every word because that was when the club–swarm analogy hit me. Epiphany!

  “Wait a minute,” I thought. “Everything about tonight’s overcrowded, overheated, poorly communicated bee club meeting, including these two members who are considering splitting off and forming another club, screams for comparison. This is exactly what a swarming beehive is all about. Like a healthy hive, it was a thriving club with large numbers of busy, industrious people, most of them women, cooperating and building up the club’s common good. And though they were ready to welcome more members like me, the club inadvertently had become too big to sustain any more growth. A split, or swarm, among the membership was a natural and unavoidable outcome, especially in spring, a time of new beginnings for bee clubs and also for beehives.”

  It is easy to understand why one bee club might morph into two clubs, but why do beehives split in two? To use bee lingo, why do bees swarm? There are several reasons. The first is simple: they split because they are healthy. Only healthy, growing hives can split. The same thing can, of course, be said for affluent, well-attended bee clubs. With plentiful members and resources, these clubs are able to split in two, whereas an unhealthy bee club with an empty parking lot and low membership would not likely divide itself. Healthy beehives also split and grow, over and over again, propagating the species, whereas unhealthy hives die out. As the old saying goes, in nature (and hobby clubs) only the strong survive. My hive had never swarmed; it was just shrinking, making me think I should put up a blinking Vacancy sign on the front of the boxes to attract healthy new members.

  The second and most compelling reason for a hive to split is overcrowding. Winter conditions can naturally reduce a hive’s size from 50,000 bees to between 10,000 and 20,000 bees. If the beekeeper leaves them enough honey in the fall and masters an appropriate sugar-water feeding technique, and if no diseases or mites take hold, the hive survives the cold weather and expands again as the weather warms up. In spring the queen produces more industrious workers, and the colony grows by leaps and bounds until the hive size peaks in late spring with as many as 50,000 worker bees to fan their delicate wings to dry honey and regulate the hive’s temperature, guard the colony from wasps, tend to the brood, and forage for pollen and honey. In April or May, with adorable baby bees hatching all over in the bee nursery cells, the hive gets more crowded than our church basement. Thank goodness no one in the bee club brought a crying baby to the meeting.

  Overheating, an effect of overcrowding, is another reason hives swarm. Anyone attending the bee club meeting on that warm spring evening could easily relate: club members in that packed church basement felt like Pop-Tarts in a toaster oven. The situation was clear. Yet how do you know when your bees are overheating? The sign that tips beekeepers off is a big, buzzing “bee beard” hanging over the hive’s entrance. As the name suggests, a bee beard is a clump of bees that forms the shape of a man’s facial whiskers. This formation, however, is about the size of a volleyball. It happens when the house bee
s push the field bees out of the hive in an attempt to reduce the hive’s inner temperature. So, if you come back to your hive one day and discover a formation of bees twice the size of Santa Claus’s beard hanging down from the entrance, it means your hive is overheating and a swarm is likely.

  The last reason for a hive to swarm has to do with communication or, more accurately, a lack of communication. When groups of people have a falling-out, I have witnessed that it’s usually over a communication breakdown. This tendency also holds true for beehives. Remember how bees communicate partially through smell and how the queen and worker bees release pheromones? Those pheromones transmit extremely important messages to the entire hive, and are passed on, in part, when bees share food with one another; when bees are feeding, they are actually communicating. Humans call this “going out for dinner.” In the beekeeping world, this communication is known as trophallaxis.

  The pheromone released by the queen is like a memo from the head office—she is telling all the bees they must continue foraging, building comb, and tending to the young brood. All the bees know that without the queen they are doomed, so when they stop getting those morale-boosting pheromone memos, they get worried. There is only one queen, and as the hive gets bigger and bigger, not all the workers have access to her and her reassuring smell. When a large percentage of bees stop receiving those sweet pheromone signals, they assume the queen is non-existent and decide it is time to flee the leaderless colony to start a new one of their own.

  Compare this scenario to the two overheated club members: their instinct was to flee and form a new bee club. This, of course, oversimplifies the complexity of a beehive swarm, but it does illustrate the point in human terms. You may have already seen a swarm in April or May. People usually freak out when they do. You look out your kitchen window into a tree in the backyard and see 20,000 bees clumped together. If I knew nothing about bees, I would freak out too. Hey, I freak out when one measly bee gets on the inside of my head veil. Often when a homeowner or well-intentioned passerby spots a swarm, that person will call the fire department, police department, or SPCA. Sometimes they call a pest removal company to come and get rid of the terrifying cluster of buzzing, stinging insects. Luckily, all of these agencies usually pass the call on to a local bee club. What is a disturbing bee invasion to one person is a treasure chest of Apis mellifera to another.

  Most bee clubs maintain a “swarm hotline” to get word out to their club members whenever a swarm is reported. The alerted beekeepers then have an opportunity to capture the swarm, take it home, and put it into a wooden box with empty cell frames to create a free new hive. Some beekeepers I know keep their bee suits in the trunks of their cars, along with a specially designed cardboard nuc box in which they can store a swarm. Their swarm kits each include a butterfly net, branch clippers, a hive smoker, a big white cotton bedsheet, a plastic tub, and the one staple beekeepers can’t live without: duct tape. That way if they get a call or text about a swarm, they can proceed directly to the location, scoop it up, and restore tranquility.

  My van doesn’t, of course, have all the items ardent beekeepers store in the trunks of their cars. I have far too much junk in my trunk already. Maybe that’s why I was so woefully unprepared the one and only time I inadvertently stumbled upon a swarm. All Jeannie and I could find to use as a bee suit was an old dirty hoodie in a pile of laundry I was bringing to the dry cleaners. I did have under the van’s back seat a Costco cardboard box that originally held six Tetra Paks of almond milk. We could use this as a makeshift nuc box.

  The swarm was by the road near some rusty old garbage cans, actually just resting on the ground, not on a branch or post, making it a bit easier to corral the bees, which we accomplished with an old roof shingle we found in one of the garbage cans. Even so, it took a bit of doing to scoop thousands of bees into the flimsy cardboard box with the shingle. After 20 minutes of coaxing and pushing, we finally crammed the little darlings into Almondville. Next, we sealed the top of the box, naively folding the top flaps over one another, and then poked some ventilation holes into its sides. I got stung twice in the process but figured it was a small price to pay for a free new hive. Because we had a vet appointment for Jeannie’s sick dog and were running late, we decided to come back to retrieve the box in half an hour. The plan was to race back to the cardboard box after the vet visit, bringing more gear with us in order to complete the safe transfer of the bees in my van back to the float home.

  We hid the cardboard box full of bees in a thicket of tall grass, confident we had scored our own treasure chest of Apis mellifera. We drove away elated; the promise of a brand new free hive had us feeling giddy. It was too good to be true, and anything too good to be true is … usually too good to be true.

  When we returned shortly, the bees had all escaped through the thin slits between the top flaps of the box and had continued their quest to their final destination. The box was completely empty, not one bee left. Jailbreak.

  Swarm day for bees is like Independence Day for a country. It’s a seminal moment in a beehive’s history—a new colony is formed, a new hive hierarchy is established, and new foraging grounds are claimed. About 60 percent of the bees in the hive just get up and go, and they take their queen along with them. Swarming is like when a country goes through a semi-peaceful revolution and two separate countries emerge.

  A few years ago we went cycling for a couple of weeks along the Danube River, through farmlands in Germany and Austria, then into the Slovak Republic. Beehives lined the bucolic route, but we didn’t see any evidence of swarms; to be more exact, we didn’t see any bee swarms. In 1993, however, the Slovak Socialist Republic had swarmed off from Czechoslovakia, forming two independent states. Without getting into a pedantic history lesson—because it makes very little difference to my tale if they took their king or queen with them—the point is that it was a bloodless split, done in peace for the benefit of both states. It was known as the Velvet Revolution, and it is replicated every spring by democratic, peace-loving bees all over the world striving for independence.

  Just as separatist movements in countries don’t happen overnight, bee swarms require tireless planning, practice, and maybe even some politicking. Try to get 30,000, heck, even three or four of your co-workers or neighbours to do something in unison and you will understand what I mean. Before the bees execute the official swarm, often they will have a few rehearsals. They leave the hive en masse, fly away to some branch or post nearby, stay there for an hour or two, and then return to the original hive.

  The key to the success of an actual swarm is the hive’s ability to acrobatically escort the queen in the middle of a cloud-like formation. In order for the swarm to survive, the queen must be transported unharmed over the long flight to the location where the bees will establish their new home. Here’s where, to use an old hackneyed bee-related cliché, there is a fly in the ointment. The problem is that the queen flies at a reduced rate because she is so out of shape; quite frankly, she’s gotten fat because she hasn’t flown in ages. She is out of practice. She has not taken flight once or even left the hive since her mating flight when she got knocked up by some drone bees in mid-air years ago. You think I am making this stuff up; I am not.

  For years she has been an egg-laying machine, plopping thousands of tomorrow’s generation of worker bees into the small six-sided honeycomb cells every day. There is no shortage of meals for her while she toils away. She snacks any time she wants, because all 50,000 bees in the hive want to keep her happy and fed. They feed her constantly, 24 hours a day, and so what does she do? Naturally, she porks out. The problem is that when it is time for Queenie to swarm with the rest of the hive, she is too fat to fly. So, for the weeks leading up to the swarm, the queen goes on a diet to lose weight in order to increase her airworthiness. In preparation for the revolution, she also stops laying eggs. If you inspect your hive and see a slimmed-down queen that is no longer laying eggs, it’s a tip that liberation may be well under
way. Once the bees have decided on their separatist movement and begun their preparations for the swarm, how do they decide where to swarm? This whole book has been about keeping bees in small wooden boxes. As such, it is easy to forget that boxes are not where bees are supposed to live.

  In early spring, while the queen is preparing for the swarm, some of the forager bees, wearing two hats, also act as scout bees. When the foragers are out every day gathering nectar, they scout for possible new hive locations: areas protected from wind, near plants with promising nectar flow, and within a stable and sturdy branch or fork in a tree or, better yet, a hollowed-out hole in a tree. The location’s orientation to the sun, its elevation off the ground, and its proximity to water are other crucial factors scout bees note on their reconnaissance missions.

  It’s natural for bees to swarm back into the trees where they were meant to live in the first place. Just like I don’t like to boast about stealing the poor bees’ honey and replacing it with white sugar, I also downplay recapturing bees after a swarm and boxing them up. Bees were meant to live in trees, not wooden boxes. I can’t help it; I am a child of the 1960s and remember that great movie about freeing Elsa the lion called Born Free.

  Determining which tree a swarm of bees will relocate to is difficult. When the bees will swarm, and by that I mean the season and the time of day, is easier to predict. Bees usually swarm between 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM because their ability to navigate is closely tied to the sun’s position in the sky. In ancient times, the nature of a bee swarm—when it swarmed and where it landed—was thought to be an omen or message from the gods.

  If you see a swarm in mid-air, you won’t forget it for a long time. The swarm begins with thousands of bees per minute exiting the hive’s tiny front door and forming a cloud; it looks similar to an ominous storm moving in. Like a macabre nightmare, this small cloud grows bigger and bigger. When the swarm has finally built up to a massive airborne vortex of 20,000 to 30,000 bees, it slowly begins to move in one direction. The creepy swarm doesn’t travel too far before it stops to rest. As it moves, an ever-present dull but menacing buzzing pervades the still spring air. Usually the swarm’s first rest stop will be only about 50 to 100 yards from the hive. It rests many times along the way to its new permanent home. Resting stops can be staged any time, anywhere, and on anything. A tree limb or fence are where you would expect a swarm to conveniently land, but the swarm’s collective reasoning and decision-making process follows no logical path, as far as I can tell. People have spotted resting swarms next to garbage cans, like the one I found, and on fire hydrants, family picnic tables, street signs, car fenders, bikes, and mailboxes. It would be enough to make you pay all your bills online if you woke up one morning, went outside to check your mail, and were greeted by a tight-knit ball of 30,000 swarming bees.