The Bee Weeks

A Personal Essay
by
Janet Goddard

Grandpa Zumsteg planted a holly tree in his backyard, next to the patio. I have a picture of it somewhere-when it looked like nothing more than a stick poking out of the ground. Now, thirty-something years later, it is magnificent: giant and towering over the small, red brick, one story house. This is where I live today.

Early each spring the old leaves of the holly begin to turn a yellowish brown as smaller fresh, new, and perfectly formed, bright green leaves come in behind to take their place. As the old fall, the new grow so the branches on the holly are never bare. I have to rake the yard two or three times in Spring to clean up. This is a fact that I resent greatly. I resent that this one tree-unlike most others- requires me to do Fall work in early Spring: raking the yard and bagging the dead when I want to be clearing the flower-beds and tending the living.

But once the new leaves are in, small flower buds begin to form in clusters around and between the leaves. In the past, when the tiny, white holly flowers bloomed, the honey bees would come. Every day for a week or two they'd come early in the morning and work the tree until dusk. They worked simply and efficiently, busily flying and stopping, then flying and stopping from one flower to the next until the sacs on their jet-black hind legs glowed yellow-white, bursting with pollen, until the bees had to fly home, I imagine, to unload their bulging baskets before getting more. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands. The kids didn't climb the tree during the bee weeks, but Greg and I looked forward to their visit each spring. We sat on the patio or stood quietly beneath the branches and watched and listened to the docile bees-so many bees that the tree itself seemed to be offering the choral-like low and steady hum.

Gradually, the petals would wilt and fade and begin falling to the ground and the bees would leave. As the petals fell, the ground beneath the tree looked as if it were dusted with snow and when the wind blew, the tiny flowers would fall in bursts, making us feel as if we were caught in an odd sort of snow storm. I'd spend another week or two sweeping up masses of tiny dead flowers from my patio each day, waiting for them to stop falling so that I could spread the dark brown mulch on the nearby garden without the effect being ruined by a mass of messy looking sprinkles.

And this is how spring went with the holly tree every year-year in, year out. And somehow the bee weeks-between the weeks of raking and then the weeks of sweeping-tempered my resentment, made the tree less bothersome and more purposeful. This, I could say, was Nature.

And then the bees stopped coming.

There were still falling leaves to rake in Spring. There were still dead flowers to sweep up. But the honey bees? Not one. Now only a small number of bumble bees flew around the tree during the bee weeks, carrying out the task of pollination.

"Where are the bees?" we kept asking each other.

Two years went by, then three, then four. No bees.

"What happened?" we wondered.

We started watching out for honey bees in general and noticed their absence not only from our tree, but from everywhere. I said to my children, "When I was a kid, you wouldn't dare walk into a field of clover without shoes on. Too many bees. I never went a summer without getting stung at least once. They were everywhere." We were at the park across the street from our house. I was looking at baseball field, littered with the flowers of white clover and not a honey bee in sight.

We thought it was the chemical fertilizers and insecticides. We thought it had to do with the trucks we saw driving through neighborhood after neighborhood spraying their glowing green chemicals on yards so that people wouldn't have to be assaulted with contemptible dandelions and clover which sullied their pristine fields of zosia, Kentucky blue grass, fescue, and rye. I know for a fact that those chemicals do not only kill weeds. They also kill birds, and earthworms and insects. I preached to my parents, who sprayed their lawn for a season or two.

"You're killing the earth, and for what?" I said. "The bees are gone."

Even before the bees had left, Greg talked about wanting to keep them. His mother had kept them when he was a child. His mother's father had kept them, too. I assumed, however, that when Greg said he wanted to keep bees, he was talking about a later time in our lives, a time when we lived on a piece of land where neighbors weren't so close by. But last winter Greg decided it was time. At first, he talked about putting the hive on the property of a friend who lives on 16 acres in Washington, Missouri. This friend was (and still is) completely open to the idea of playing host for a hive. But then Greg decided he wanted it closer to home-closer, like in our back yard. Our yard is not large and our neighbors are very close.

"What about the kids? What if they kick a soccer ball and it hits the hive and they're attacked? What about the neighbors? What if they complain? What if they are allergic to bees? Or what if one of the kids' friends get stung? What about the dogs? And is it illegal? What if the city finds out? I don't think it's smart. I'm afraid someone will get hurt."

"We'll see," he said. "We have to learn about it. Don't worry. I won't do it if it's dangerous."

So he waited for Spring.

Whenever I went to the library, I checked out every book I could find on beekeeping. On one visit, the librarian, a woman about my age, held up one of the bee books and said, "Do you keep bees?" I told her my husband was interested in keeping them and that we were just reading about them right now. I told her I was apprehensive. She told me her husband had been apprehensive, too, but that now he loves them. I gave her a sideways look. She told me about a Bee Keeper's Association meeting that takes place on the first Thursday of every month at a nearby community center.

"It's important for people to keep bees," she said seriously. "They can't make it on their own."

I nodded, thinking of all the horrid chemical trucks spraying their green goo.

Greg read every book I brought home from the library, cover to cover. He read books like: A Book of Bees, Keeping Bees, The Golden Throng, The Biology of the Honey Bee, The Queen Must Die, and The Honey Bee. And these are just a handful of the books he read. I wasn't nearly as vigilant as Greg in learning about bee keeping, but I glanced at most of the books.

I read, for example, about experiments biologists have conducted concerning bees and their mating practices-experiments like placing a queen in a tiny cage and tying the cage to a balloon, then watching the drones follow her as she drifts in the air, hoping to establish a meaningful relationship with her (an act which, unfortunately for the male, results in death).

"Who comes up with this stuff?" I wondered.

I read about the way bees keep a constant temperature in the hive, fanning their wings in summer to create a draft, huddling close together in winter to create warmth. I read about the dance bees use to communicate the location of blooming flowers to each other, wagging their bodies and zig-zagging in circles and semi-circles and lines. I read about the different bees that make up a colony: the worker bees, the queen bee, the drones, and the role each bee plays toward the success of a hive. I read about the ways beekeepers manipulate, care for, and nurture their bees. The more I read, the more I began to understand that keeping bees was more than just keeping bees. Keeping bees is about establishing and nurturing an intimate connection with something that is seemingly outside of our experiences. Keeping bees, I discovered, is a relationship.

Greg went to the next meeting of the Eastern Missouri Beekeeper's Association. Their mission statement is: "To promote beekeeping generally; to broaden the knowledge of beekeeping among its members; and to foster the best practices and techniques in apiary management. (Article 11 of the Constitution)." This was written at the bottom of the quarterly newsletter, beneath a list of those members responsible for refreshments at the upcoming meetings.

When Greg came home, he described a diverse group of people: men and women, old and young. Some old men with long gray beards. Some old women with buns tied on top of their heads. Some widowed, some not. Some married. Some single. Some there as couples. Some alone. Some fathers there with grown sons. Some mothers with young children-childless at the moment for a night away. Some hobbyists like Greg. Some in serious business with hundreds of hives. People all. People who led ordinary lives with ordinary jobs-jobs like working in a library-all joined together by the honey bee.

"And they argued about everything," Greg said.

It seems that beekeepers tend to be opinionated in their apiary practices and are stubborn when it comes to their bees. This is a characteristic beekeepers do not deny, nor is it one they apologize for.

"Well," I said to Greg, "you should fit right in."

That night they had argued vehemently about the best way to use Apistan against Varroa mites. The alarming and wretched Varroa mite: a Varroa mite, we learned, is a tiny, brown, crab-like parasite that attaches itself to the body of a bee. The bee is powerless to remove the parasite, which drives it mad, weakens its resistance, leaves it susceptible to the other bee diseases and threats, and which weakens the defenses of the colony until the colony can no longer survive. While Greg and I maintain our disdain for lawn chemicals, we learned that it is this horrid little mite who is the true culprit behind the lack of bees on our holly tree.

There is a theory that the Varroa mite came from Thailand bees. Thailand bees have always had to deal with Varroa mites and have learned how to rid themselves of the pests. When a bee in Thailand is suffering with a Varroa, it alerts the other bees by performing a frenzied dance of alarm. The other bees circle around the infected bee, and snatch the mite away, crushing it in their jaws. Bees outside of Thailand simply don't know how to do this for each other, and the effects have been devastating. The Varroa mite has destroyed ninety eight percent of the wild bee population. Ninety eight percent. This loss of bees has, in turn, drastically affected the farmers who depend on bees for the pollination of crops. Now farmers are forced to rely on commercial beekeepers who must literally bring the hives to the crops. But commercial beekeepers and hobbyist beekeepers are fighting the Varroa mite as well. Research has produced a chemical called Apistan to control Varroa mite infestation, but the mite is an ever-present threat to a colony of bees, and one that a beekeeper must guard against vigilantly as even a strong hive can be devastated in a short period of time. Commercial beekeepers, too, have lost a substantial number of colonies due to Varroa mites. What is worse, at present, Apistan is the only approved chemical known to have any effect on the Varroa mite. The Varroa mites in Europe are already resistant to Apistan; the mites in America are beginning to show a resistance as well.

I thought about what the librarian had said-Keeping bees is important. They can't make it on their own anymore. She wasn't talking about lawn chemicals, as I'd thought. She was talking about Varroa mites. I thought about our relationship with honey bees: they need us for survival as much as we need them.

Marshall Creech was at the bee meeting. He's a serious bee keeper: a man with a hundred or so hives, who also owns a business called Creech Bee Supply. Marshall has become Greg's unofficial beekeeping mentor. He is always willing to answer questions, help solve problems, and provide bee equipment. Greg went to Marshall's house to talk about bees and when he came home he had an invitation from Marshall to go out with him the next week to check the hives he keeps scattered in various places around West County. While he was there, Greg bought a bee suit that cost $100, and a smoker that cost $25. The kids and I couldn't resist trying on the netted hat. The smoker reminds me of the tin man in the Wizard of Oz-specifically, the scene when the he sings about needing a heart then bellows his arms and puffs smoke out of the inverted funnel on top of his head. I keep the pot on my bookshelf for decoration.

The next week, when Greg came home from seeing the hives, his eyes shined: he'd gotten a glimpse of a natural wonder and witnessed the mastering of the wonder by a man. In his arms, that day, Greg carried the makings for a hive of his own.

A bee hive comes unassembled in bundles of pre-cut boards and sticks. Greg is a carpenter by trade, so for him, putting the pieces together was no big deal. In general, the components to a basic hive cost around $350-a fact that we try not to dwell on as the expense doesn't end there.

A hive is made of varying numbers of boxes that stack one on top of the other. Inside each box, there is room for ten frames to hang vertically, one bee-width apart. The frames are removable and are the structures upon which bees draw honey comb. In general, from the bottom up, a hive consists of the following: a bottom board; two brood chambers with frames; a queen excluder; three supers with frames; an inner cover; and a telescopic cover (the top lid). However, all of these components are not necessarily in use at all times. What components are used when depends on the goals of the keeper, the demands of the seasons, and the strength of the hive.

The bottom board is simply the board on which the entire hive rests. The brood chambers are usually the two bottom boxes of a bee hive. This is the heart of the hive, where the queen lives and lays eggs and where the brood are raised. In the months of Spring and Fall, when the bees are the busiest-first making honey and raising brood, and then making honey to live on during Winter-supers are placed on top of the brood chambers. Queen excluders are sometimes placed between the brood chamber and the supers. The queen excluder (which isn't always necessary) is a screen-like frame that lies across the top of the highest brood chamber. The openings in the excluder are big enough to allow worker bees access, but are too small for the queen to fit through. Because the queen cannot enter the supers, the honey stored in them is free from eggs and larvae. This is the honey that beekeepers harvest at the end of the season.

As the season continues and the hive thrives, the bees continue building comb and storing honey from the bottom of the hive upward. A bee keeper adds supers (one on top of the other) as the bees need space to store honey. We are told that a relatively strong hive will produce around one hundred pounds of honey per season. A father and son hold a Guineas world record for a single hive that produced three hundred pounds of honey in one season.

Greg had the hive. Now all he needed were the bees.

One day in late Spring he called me from work.

"There's a swarm of bees outside the hospital," he said to me. His voice held the tension of an electric charge. "They want to kill them."

"Oh!" I said.

"Those are my bees," he said plaintively. "They're here for me."

"Did you tell them you'll take them? Did you tell them not to kill them?"

"Yeah, but I wouldn't be able to get them until after work and all my stuff is at home. People are freaking out about it. They want them gone now," he said.

"So, what are they going to do?"

"I talked to security and told them they needed to call a beekeeper, not an exterminator."

"Well, are they going to?"

"Yeah." He sighed.

"You saved them," I said. "Good for you."

"Those are supposed to be my bees," he said again and hung up.

I know that bees swarm for all sorts of reasons, and that one of the main reasons is that they run out of space. A swarm of honey bees are not particularly dangerous; they are just looking for a new place to call home. Few people understand this. I've never seen a swarm, but I imagine the sight of one flying through the air or the sight of one that has landed-an impressive ball of pure kinetic energy-would be disconcerting to most people, myself included.

"You know that security guard I'm always talking about?" Greg said a week or so later. "He thinks he has bees living in his soffit."

"Really?" I said.

"I'm going to go look and if they are, I'm going to take them."

I felt my stomach flip-flop.

"But you don't know anything about capturing a wild hive," I said.

"Well, I'm going to find out."

Greg likes doing everything the hard way.

"Can't you just get some bees from Marshall?" I said. "I don't want you to do it."

"They need me," he said. "They'll die without me. Besides, I need bees. It's the perfect opportunity."

The next Saturday Greg left the house early in the morning. I stood in my p.j.'s with a cup of coffee in my hands, watching him as he carried his bee suit and his smoker and his brood box to the pick-up truck. He looked so confident, so self-assured, as if he'd captured hundreds of wild hives in his lifetime. I thought of Ghost Busters. I thought, "Who you gonna call . . . ."

He was gone all day, and all day I wondered, "Where the heck is he? What in the heck is taking so long?" I wasn't really worried about him, but I was worried. I was worried about the fact that when he came home he was going to be bringing a mess of bees with him. I'd learned a lot about bees, but there is a difference in learning about them and actually having them. I didn't know what to expect.

He pulled into the driveway at dusk. Finally. I went out to the front porch.

"Come here," he said quietly, walking toward the back of his truck. He was smiling and happy and filthy dirty. I smelled the smoke on him.

"What happened?"

"Oh, man," he said. "There were thousands of them up there. Thousands."

He spoke quickly, describing how he removed a section of the soffit to find the entire inside packed with the honeycomb and the chaos of thousands of bees.

"How'd you get them out?"

"I smoked the shit out of them," he said. "I just kept pouring it on and finally they had to leave. I got some of them to swarm and they landed in a bush . . . I mean they were everywhere."

There is a theory about why smoke settles bees-I don't know if I believe it or not, but here it is: some people think that when a bee is hit with smoke, it fears fire and instinct directs it to immediately prepare to leave. It prepares to leave by first going to the comb and gorging itself on honey. Once the bee has gorged on honey, it becomes docile and its body is so full that it couldn't bend its tail section to sting even if it wanted to.

The whole neighborhood was out to watch Greg as he captured the hive. People stood on the other side of the street to watch, or watched him through their windows in the safety of their houses. Some had binoculars and passed them around offering each other a closer look. The woman right next door, Greg told me, had a front row seat as she sat at her upstairs window right across from Greg.

I tried to imagine the scene, bees flying, some guy in a bee suit going up and down a ladder, smoke all around him. I thought of a spaceman walking among aliens in some cheesy B movie-only I'm sure the neighbors thought he was the alien.

"And you got them?" I said.

"I got a lot of them. I don't know if I got the queen, but I got them to swarm twice."

When bees swarm, the queen is usually with them.

"I know one thing, though," Greg said. "I killed as many as I saved. It was a mess."

He pulled a cardboard box out of the back of the truck and lifted up a chunk of honeycomb. "See?" he said. "There was comb all over the place-not in neat rows like they say in the books."

"Where are they?" I said.

"Here," he said, and pointed to the brood chamber that sat in his truck.

I started to back away.

"Don't worry. I have the opening plugged up. They can't get out. Besides, it's getting dark. They don't go out after dark."

"Yeah, well I bet they're pretty angry," I said.

He carried the box to the back of the house and set it on the patio. Our three kids came out and together the four of us walked around the box gingerly, as if we were standing in front of a bundle of dynamite. Greg stood back and watched us, his arms folded over his chest like some sort of proud papa. "They can't get out," he kept saying. "Stop worrying."

We'd been talking to the kids about the bees for weeks before we actually got them.

"Don't go to school and tell all of your friends and your teachers," Greg said. "They will not understand."

Before the bees came, we had checked to be sure keeping them was not illegal (it isn't). Still, we didn't want to bring any undue attention to the fact that we were keeping a hive: most people are afraid of bees. We had studied our small yard, trying to find the perfect yet least conspicuous spot to place the hive. We decided upon a spot next to one of the four gardens that wrap around the back yard. This spot provided good morning sun and would be somewhat hidden behind the crape myrtle bush on one side, and the bridal's wreath bush on the other. Once we had chosen the spot, we spoke to our neighbor, Winnie, as it was right next to her back yard. We assured her that we didn't think they would bother her a bit, but that she does have an ornamental pond and they would probably be going there for water. She was supportive and even said she would be sure to find out about flowers they like and plant those. We smiled. Bees will fly for miles to find pollen and nectar if they have to.

Greg moved the box from the patio over to the fence on top of two milk crates that had been sitting there, side by side, just waiting for a hive to come and land. The crates would keep the hive off the ground and free from moisture when it rained or snowed. And that was it. The bees were home.

The next morning, we sat on the patio and watched. The bees were already coming and going. The kids and I were tentative, but once we got used to them, once we realized they weren't going to attack us, or bother us unless we bothered them, we began to relax and enjoy their presence in our yard. Each day the bees became a bit more active. Each day we sat and watched them as if we were watching an aquarium.

We knew a lot about the bees before we got them. We knew that the worker bees are all female and are all kept sterile by a certain pheromone given off by the queen; that each hive has its own scent and bees recognize each other by their particular smell. We knew that the workers make up the main population of a hive and do everything to maintain the hive as a unit: building and cleaning the comb, tending the young, collecting the pollen, water, and nectar, guarding the hive from intruders (like ants, birds, other bees), and keeping the hive clean. We knew that drones are all male and do not work; that they exist solely for the purpose of mating; that they are bigger than the worker but smaller than the queen, that they have no stinger. We knew that the Queen is the Big Bee, the Head Honcho, whose sole purpose in the hive is reproduction. We knew all of this, but now, having them in our back yard, we began to know about bees in a whole new way.

These bees were ours.

We recognized for ourselves the visual differences between the drones and the worker bees. We saw the foragers coming in with their pollen baskets bulging. Whenever I took walks, I paid attention to what wild flowers were blooming around the creeks and wondered if our bees knew about them. We recognized the bee dance and watched as they wagged their bodies in specific turns offering directions to the bees that stood around and watched. We recognized the guards on the landing board, paying close attention to all the comings and goings of the other bees and buzzing around and fighting off intruders. On hotter days, we understood what the guards were doing when they stood facing the hive along the long opening of the landing board, like a tiny, buzzing chorus line, and began fanning their wings. We saw how they planted themselves firmly with their heads hunkered down to hold themselves in place as their tails were raised by the lift of their wings as they fanned, fast and furious to create a draft and cool the hive.

We learned that it is difficult, if not impossible, to watch a single bee in flight for very long. They are too small and too fast. To watch the flight patterns, we discovered that you have to look beyond the bees in order to see them. You have to look off into the distance, past the hive, straight ahead and keep your eyes focused on nothing in particular. Only then, only when you stop looking, do you begin to see the steady stream of flight, the throng of bees who are nothing more than quick zips, all coming and going from the same general direction.

Greg took some of the old honey comb that he'd pulled out of the soffit and he melted it down on the stove, and as it cooled it separated and he strained it according to the books he'd read on how to get the impurities out of beeswax. He was doing it just for fun, but I was wondering if I'd be able to make beeswax candles one day. Greg got a ball of beeswax about the size of small chicken egg. It was a cream colored yellow and smelled like honey, sweet and pure.

When our children bring home friends and if we know they will be playing in the back yard, we take them out to the hive and explain things. Our goal is to explain that if they respect the hive, they don't have to worry and they can even enjoy it.

"This is how you stand near it without bothering them," we tell them. "Off to the side of the hive so that you aren't in their way when they come in to land."

And the kids are usually fascinated as they see the bees come in to land and fly off to forage. They are given the opportunity to see and understand and appreciate and respect rather than wonder and fear and worry and hate. And usually, their understanding sounds something like this: "Cool."

Greg nurtured the bees carefully as the colony had been weakened substantially when he took them. He fed them jars of honey and sugar syrup and tried to encourage them to begin drawing new comb by tying broken pieces of the old comb he'd gathered from the soffit onto the new frames. Marshall talked him through the various processes involved in medicating them against the various bee diseases, but mostly it was a matter of just letting the bees alone.

One day he called me out to the yard. He was sitting in his Adirondack chair, looking at a dead bee with a magnifying glass.

"Look," he said.

He pointed out the small brown dot right behind the bee's head.

"It's a Varroa mite," he said.

"Oh!" I said. "Rotten, ugly bug."

He called Marshall for Apistan strips and put them in the hive. The next day the landing board was sprinkled with tiny, brown, dead dots.

The first two times he opened the hive, he wore the full bee suit, complete with gloves and netted hat. He wanted to find the queen. He wanted to see if there was brood. I came out to watch. I climbed the fence and stood in Winnie's yard, hoping that I'd be able to get close enough to get a glimpse into the hive, but not too close. Greg puffed some smoke on the frames and took them out and examined them, one by one, trying to find the queen-an impossible task to his untrained eye. All was quiet so I came closer and peeked into the world of orderly chaos. I quietly climbed back over the fence, back into our yard, and stood under the holly tree. Greg kept searching the frames in silence. Space man, I thought. After a minute I started to walk toward him, slowly and quietly until I stood right next to him. He smiled at my bravery and held the bee covered frame out for me to see. I looked at the frame and then I looked at him all safe and sound in his big bee suit and his netted hat, and me just standing there.

"You're kind of a wimp, all dressed up like that for these little bees, aren't you?" I said.

He doesn't open the hive unless there is a specific reason, and he rarely wears his bee suit anymore. Now he just puts on the netted hat. Quiet, calm motion is the key, I'm told, though I believe it's easier said than done-especially when you are stung. Greg has been stung a few times now. If you are stung it's even more important to remain calm because the bee that just stung gives off a pheromone that alerts the other bees who will then be attracted to quick motions of panic. Greg says a real beekeeper remains calm when stung. He still runs away. I've seen him do an amusing dance or two, running around and shooing his arms in the face of an angry bee. I've never been stung, but then, I don't handle them. I'm the Supportive Observer.

He has not, as of yet, actually seen the queen. However, after we had the bees for a few months, he examined the frames and found evidence that a new queen had been raised-one of the cells in the honey comb was bigger and longer than the others-a queen cell. This was good. This was a sign that the hive would make it, that the hive was doing what it needed to take care of itself.

Not more than a few weeks after seeing the queen cell, for about a half an hour every afternoon at about 3:30, a cloud of bees would fly around together in a crazy kind of frenzy just outside the hive opening. We were alarmed. What was happening? What were they doing?

"I'm afraid they're going to swarm," Greg said.

He called Marshall.

"That's play flight," Marshall told him.

"What's play flight?" I asked Greg.

"Baby bees learning to fly," he said.

And we were happy.

On our thirteen-year wedding anniversary, we went out to dinner. Over salads I told Greg I knew we wouldn't get any honey this year, but that next year, if we did get honey, I wanted to take care of harvesting it.

He looked up.

"That's great," he said, "Because I have no interest in the honey."

I frowned.

"I just like messing with them," he said.

We decided that we were perfect beekeeping partners as I had no interest in messing with the bees.

On warmer days in winter, the bees will come out of the hive. For the most part, though, we didn't see much of the bees except for the dead ones that littered the ground under the opening. In Fall, all of the drones are kicked out of the hive or killed outright-which is the same difference as a bee cannot survive outside of a colony. Only the workers and the queen remain during the chilly winter months, clustering together for warmth and living off of their stores of honey.

With any luck, next Fall we will harvest our first hive of honey, and it will be a whole new experience with the bees. But for now I look forward to Spring. The perennials in my garden are just beginning to come up, along with my tulips, crocuses and daffodils. I know that soon the green leaves on my holly tree will begin to turn a yellowish brown and will fall to the ground. Then there will be flowers, and when the flowers come, we will have bees. Our bees. And I will stand under the holly branches of Grandpa Zumsteg's tree, and listen to the music of the choral hum.

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