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11/25/2010: "Rise and Fall of the Bees"

In the unflattering photo above you can see that I'm actually realizing a long-held dream: harvesting honey from our own beehive! I'm cutting the wax top off of a frame of honey with a special knife that has an offset handle.

For the past year we've had a hive in the backyard of the Portland house, and it's been a source of interest both for our girls and the neighborhood. Our daughter even did a school presentation on the life cycle of the honey bee.



Having the hive in the city backyard had its good and bad points: it was easy to check on the bees, if only to verify that on warm sunny days they were appropriately active. From time to time I would put on the bee suit and open it up; I checked for mites. We had some disease present in the hive, nosema apis, which needed occasional treatment. (Treatment consists of feeding the bees a medicated syrup, and has to be timed so that the medication doesn't end up in comb that you want to harvest.) The downside, of course, is having to work around the buzzing of the bees when you're outside near the hive. From ten feet away you would hardly know that there was anything going on: just an occasional buzz as one of the hard-working insects flies past you. If you stand in front of the hive, however, to pick raspberries it becomes an exercise in zen concentration to ignore the constant buzzing inches away from you. Having worked with the bees now for a couple years, it didn't bother me, but the rest of the family was a bit put off.

Eventually, we decided we need to move the hive down to the farm so that we could do some work on the patio. A hive is a very heavy object: our hive weighed well in excess of a hundred pounds. Real Beekeepers(tm) just suit up, unstack the hive from its current location, restack on a trailer, and drive off. Since it wasn't possible to get a trailer very close to the patio, and I didn't want to carry each hive section a hundred feet to the back of my truck, I built a two person hive carrier. This took a couple evenings of cogitating and knocking some wood together in the (very crowded and messy) garage.



On the appointed evening I waited until all the bees were back in the hive and then sealed it up.



Next morning I carefully tipped the hive and slid it onto the carrier (it fit just below the stretchers). Then Ann and I lifted it up and carried it to the back of the waiting pickup. I remember a moment of panic as we struggled to heave it up to the level of the truck, only to find out that I had forgotten to take out the plywood board that usually sits on the floor of the bed of the truck. We had to carefully pull it off the tailgate, set it on the ground, remove the board, and then HEAVE it up again. It slid in perfectly. I used the hand truck to move the very heavy base into the other side of the bed, and I was ready to go.

I drove it down to the farm, where Lou was waiting. A few bees managed to wriggle out past the screening, but otherwise the move was successful. Lou and I carried it over to the orchard and set it down. I wish that I had thought to set up the camera for a movie: at a certain moment I ripped the screening off the entrance, and a cloud of pent up bees surged out of the hive into the sunshine. They rose up and started circling to get their bearings, and then zoomed off in search of pollen.



And now I come to the sad part of my story. After opening up the hive to pour in some medicated syrup into the feeding tank inside the hive I went off to do some other farm chores (I think that I was mowing the pasture that day). Although it was mid-fall, I failed to close up the hive entrance for winter before going home. When I came back the next week I found that the hive had been nearly totally robbed of honey! A hundred pounds of honey, carried off by unknown bees. This was caused by a combination of factors, clearly visible in hindsight: we had lost part of the hive to swarming in the summer (reducing population), I was putting the hive in the neighborhood of a feral bee colony quite nearby, I was feeding syrup that attracted other bees, and I had not closed up the hive entrance to make it more defensible for my bees. I've since closed up the hive, and have been feeding small amounts of syrup to keep them alive, but it's an open question whether they will make it through the winter. If this recent November cold snap hasn't killed them off entirely I will probably bring them home this weekend; it would be much easier to nurse them through the winter in the city.