by Dave Doroghy
The Wizard must have liked me after all, because he went on to explain that the machine does just what its name implies: it accelerates electrons into a high-speed electron non-radioactive “shower” that sterilizes medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, labware, agricultural feeds, and a host of other industrial items. My ears perked up when he told me a big part of their business is gemstones; huge mines ship gemstones in massive boxcars from all over the world to go through this very specialized machine. Blue topaz, which is the gemstone of Texas, is actually grey or colourless when it comes out of the ground. After it is blasted with radiation from the electron beam accelerator, it turns an incredibly vibrant turquoise. He told me his plant irradiates hundreds of tons of topaz every year. After a short tour of the plant and wasting more of this poor guy’s time with neophyte questions, I was afraid to ask how much he would charge to whisk my slimy, mouldy, and fungus-ridden boxes through his magic carpet ride. “How about I give you a jar of honey and we just call it even?” I joked. He didn’t go for it. It was 10 bucks, and I could pick the hive boxes up in the morning.
When I fetched the boxes the next day, they looked exactly the same. Did he really irradiate them or was it the world’s biggest scam? Before I left, I stood for a few minutes watching the conveyer belt spin as it cycled through the massive 165-foot-long machine. Since I had shelled out only 10 bucks, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. I packed up my boxes, said goodbye, and left. Exiting the parking lot in my van, I carefully scanned the black asphalt road in hopes of seeing the glint of a turquoise topaz gemstone that had fallen out of the back of one of those huge trucks. A topaz would have made a nice souvenir from my trip to see the Wizard of Oz. Now, with my boxes professionally sterilized and disease-free, I was ready to start beekeeping again. Carpe diem!
Port Coquitlam is, as the name suggests, near the water. Taking the scenic route home, I noticed some trees in early bloom along a pretty inlet. No season signals freshness and a sense of optimism like spring. Daydreaming about winter’s imminent demise, my thoughts eventually wandered back to beekeeping and my dilemma of restarting my hive. Okay, sanitized bee boxes are great, but what about bees? I was back to square one: I needed some hardy new bees to get started.
I listened to a business report, my attention bouncing from bees to the stock market and back to bees. I like stocks that split, although mine never do. My friend bought lots of shares of Apple stock in 2003, and his stocks have split a few times. Instead I bought BlackBerry shares (fitting for a Canadian beekeeper). With investments like that, I need to save all the money I can and keep my eyes open for deals. When it comes to getting a break on beekeeping expenses, I saved the best for last. Here is the one and only cost-efficient thing about beekeeping: sometimes a healthy hive gives you a two-for-one deal. Remember the chapter on swarming? Well, when you split a hive in two, you are essentially pre-empting a swarm by intervening; the best time to split a flourishing hive is, you guessed it, spring.
Splitting a hive involves simply lifting four or five frames of brood and bees, along with the capped honey and pollen, out of one box and inserting those frames into another empty box. You’ll remember that when the bees swarmed, they did it on their own, but they weren’t able to take their pantry of stored honey with them. They also weren’t able to take along any of the unborn bees slowly forming in the wax cells.
When you intervene and create a split, it is important to take the brood, or eggs, in various stages of development. This way the new hive begins growing immediately and has the staying power to continue growing for the weeks and months ahead. What about the queen though? In the wild, she goes off with the rebels. When you artificially split a hive, just like in the wild, you move the queen with her comforting queen pheromones to the new box to help hold the bees in their new home. The queen will also speed up the growth of the new hive by immediately laying more eggs. But remember, after you move the queen, you will have to add a new queen to the original hive.
Lucky for me, I knew just the girlfriend who had too many large hives and was willing to do a deal with me. Over the previous season, Jeannie’s beehives had gone nuts. She went from keeping just three hives on her dad’s farm to having her hives grow, morph, split, and swarm into 18 different hives. She just happened to have a super-healthy hive that was ready to split. One nice thing about beekeeping is that it is void of regulations or red tape. No subdivision permits are required and there are no zoning issues to deal with. Mother Nature welcomes these particular subdivisions. So Jeannie and I put on our white suits, reached into the gene pool at her dad’s farm, and grabbed what we needed. Then, with bees, eggs, and honey all neatly bundled into a cardboard nuc box, we headed over to the float home. I remarked to Jeannie how her bees had gotten an upgrade from a farm view to a river view.
Part two of the split took place on the float-home deck. As we gently removed each frame of the split from the cardboard nuc box, I was quite proud the new girls were moving into spic and span, freshly irradiated colourful hive boxes—the best 10 bucks I’d ever spent.
For my new bees, it was the equivalent of moving into a spotless apartment where a professional cleaning company had put in 40 hours of elbow grease to scrub those hard-to-get-at areas, like under the sink and behind the couch. Actually, the wooden boxes were even cleaner than that. The ionizer plant sterilized medical equipment used for surgical operations. My hive was as clean as an operating room! Forget about everything that had gone wrong in the past with my half-baked, sloppy apiarist ways. This was the first day of my new beekeeping life. With a super-clean start, I was finally getting serious about my beekeeping hobby.
As we transferred one of the last frames from the cardboard nuc box into my freshly sterilized hive, lofty philosophical thoughts about the ebb and flow and the circle of life caused me to mentally stray from the task at hand. The day was perfect with a light breeze coming off the river. I paused and looked closely at the single frame I held in my hands. My reading glasses, perched on my nose under the protective veil, were clean for once. With not a cloud in the sky, the light was intense—which doesn’t happen often in rainy Vancouver—in a way that illuminated the smaller details that we often overlook. I was totally in the moment. I had a crystal-clear view of a one-inch-square section of the frame. I grew mesmerized by a cluster of six or seven tiny capped brood cells. The frenzied nurse and worker bees rushing to and fro all over, bumping into each other in a hurried Grand Central Station–like manner, had 100 percent of my attention. Time stood still as I observed and tried to understand this contradiction of order and confusion. Then something occurred that under most beekeeping circumstances would be so very easy to miss—something smaller than small and so wonderfully miraculous. A tiny hole, the type of hole that might be created by poking a sewing needle into a wax candle, emerged in one of the cells. Very slowly, a baby bee’s minuscule antennae poked out. Then the black vibrating antennae, each the width of a strand of hair, withdrew back through the hole into the safety of the sticky, concealed wax crib. I had stumbled upon the very first seconds of a bee’s life. After a minute, she poked her antennae through again, wiggling them for a few seconds to slightly enlarge the hole. Then, again, she rested for a minute. Then she enlarged the hole a bit more with her mandible jaws. She pushed her tiny bee head up against the small wax opening, breaking more wax cap with the pressure. For the next 40 seconds, she bore her way through the hole, making it bigger and bigger. Repeating this instinctive action was, of course, what she was programmed to do. She widened the hole, wiggled back down, paused, wiggled up, carved out more wiggle room, chewed more wax, and paused again. The hole was still too small for her to fit through, so she rested a bit more and then repeated all the steps. After investing four more minutes watching her squirm and push, I was hooked on seeing this birth through to its conclusion.
Unfolding in front of my eyes was the very first step in that complex circle of insect life I had been observing for three years. Obviously, this m
iracle happens all the time. I had come across the evidence in the past, but I had never witnessed the exact moment that life emerged: antennae poking out for the first time, followed by the tiny bee’s arduous destruction of the wax-capped cell as she yearns to join her sisters and begin to contribute to the ongoing important work of pollination and the survival of the colony.
As this baby finally emerged, she looked different from the others. Her exoskeleton and hairs hadn’t yet fully developed, and she was slightly smaller and lighter than her sisters. I later learned that her salivary glands are activated when she leaves the enclosed cell and encounters fresh air, which triggers a desire to clean out empty birth cells, including the one she just emerged from. For the next two or three days, she commits herself to housecleaning chores. Other more experienced bees fill the cells with nectar and pollen, after the queen has come by to plop in a fresh egg. The eggs the queen lays, just like human eggs, are preprogrammed with cues, codes, and millions of prompts that result in instinctive behaviour. Mother Nature’s mandate to keep this whole world spinning depends in large part on those innate prompts that guide us all. You have them, I have them, and the bees have them.
What this little bee did next totally blew me away. She didn’t waste any time in fulfilling her destiny. She crawled out and in less than two seconds began working. What other creature is born and immediately gets busy adding real, tangible value to its society? It took me at least 25 years. Bees are absolutely amazing! This little bee, which had only a couple of months to live on this planet, immediately began contributing to the hive. The lowest job on the bee totem pole, the entry-level job all bees start out at before they get the work experience they need to be promoted, is cleaning. She joined in with zeal and vigour.
Alongside the other bees, she began simply poking her head in and out of the cells, cleaning out bee afterbirth, debris, and old food. It’s not like she took a five-minute break to get her bearings and build up her strength. It’s not like she needed a tour of that particular frame so she would know her way around. It’s not like another bee needed to show her how to clean. She was born to work. My jaw dropped. Then, not to be outdone, I returned to the work at hand: completing the split transfer.
I knew then, and only then, that continuing to keep bees was what I must do. Not for the honey, not for the notoriety, nor to have a hobby to share with my girlfriend and sister. No, I would keep on beekeeping for a reason I didn’t even contemplate when Miriam and Len had dropped the first hive off at the float home three years earlier. I would continue with the bees because carefully observing and respecting their world as an accidental apiarist might, in some small way, helps me to figure out how to navigate the complex, much more dysfunctional hive of humans swarming over Planet Earth. Watching bees and taking their collaborative cue might be a way to better understand and connect with our fellow humans. Our challenges are not so different from those faced by bees. We share the same manifest from Mother Nature. We all play a role in how we will deal with the comings and goings of leaders and people, diseases and famine, weather extremes and natural disasters. We are all hard-wired to want the same things: some honey in our pantry and a safe, comfortable home among a hard-working, harmonious colony.
My float home sits on a scenic bend of the Fraser River, across from a deserted island.
Photo credit: David Kincaid It was built on an old wooden hull, which was originally a barge that hauled sawdust up and down the river. My back deck has just enough room for a hive of honeybees. The average beehive consists of four or five wooden boxes. The wooden bee boxes come unassembled and need to be glued and nailed together. After the hive boxes are assembled and hammered together, they need to be painted. A stack of decorated hive boxes with Dave’s signature bee illustrations on them. I like to paint the boxes the bees live in with colourful cartoons. As you may have noticed, many of the chapters in this book are named after my wooden bee boxes. The three types of honeybees: the top one is the common female worker bee, the middle one is a male drone, and the bottom photo is of a queen bee. To prevent your hands from
getting stung, thick leather gloves are imperative. One of the most important pieces of
beekeeping equipment is the hooded veil. A sting in the face usually results in
uncontrollable, grotesque swelling. A plastic queen bee cage. A frame being pulled out of the hive with
the Fraser River in the background. A typical frame of brood. Note the lighter coloured ring on the outside edge is capped honey, the darker brown oblong–shaped circle in the middle is capped brood. Bees crawling over capped and uncapped brood. The beginning of what could become a queen cell. A frame full of capped honey and bumpy drone brood. Note the three protruding queen cells near the middle bottom of the frame. Bees drawing out new wax comb. Large bags full of sugar that are fed to the bees. A bee, next to a drop of honey, that we found on the dashboard of my VW van as we left to go to the annual bee convention. Granulated sugar surrounds the small opening on top of a hive’s inside cover. A “field” trip at bee school. Bees busy at work, building wax comb on a wooden frame. Removing a frame of bees from the hive, using the metal beekeeping tool. A frame where the bees have not yet drawn out their wax comb. A giant mural of honeybees. Don’t worry… Winter presents interesting challenges for bees and float-home beekeepers. The black dots are dead varroa destructor mites, which after being treated with oxalic acid have fallen off the bees and dropped onto the white corrugated plastic bottom board. The hives securely placed in the back of a truck on their way to the outyard. A car battery can be used to power the vaporizer, placed at the bottom of the hive, to combat mites. A ratchet strap being cinched around a hive to prepare it for transport. Hives placed behind an electric fence in the outyard. One of the first plants to grow back after a forest has been denuded is fireweed. Bees love this plant,s nectar. Honey flowing out of the extractor into a small bowl. After the honey has been extracted, wax particles and unwanted debris need to be filtered. Jeannie filling jars of filtered honey. Small jars of Houseboat Honey ready to be given away to friends. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jeannie, who is excellent at bee-and boyfriend-keeping. The best partner and the best beekeeper I could ever wish for. And to Miriam for bringing over the hive. I won the sibling lottery when I got you as my big sister. Thank you to some worker bees who buzzed on by when I needed them and helped me see this project through to its conclusion: Amabel Kylee Siorghlas, a patient editor bee from Vermont who stuck by me through the endless drafts; Daphne Gray-Grant, a motivator bee who helped me understand that a hive consists of about 40,000 bees and a book consists of about 80,000 words; her sister Jennifer, who always encouraged me to write; Naomi Pauls, an extraordinary proofreader and spelling bee; and Taryn Boyd, the queen bee of publishing, who took a chance on this useless drone who barged into her hive one day carrying a jar of honey and an early version of this book. A special thanks to my beta-copy readers: David Kincaid, Brian Antonson, Julie Prescott, Diane Zell, Mataya Varsek, Miriam Soet, and Jeannie Page. And thanks to one very knowledgeable beta reader who understands the fine line between humour and accuracy: Axel Krause, for his input and gentle push-back on that line. And finally, thanks to Rick Hansen—friend, mentor, hero, and lover of honey. The end is just the bee-ginning.
By Peppa Martin Dave Doroghy has worked in radio broadcasting and advertising, and has spent the last 30 years in sports marketing. He was the vice president of the former NBA Vancouver Grizzlies and more recently the director of sponsorship sales for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Dave now lives on a floating home ju
st outside of the city, where he raises bees and blogs about it at houseboathoney.com. He is the co-author of 111 Places in Vancouver That You Must Not Miss.
Copyright © 2020 by Dave Doroghy
Foreword copyright © 2020 by Rick Hansen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For more information, contact the publisher at: touchwoodeditions.com.
The information in this book is true and complete to the best of the author’s knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author or the publisher.
In this memoir names and identifying details of certain places and individuals have been changed to maintain anonymity, and the chronology of some events has been compressed.
Edited by Claire Philipson
Copy edited by Meg Yamamoto
Cover design by Tree Abraham
Interior design by Sydney Barnes
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Show me the honey : adventures of an accidental apiarist / Dave Doroghy ; foreword by Rick Hansen.
Names: Doroghy, Dave, author. | Hansen, Rick, 1957-writer of foreword.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190193468 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190193492 | ISBN 9781771513227 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781771513234 (HTML)