Show Me the Honey

by Dave Doroghy

  Just like me, bees need a way to stay warm through the winter. As you know by now, bees live in harmony all year without much friction—that is, until winter, when they need to create friction by shivering, which, in turn, creates heat. Even though bees have their own heat-producing strategy, beekeepers must do three things to assist them in staying warm.

  First, a beekeeper must usually reduce the overall size of the hive. My hive consists of three wooden boxes containing bees and honeycomb. In spring, summer, and early fall, the population of a three-storey high-rise bee apartment has somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 bees, and in winter, Mother Nature naturally reduces the number of inhabitants to a mere 20,000. At this point, my hive was tottering around at a mere 10,000 bees. Heating is all about efficiency. With fewer bees in my hive, there was no sense in heating all that extra space. So, first, I pulled off the top box full of bees and laid it down on the deck. Then, ever so carefully, I lifted out each frame packed with bees from the box on the deck and shook the bees into the lower box, thus combining three hive boxes into two overcrowded boxes. Overcrowding a beehive is a good thing in the winter because it means warmth, and warmth means survival. I suppose if I invited 30 or 40 of my friends over to my float home on a cold winter’s night, and we all formed a tight cluster in the living room, shivered against one another, maybe to some Bee Gees music, it would heat things up too.

  The second task for winter preparation is something that any clerk at the local Home Depot would recommend: insulation. I insulated my hive with good old-fashioned one-inch-thick pink Styrofoam. I recommend the Dow Cladmate brand, and I did some extensive research before investing the $23.95 to buy a sheet of it. After plugging the ever-popular, trending term “beehive insulation” into Google, I found out that Dow Cladmate Extruded Polystyrene Insulation helps manage energy loss and moisture, it’s lightweight, the sheets are easy to cut, and it has an R-value of 5. I had no idea what an R-value of 5 actually meant, but I assumed it was better than R-4 and not as good as R-6. Most people who buy Dow Cladmate at Home Depot buy hundreds of square feet of it; however, one sheet was fine for my small beehive winter renovation project. When I got home, I cut the sheet into five easy pieces with an X-acto blade, then I used old inner tubes from my bike tires as makeshift bungee cords to wrap around and securely fasten the insulation to the outside of the hive. In less than 10 minutes my bees were as snug as bugs in a rug. It was a heck of a lot easier than properly insulating the float home, which is something on my to-do list that I’ve never quite gotten around to doing. I take the lazy approach of turning up the thermostat, throwing another log on the fire, and donning a big sweater.

  The third crucial task to help the girls stay warm is to reduce the humidity and moisture inside the hive. When it gets cold, the bees’ biggest enemy is moisture, and my bees had it particularly rough living only three feet above the water. As anyone who has ever spent a winter in Palm Springs or Phoenix knows, when the air is drier, somehow it doesn’t feel as cold. There is nothing worse than damp, damp cold. I replaced the now-empty box with a narrower, four-inch wooden box to top off the remaining two boxes crammed with all of my bees. But instead of filling the new, thinner box back up with honeycomb frames and bees, I filled it with wood shavings to insulate the hive, trap moisture, and provide a bit of ventilation. To keep the bees separated from the wood shavings, I stapled a layer of burlap from an old potato sack to the bottom of the top box.

  Here’s the rub—literally. Inside the hive the bees were now living nice and cozily in smaller quarters, so cozily they would consolidate into a clustered, buzzing ball. That ball of oscillating bees becomes the equivalent of an electric baseboard heater and wood stove combined, and come to think of it, the hive probably ends up warmer than my float home. The warm air created by the bees, along with ambient moisture, of course, rises. When the heated air reaches the upper box with the shavings, the wood chips absorb the excess moisture, and thus the bottom hive boxes stay nice and dry. Theoretically.

  Once I created that moisture “sucker-upper,” I also adjusted the opening of the hive’s bottom board and main doors—which I had reduced in the summer to keep out evil intruders—to provide further ventilation. Think about being in a small club on a crowded dance floor and how nice it is when the owner finally props open the back door to let in some fresh air. Finally, I tilted the entire hive slightly forward by putting a couple of shingles at the back as shims so that any condensation that dripped to the bottom could flow out the tiny door to the front. Moisture in a hive (or a float home) over the winter is not good. Aside from increasing coldness, moisture also promotes slime, diseases, and mould. A dry hive is a happy hive.

  When I had completed these relatively simple hive-winterizing tasks, I noticed that as the days grew shorter and we approached the dead of winter, both the bees and I went out less, and this was particularly true during the worst cold snaps.

  Please don’t get me wrong in this next paragraph. It’s not like I turned into a bee that bone-chilling season. This is no Franz Kafka Metamorphosis tale, yet I couldn’t help but observe that my winter habits mimicked the behaviour of my bees. I stored up food as the roads in Vancouver became snow covered and treacherous. When the first cold snap hit and the weather forecast called for two days of heavy snowfall, I buzzed over to Costco in my VW van and foraged through the colourful aisles. I packed my cart and the van like six-sided bee cells with supplies: family-sized multi-packs of macaroni and cheese, olive oil, canned tuna, eggs, bananas, jumbo boxes of crackers and cereal, bottled water, almond milk, and some veggie burger patties. After this foraging excursion, I didn’t have to go out at all for food because I had my winter supply stored away in dry, rectangular (as opposed to hexagonal) cupboards.

  The next part of my cold-weather diary is a bit embarrassing, as it deals with going to the bathroom. Flight activity around the hive in winter grinds to a halt like a major airport during a blizzard. The only reason the bees venture outside is to poop. The correct terminology for these trips is “cleansing flights.” Bees don’t pee. They store as much water as their small bodies can hold and release a tiny bit of liquid waste in the form of uric acid. Uric acid contains hardly any water. When it comes to doing “number two,” the girls work hard to keep the inside of the hive clean. As such, each worker bee will hold in her feces until she is well away from the hive. So the main reason for the bees to leave the hive in the winter is simply to fly out and use the great outdoors as their bathroom.

  I was in the same boat as my bees during the most brutal cold snap. My pipes were frozen, the toilet wouldn’t flush, and I was forced to brave the elements and go outside onto the deck to pee into the river. I know what you are thinking now. Is it bad to pee into a tidal river, and what about his hygiene with no water? I worried too.

  According to a cute little video I found online, it is not environmentally egregious to pee in salt water, though the same does not hold true for freshwater sources. Urine contains 95 percent water and the waste by-products urea, sodium, chloride ions, and potassium. Our urea is a bit different in compound and form from the bees’ more solid uric acid. The ocean contains the same compounds found in human urea. Also, nitrogen, another pee by-product, combines with sea water to create ammonium, which ocean plants use for food. To top it off, the amount of urea is but a tiny drop, while the great big sea, to where my river travels, measures liquid volume in zillions of litres.

  Now, as for my cleanliness during this waterless, cold-weather hibernation, fortunately there is a nice warm community centre and swimming pool (which you are also not supposed to pee in) down the street where I showered every morning and used the toilet. My frozen pipes created other cleanliness problems though. With no water to wash dishes, I simply let the plates, glasses, and pans pile up and then placed them outside on the deck every couple of days. Just like the bees, I did my best to keep the inside of the float home dry and clean by expelling waste products to the exterior.

  Occa
sionally over that winter I’d put on my thick, bright orange down ski jacket, throw the bee suit over the puffy coat, and gingerly navigate the slippery deck to check on the bees. When I did this, I quickly closed the back door behind me so as not to let any more cold, wet river air inside and employed the same technique when I lifted the lid on top of the hive. I was keenly aware of every particle of precious hot air that escaped when I opened the hive lid. My occasional checks verified the girls were still alive. Always a relief. As my own Costco food supplies dwindled, I worried whether my bees had enough honey to get by. When I had reduced the hive that fall, along with feeding the bees the required sugar water to fatten them up, I carefully lifted each frame, estimating its weight. Based on the reassuring heft of the frames, I believed there was enough honey in the hive to make it until spring. A good rule of thumb is to leave a hive with about 40 pounds of honey over the winter. I didn’t take an ounce of honey out that winter; I left them every drop. I didn’t have one jar of honey to give away that season, or even one for myself. The sacrifices I make for my girls!

  Still, I wanted to be sure they had enough to eat. Since sugar water would just freeze in such cold, Jeannie prepared a weird doughy mixture of icing sugar and honey that wouldn’t freeze. I placed globs of it inside the hive every few weeks during the worst cold, and they gobbled it up. At winter’s end, I also fed them some pollen. A beekeeper at the club suggested I purchase something called a “pollen patty” from the bee supply store. I figured I had my Costco veggie burger patties, so the bees deserved some patties of their own. As the name suggested, they were small clumps of pollen moulded into oily, flat circles the consistency of peanut butter. I am not sure where the pollen came from. It was probably stolen from some other poor hive in the summer and then fed back to my affluent bees in the winter. The beekeeper I gave six bucks to for the pollen patty instructed me to throw a dollop the size of a matchbox on top of the inside of the hive for the bees to munch on near the end of winter. I did, but when I checked again, they hadn’t touched it. I, however, finished my entire family-sized box of veggie patties all on my own by halfway through February.

  Spring is always glorious—snow melts, rivers unfreeze, and flowers bloom. Brave little yellow crocuses, an array of snowdrops, and fragrant hyacinths pop out of the soil, calling out to the bees: “The pantry is open! Come and get it!” Blossoming flowers are so damned tempting that they seductively lure the hungry bees back outside. I, too, was lured outside. With my houseboat pipes thawed and water flowing again, I no longer visited the recreation centre to use the washroom. I went to Costco less and resumed biking and visiting the local farmers’ market. One warm, sunny day in late March, I headed back to my float home after a pleasant forage at the vegetable market and a not-so-pleasant trip to the recycling centre to unload the plastic water bottles that had provided my hydration during the deep-freeze. I couldn’t wait to get back to my hive to see what the girls were up to; maybe they were spring cleaning and recycling too.

  When I arrived home, I paused for a few minutes on the boat ramp as I spotted about 40 or 50 happy bees buzzing outside of the hive’s entrance. Just as I had been out picking up fresh vegetables from the grocer, they were out flying around to gather fresh nectar and pollen. Together we had made it through the harsh winter—bee and man, hive and boat. I imagined that April, May, June, July, and August would be a cinch. When Old Man Winter limps away scowling, and spring and summer waltz back in, accompanied by cheery colours and birdsong, we humans are often filled with a renewed sense of optimism and purpose. It’s as if Old Man Winter carries away our worries and troubles in a sack slung over his back, and we get a brand new beginning. I had a couple of years of beekeeping knowledge and many hard lessons learned under my belt. I felt that this would be the year I would vanquish the foes of my hive, and the girls and I could revive and reinvigorate.

  All My Bees Are Dead

  Bee suits don’t come in black. Beekeepers wear white because bees can better perceive dark colours and are more apt to feel wary of approaching shadows such as skunks, raccoons, and bears. Garbed all in white, humans can safely approach a hive with the bees becoming less defensive and agitated. Until now, white had been the standard and appropriate colour for my beekeeping attire.

  Despite my peppy outlook, it had been another challenging beekeeping year for this bachelor on a barge. With increased diligence, I had applied everything I knew to keep my hive afloat. But the wasps returned with a vengeance, various moulds and mysterious infestations gained stronger footholds, and the queen continued to let her crown slip with insufficient brood production. By the fall of my third year as a novice beekeeper, I’d still not harvested another ounce of honey. I skulked about the neighbourhood, hoping no one would mention the words bees or honey. I sat in the back row at the beekeeping club meetings, if I even went. I kept mum as Jeannie’s hives thrived and grew. As the days grew shorter and the temperatures dropped, the girls and I, ragged and weary, hunkered down for our third winter and hoped for the best.

  The following March on a grey, cold winter afternoon, I ventured out in the wind and rain to check on my hive. Suddenly, I wished that bee suits came in black, because my usually lighthearted mood quickly turned to sorrow and regret. My hive was stone cold silent. On that blustery day, I discovered that all of the bees in my hive were dead. Every single one. Normally upon lifting the lid, I paused to simply enjoy the teeming, splendorous miracle of bees buzzing in their happy, cooperative colony. It filled me up. But on this particular grey, overcast afternoon, I lifted the lid of a coffin.

  This discovery hit me like a sledgehammer to the abdomen. A three-inch pile of yellow-and-brown corpses lay expired on the hive’s bottom board. The reduced hive of about 10,000 bees hadn’t made it through the winter. Where once there was abundant sunny energy and springtime joy in anticipation of whimsical foraging flights, now there was a mound of twisted, brittle, lifeless bodies. Order, organization, and purpose had been supplanted by thousands of carcasses waiting for wasps and ants to come and eat them. In the cells where once there was honey, there was mould and the stench of death. I spent three or four minutes just staring at the motionless bees that lay at the bottom of my hive. Then I went inside to call Jeannie.

  Modern apiarists face significant beekeeping challenges their predecessors did not. There is a brand new term that didn’t even exist 50 years ago: colony collapse disorder. Today, nearly half of all beekeepers’ hives are dying every year. My friend Axel is the bee inspector for eastern British Columbia. He is semi-retired, about six years older than me, and works for the provincial government inspecting hives, giving advice, and generally supporting beekeepers in the vastly underpopulated, beautiful farming and mining region of our province. He’s the most knowledgeable bee person I know. I heard him give a talk at our club once, and he ended it by explaining how easy beekeeping was when he was a young boy. He said that he and his dad would place five or six hives on the flat roof of their house every spring, do absolutely nothing for six months, and then collect copious amounts of honey in the fall. They would leave the hives outside for the entire winter, again doing absolutely nothing, and all the hives would make it through with no problems. They had strong, independent, hardy bees of the old-fashioned variety that didn’t need beekeeper intervention to survive. Of course, 50 years ago the world was a very different place in terms of climate, human population, and bee habitat.

  Today a number of bee species all over the world, including the honeybee, are dying. Before you panic, there are over 20,000 varieties of bees on the planet (that we know of thus far). But before you relax and say, “What’s a few honeybees then?” consider that the bee species that are struggling with a number of known and unknown environmental and human stressors are in many ways a barometer for the well-being of all pollinators and our ecosystems in general. Their challenges are a distress call to which it might just behoove us to pay attention.

  This feels like a good time to share a quote
that has been much used and perhaps mistakenly attributed to Albert Einstein. He supposedly once said something to the effect of “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” Again, before you panic, keep in mind the wide variety of pollinators, including butterflies and moths, as well as our dear old friend the wind. Yet, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 90 percent of the world’s food comes from only 100 crops, and bees are needed for pollination of 71 out of those 100 crops. This is definitely food for thought.

  I will now quote myself so that I can claim for all eternity that I am quoted in a book following a quote that may be by Einstein. Dave Doroghy once said, while shivering on the Fraser River one late winter’s day, in shock over the demise of his clever, honey-producing girls, “If the bees disappear off the surface of my houseboat deck, then I have only myself to blame. For I am probably one of the worst beekeepers on earth.”

  After discovering my hive was dead, I plunged directly into the guilt phase of the grieving process. Jeannie tried to console me on the phone. She had recently harvested over 300 pounds of honey from her four hives, so she said she would give me a few jars. She also helpfully pointed out that although I had made a lot of mistakes with my beekeeping, at least I was learning. She said she really liked the colourful cartoons I had painted on the outside of my bee boxes. I felt like a five-year-old. After we hung up, I went back outside, hoping that a few bees might still be alive. Now I was clearly in the denial phase.

  I scanned each frame with care and realized to some degree what firefighters must experience when they have to search through burned-out buildings for bodies. Each wax cell, once a small room functioning as an incubation unit, a nursery, or food-storage area, was now nothing more than a cold morgue. Dead bodies were strewn across the surface of the frames and embedded inside the chambers.