by Dave Doroghy
Cheating, like most of life’s vices, can be addictive. After flawlessly listing all 15 bee body parts and then choosing responses to the multiple-choice section from the answers recorded on my hands, I had to move on to the rest of the exam without assistance. I did my best ticking off the appropriate true or false boxes and then faced the fill-in-the-blank questions. After 50 minutes of deep thinking, I was drained—my brain was quite empty—and yet eight questions remained unanswered. They were all true or false questions on the last page, and I didn’t have a clue how to answer them. I hadn’t written the answers to these questions on my hand, and even if I had, I’d sweated so much for the past hour that the finely drawn tiny letters had dissolved into blue smudges. I read each of those eight questions again and again and again, panicking, my vision of the gold-embossed provincial certificate dissolving as the clock ticked toward the end of the exam period. I desperately needed a lifeline.
T / F Formic acid treatment of hives controls both varroa and tracheal mites.
T / FAll medications need to be removed from the hive prior to the honey flow.
T / FLocating hives in a straight line will promote drifting.
T / FChalkbrood mummies are a source of chalkbrood disease.
T / FThe Bee Act of British Columbia requires inspection prior to selling your bees.
T / FAn ionizer is used to rid the hive of nosema.
T / FIt is best to avoid facing your colonies toward the south.
T / FFeeding bees purchased pollen can infect the colony with American foulbrood.
I hate to admit it, but, racking my brain, desperately trying to figure out the answers, I cheated some more. This cheating was totally unplanned and more a matter of taking advantage of an opportunity that presented itself. A gift. It was spontaneous, and as such, if the British Columbia Honey Producers’ Association ever pressed charges against me and my transgressions ended up in Bee Exam Court, the judge would surely pass a more lenient sentence, perhaps letting me keep the certificate but marring the gold embossment by drawing the letter C, for cheater, across it with a red Sharpie.
The classroom we wrote the exam in was lined up with eight-foot tables. I sat at the back at one of those tables with two other students. With three people per table, we were so closely seated that it was easy to glance over at each other’s test papers. There was a middle-aged Asian lady with long black hair sitting next to me. She was the best-dressed person in the class with tortoise-shell bifocals and a smart brown blazer with an embroidered, classy red silk shirt under it. She looked smarter than me—come to think of it, everyone in the class looked smarter than me—but she looked much smarter than me, so I casually spied on some of the answers on the last page of her test sheet. Another victimless crime.
We were given a full hour to write the test. Most of the others left when they were done after 35 or 40 minutes. I used every last grain of sand in the hourglass to complete mine, agonizingly reviewing each question over and over again until the bitter end. Then, right after the time ran out, what did I do? Why, I destroyed the evidence, of course. I hurried straight to the bathroom and, like a surgeon preparing for an operation, rigorously scrubbed both of my hands, massaging the ink out of the fleshy parts under my two thumbs. A profound sense of relief came over me as I watched the blue-tinted water swirl clockwise down the sink’s drain. I didn’t stop until my hands were restored to their original pristine pink colour. I was glad I wasn’t one of those rustic bee farmers from the convention because the ink probably would have firmly lodged in the cracks and calluses of hard-working hands, allowing the evidence to linger for weeks. But for me, two minutes of the most thorough handwashing of my entire life felt nothing less than cathartic. I left the washroom an innocent man.
Three weeks later, an envelope from the British Columbia Honey Producers’ Association arrived in my mailbox. I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high, but it wasn’t a standard-size envelope; it was big enough to hold a beautiful 8½-by-11-inch provincial beekeeper certificate. I was breathless as I opened it. There is no way I failed this test, no way. I knew a third of the answers from attending some of the classes, another third were written on my hands, and the rest I filled in from copying my neighbour’s test. As I ripped the envelope open, I discovered three separate documents. The first document was an evaluation form for the course. I briefly reviewed the typical class survey questions on course content, handouts, and instructor effectiveness. I paused when I got to the box for comments and decided not to point out that I liked the final exam seating arrangement of three people per eight-foot table. I crumpled up the evaluation form and threw it in the garbage. With trepidation, I reached for the second document that I could see was three stapled pages—my marked final exam. I almost dropped to my knees in elation when I saw 84 out of 100 marked in bright red letters at the top of the test. The teacher had scrawled, “Good job, Dave!” Her compliment brought me not a twinge of remorse; I can’t believe how low I stooped. Egad, what a cad.
The B mark was fantastic. It really lifted my spirits. But I was most excited about the final piece of thick parchment paper—my official beekeeper certificate. It was a beautiful proclamation with an ornate gold-leaf border and my name written in the middle in fancy calligraphy announcing, “This is to certify that DAVE DOROGHY has successfully completed Introductory Beekeeping,” and signed by the president of the British Columbia Honey Producers’ Association and the course instructor. No one could take the accomplishment of passing the test with flying colours away from me now, and I had the certificate to prove it. My old high school science teacher could shove that eyeball diagram in a certain biological orifice that I would also be tested on later in Grade 10. I was at the top of the class in bee biology, baby!
Postscript: Although I feel no twinges of guilt or remorse, others may want to confront my transgressions.
First, I admit to cheating on the test. I am hoping there is some kind of statute of limitations, and the British Columbia Honey Producers’ Association isn’t going to come knocking on the float-home door, demanding the certificate back. Just to be on the safe side, if some authoritative-looking person in a beekeeper’s suit comes knocking on my front door, I just won’t open it. Or maybe I can scare them off with my electric tennis racket fly swatter. Hey, it works with the wasps. Just to be doubly safe, I took the certificate to the library and made a high-quality colour photocopy of it. If they revoke the certificate, I will be sure they get the copy, and I’ll keep the gold-embossed version.
Second, I never told Len or Miriam or Jeannie that I cheated on the final exam. They’ll find out about it by reading this. I figure the points I lose with them will be regained when they realize I wrote a book about bees. It’ll be a wash.
Now, does a bee have four legs or six? Who cares? Google it. I got a Bee plus in the course, and I’m a certified beekeeper, and that’s all that matters.
Fly United
When I was 12 years old, novelty posters were all the rage. I mean those giant humorous posters you’d hang on your bedroom wall, much to your mother’s chagrin. I’d save up my weekly allowance and send away for them from mail-order ads in the backs of the old Archie, Charlie Brown, Tarzan, and Richie Rich comic books I collected. These were posters with adolescent, sexually charged double entendres and colourful graphics. One memorable poster depicted two cartoon ducks copulating in mid-air with the headline “Fly United.” Very popular in 1969, this poster was by far my favourite.
Around the same time that I was tacking that poster above my bed, I was hiding Playboy magazines under my bed. The May 1968 issue—I remember the month because I had the worst crush on Miss May—had an article about a certain unusual “swinging” group of grown-ups having sex in the bathrooms of commercial airplanes. The article went on to explain that once you have “done it” in a plane, you join an elite clan of oversexed adults called the Mile-High Club. At 12, I had never even been in a plane. Since then, I have been in many planes, but
I still don’t know a single person who has actually had sex in an airplane washroom, and I can’t imagine that it would be much fun due to the cramped space and unpleasant odour. I was a skeptical kid, so I never really believed the cartoon birds had sexual intercourse in mid-air either. Since my adolescence, I hadn’t given much more thought to mating in the sky. Until I became a beekeeper, that is.
One particularly riveting class at bee school taught me that bees really do have sex in mid-air. It’s not a cartoon gag; it’s not a fantasy. It’s not the scandalous, semi-fictitious subject matter of an erotic, sensational 1,200-word article buried behind the iconic three-page gatefold topless model in an old Playboy. It’s just the plain biological truth and a scientific fact. That’s where bees do it: in mid-air. When you think about it, it makes sense for bees to “fly united” in the friendly skies, since they are less vulnerable to predators when they are flying.
If I thought as a teen that Playboy was racy and explicit, the magazine had nothing on the beekeeping textbook handed out as part of my certified apiarist course. Although the colour pictures of bees held much less appeal than Miss May, the salacious description of what the virgin queen bee does more than made up for it. The way bees mate in mid-air is pretty amazing and beyond anything I ever fantasized about as a young boy. Anyone reading beyond this point must be 18 years old or older. Erotic bee sex spoiler alert!
As you know, the queen bee is a superpowered egg-laying goddess, efficiently creating up to 2,000 perfect little eggs a day in the hive for months at a time. However, she can’t do it alone. In order for an egg to eventually create a baby bee, it takes two. Now, as the song goes, “let me tell you about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees and the moon up above and a thing called love …”
It actually takes more than two when it comes to the queen bee’s mating ritual. On her mating flights, the queen will mate with between 15 and 20 different male drones. The articles in the faded and dog-eared pages of my old Playboy started looking pretty tame once I considered the nature of Miss Queenie.
So where and how does the queen bee get her action? In a typical hive, tens of thousands of industrious female worker bees, hundreds of testosterone-filled male drone bees, and one fertile queen all cohabit under one roof. Compared with the bustling activity of the female worker bees gathering pollen, building the comb, processing the honey, nursing the young, and warding off intruders, the drones seem pretty lazy—they just eat and mate. But the drones aren’t just loafing around. They can’t collect pollen or nectar because of the way their bodies are designed. Drones don’t even have stingers—they are all bark and no bite. Talk about a good excuse not to have to work! Besides, they must save all of their energy for lovemaking. They live, essentially, to have sex with a queen during mating season, and for the time leading up to that, they simply lounge around in the hive all day, surrounded by females working hard to support them.
In many ways drones are a lot like the controversial founder of Playboy, Hugh Hefner. According to articles I read in his magazine as a kid, Hefner, wearing his black silk housecoat with the Playboy logo embroidered in gold on the front chest pocket, lounged around in his mansion all day surrounded by beautiful women. The women supported Hef by working hard on photo shoots that made him lots of money. Unlike Hefner, who lived to his 90s, drones only live for up to four months. And unlike the skewed power dynamic of the Playboy Mansion, in a hive, the women are clearly in charge.
When mating season is over and the queen is successfully pregnant and laying eggs, the fat, unpopular drones are a drain on the hive, and thus the ruthless female worker bees, which live for about 40 to 50 days in summer, boot them out. Usually the displaced drones loiter around the front of the hive like punks ejected from a popular nightclub. Without access to the golden honey, they eventually starve to death.
I know what you may be thinking now: with all those local homegrown drones looking to get some action and only one queen in the hive, what about insect incest? What’s to stop a virgin queen from mating with one of her own brothers? Well, it’s possible, but unlikely. You see, when the queen takes off for a sex-crazed night on the town with a bunch of young, virile drone bees, she finds her very own Mile-High Club to join far, far away from the hive and from her children. These clubs are located about 200 to 300 feet above the forest floor. Queen bees may travel several miles to reach one of these special drone congregation areas. Massive clouds of drones, some 25,000 bees from as many as 200 different colonies, gather at the exact same spot every year to mate. Finding her “hookups” in this testosterone-filled cloud of out-of-town drone bees is how a virgin queen can guarantee that she will receive the genetic diversity needed to ensure the ongoing survival of her colony. Somehow she knows that by flying to drone congregation areas farther away from her colony, she will avoid inbreeding. And this, of course, also reduces the embarrassing possibility of running into one of her brothers. “Hey, Sis! What are you doing here?”
When I think of drone bees, I think of men in their early 20s who like to gather together in singles bars and ogle the pretty young girls flying by, hoping to meet one. With thousands of drones vying for the attention of one female queen bee, the competition is fierce. The only place they can score is at one of these drone congregation parties, which occur annually at a very specific time and place. But just how do the drones determine the exact spot to host these swinging parties? It has something to do with the proximity to nearby trees, the sun’s position in the sky, and the direction of the prevailing winds. Why the following year’s crop of drones goes back to the same spot, at the same time, is anyone’s guess. People who track these types of things, people I call “strange insect voyeurs,” have documented drone bees congregating every year in the exact same spot for over a dozen years. And the queens, who have very little experience in navigating the great outdoors because they are so young they have logged little or no flight time, also mysteriously manage to find these singles clubs. Since drones and queens intrinsically know how to find these sex rendezvous spots, perhaps it’s written in their DNA. Observation reveals that other animals must have similar mating DNA imprints.
Take salmon and their spawning habits. When it comes time to lay their eggs, the salmon also know exactly where to go. Living on the mouth of a river, I know a thing or two about these glamour fish and their amazing life cycles. There is a big salmon-processing plant about a third of a mile away from where I moor my float home, where gillnetter boats drop off tons of fish during the annual salmon runs. Millions of salmon are born each year on tributaries of the Fraser River, way up in the heart of British Columbia. After they are born, they travel thousands of miles—as far afield as Alaska and Japan—but when it is time for them to spawn and lay their eggs, they return from overseas four years later to drop their fertilized eggs in the exact spot where they were born. The process takes the fish right underneath my float home and my beehive twice, once on the way out to the ocean and once years later on the way back.
Then there is the mating ritual of the emperor penguins, in which males and females begin their mating dances miles apart from one another in temperatures a gazillion degrees below zero. Each black-and-white tuxedo-clad bird waddles about 50 miles from locations around the South Pole to inland Antarctica in order to meet at a specific breeding colony. Again they know the exact spot to rendezvous. Then they stand in a crowd and the males sound a loud bugle call for the females, who can recognize their mates’ voices. After that, they take a long stroll around the group, bow deeply to one another, nuzzle, and make strange noises before mating.
How do these bees, fish, birds, and myriad other animal species know where to go to find their lovers? It’s a mystery. For now let’s just say that Mother Nature has done an amazing job here on earth giving all living creatures, including people, an instinct for finding their mates. In Vancouver in the late ’70s, clubs like Oil Can Harry’s, Pharaoh’s Retreat, the Raspberry Patch, and, my favourite, Misty’s, were
all the rage. These rendezvous spots had an abundance of queens flying around inside, all dolled up with amazing hairdos, sweet perfume, high-heeled shoes, and killer dresses. My animal DNA imprint forced me to dress up and go out to find them. I increased my chances of mating by wearing the hippest robin’s egg blue leisure suit with bell-bottom pants. I stylishly tucked my shirt collar on the outside of my jacket and carefully left the top three shirt buttons undone to expose my limited chest hair. I then splashed on copious amounts of Old Spice aftershave lotion. Did I mention the platform shoes? I’m six feet one. If you added two inches, I became one of the biggest, brightest drones on the dance floor. The drone bee in a hive is bigger than the females, and the bigger the drone, the stronger and more suitable a mate. By making myself big, like the drone, I had the edge on attracting disco queens. Although, more times than not, in some weird kind of Darwinian evolution of the species selection process, I would usually get turned down by most of the women I asked to dance.
Every once in a while, though, a queen would agree to trip the light fantastic with me—unfortunately, it seems, more out of curiosity than a desire to mate. Once we made it out onto the dance floor, however, I delivered! Look out! I could waggle dance with the best of them. Turn the knob on the professional sound system amplifier up to 11; throw the latest hit from the Bee Gees, ABBA, KC and The Sunshine Band, or Barry White on the turntable; and set me loose on the dance floor to do what I was programmed to do: attract a suitable mate. I had this certain dance move women found irresistible. I’d bend my knees slightly, swing my hips from side to side, and, while wiggling all 10 of my fingers to the music, I’d gyrate my arms horizontally, raising my hands from the akimbo position on my hips up to my brow. Every move was executed in perfect syncopated rhythm with the pulsating disco beat. I called this surefire dance move the Shy Tuna. Doing the Shy Tuna under the disco ball, sporting fashionable long sideburns, a Burt Reynolds–style moustache, and a heavy gold necklace often led to instant primal attraction. Well, it did once. Well … almost once, until her roommates came home unexpectedly and ruined the whole thing.