Driving a car with a box of 5,000 bees in the backseat is one way to wake yourself up in the morning. My friend Dan and I were on our way to install our new beehive in his backyard. The box was humming; spiking in pitch with every pothole. I was wearing a red shirt. I had just learned that bees hate the color red. We were nervous.
Why are we doing this? If you grew up suburban, barefoot and curious, your first memory of pain is probably a bee sting. One wrong step, and clover-specked lawns suddenly feel like minefields. As humans, though, our first experience of sweetness—high-grade, system-shocking, what is this stuff sweetness—was probably honey. Ten thousand years after we started stealing it from wild hives, cartoon bees push their dope to kids watching Saturday-morning TV. Fear and reward, reverence and addiction: our relationship with bees is long and complicated. That’s one way of explaining that early-morning car ride.
Here’s another: Better cereal. Traveling the country, I’m fascinated by local honey. More than anything I can think of, it captures a season, a place—what’s blooming when, and where. Smoky mesquite honey from New Mexico; velvety tan oak from Sonoma County; sparkling, light-as-spring-dew clover from Vermont; molasses-dark avocado from the Central Valley. One day, Dan and I looked around our own neighborhood: sage, eucalyptus, jasmine, fennel. We wanted to taste home.
Which is how we found ourselves trawling list-serves with thread titles like, “Do bees have feelings?” Or in late-night Beekeepers’ Association meetings, sitting through conversations that dissolve into sobering talk of disappearances, dead-outs, the Varroa destructor mite, and Colony Collapse Disorder. And finally, in an empty parking lot on a cold morning, picking up our box of bees.
We got our package from two society members, who got it from a local bee breeder. When we arrived that morning, they were parked in a windowless white van eating Egg McMuffins, dozens of bee boxes stacked in a pile behind them. “We’re the gypsy beekeepers,” one said. Beekeepers are harder to explain than bees. At the meetings, they talk about “getting friendly with the bug in the box.” Lithuanians have a word, biciulysté, for the relationship among beekeepers. San Francisco beekeepers simply call themselves “beeks.” Dan and I were “new-bees.”
And we were overwhelmed. Beekeeping is about building a perfect world for your bees, and then breaking it apart and stealing their food. It’s a delicate game, made even more so these days by the specter of Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious occurrence of beekeepers opening their hives to find them all or nearly empty, even of the dead, like the first scene of a zombie movie. No one knows why it started happening about five years ago, and no one knows how to stop it. If you’re a beekeeper, this is what keeps you up at night.
For a first-timer, though, CCD seemed refreshingly unpredictable, a disaster we wouldn’t have to blame ourselves for, as every decision we had to make seemed to have one right answer and a thousand catastrophically wrong ones. Bees are temperamental. They like things a certain way. There’s the color issue, first. (Though my red shirt and I survived.) Bees keep their hive at a constant 90 degrees, even in winter. The frames of comb in a beehive have to be set 3/8 of an inch apart, or the bees won’t build. They’re nit-picky, and so were we—concerned with matters at hand, like what to paint the hive, or if we should paint it at all.
Organically minded beekeepers recommend natural oil; old-timers swear by paint (white is best, apparently). We researched intently, sending 500-word emails back and forth, swimming in data and doubt. We called up an alpaca farmer in upstate New York to ask how she treats the walls of her barn. Does latex cause CCD? Does linseed oil spontaneously combust? Every answer seemed to be “maybe.”
We settled on the oil, ordering a jug from a Swedish couple that uses it to renovate 300-year-old window frames, because, it turns out, Home Depot’s strength does not lie in beekeeping supplies. We suited up in veils and thick leather gloves (we’ve seen braver souls do it bare-handed), we opened a one of the larger boxes, called a brood chamber, that stack together in a modern beehive, and fit the box of bees inside. That night, they’d crawl out onto the frames of wax slotted into each box and set up camp. The queen came ensconced in a matchbox cage, protected from bees not yet used to her scent. After a day or two to become accustomed to each other, we released her and the bees were on their own.
Where do bees go? Before bees were kept, they were chased. Honey hunters would leave out a bite of something sweet, wait for a bee to swoop in for a taste, and run after it back to its hive. They called it bee-lining. (Karl von Frisch spent years chasing bees to their hives and watching what they did when they got there. In 1974, he won the Nobel Prize for what he discovered: the bees’ famous waggle dance.) It’s hard to know where bees fly because it’s hard to chase them—try it and see. Your best bet is to taste what they bring back.
We checked our hive every few days. The smell of a hive is mesmerizing, like warm honey dripped on a rainforest: damp, warm, sweet, tropical. That’s the pheromones. Besides their dance, bees communicate through chemicals. The queen excretes one imaginatively called the “queen substance” that keeps all other female bees from developing ovaries. Queen substance is 9-oxo-2-decenoic acid. Isopentyl acetate is the defense pheromone—what you smell when you disturb a hive, the burglar alarm—and it smells like bananas.
Open the lid and lean in: the bees thrum like a revved engine. Bees are always moving; you can feel their heat. A keeper can learn a lot from his bees: Wake up with the sun, keep a neat house, and stay busy, or at least look it. Keeping bees steadies your hands. It’s meditative, if that’s how you’d describe the mind-clearing terror of lion-taming or smoke-jumping. The thick gloves work, but not well enough to snip the wires of childhood fear. Beestings are good for your joints; fear of them is good for your mind. I don’t do yoga, I keep bees.
One day, our hive swarmed. Bees swarm when they run out of space, so theoretically, a swarm is a good and natural symptom of a healthy, growing hive. The bees make a new queen and half of them leave with her to find a new home. All fine, on paper. But a swarm is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen, raised on cartoons of them chasing Winnie the Pooh, and the specter of killer bees.
Neighbors came out and yelled at us. What could we do? The first swarm clustered around the branch of a Monterey Pine, 15 feet up. Some books advised beating it out of the branch into a shoebox. We decided this was a terrible idea. We left the swarm where it was, tried not to draw any attention to it (Oh, us? We’re just admiring the tree. In full bee suits). By the next morning it was gone.
The first swarm of the season is called the prime swarm, then comes a cast swarm, and then a colt. Our hive’s three swarms burned through its population like a bee rapture, whole clouds of bees evaporating into the firmament, and with that realization came another fear. Not of a storm of stings, but a worry there’d be no one left to hold down the fort and, of course, make honey.
Was it the linseed oil? The spacing of our frames? Did we flirt with childhood trauma, infuriate neighbors, and have to endure being called new-bees for nothing?
Humbled, we called for help. Paul, our mentor from the beekeeping society, came over and with badass poise, a monogrammed bee suit, and—of course—gloveless hands opened our hive, identified our queen, and declared our colony healthy. We’d have honey after all. We removed four frames, grown surprisingly heavy in four months, and took them to the beekeeping society for extracting: we cut off the wax caps over the comb cells, fit the frames into a rotating rack inside a metal drum, and spun the rack with a crank to fling the honey out of the comb, down the sides of the drum, and into our jars. I reached into the drum up to my shoulder to scrape the rest out with a spatula.
The honey was incredible: floral and minty. The bees found the eucalyptus for sure. And sage and… is that rosemary? On walks through Golden Gate Park, I’d see a buzzing yellow spot—was I eating that forager’s handiwork? A fellow beekeeper posted on the list-serv that she saw a swarm that day—were they mine? I pictured our colony spread throughout the city, marking blossoms, claiming territory. I owned this place, I could taste it.
After all the swarming, we ended up with only a few dozen half-pint jars—big, healthy colonies can produce double that. But small rewards can taste as sweet. The bees did their job, and we tagged along. The city bloomed, and we captured it.
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