How Not to Hive Your Bees

My honeybees arrived this weekend. You may remember my post from late winter about the beekeeping class I took because it is one of, like, three posts from this year.

 I felt perfectly prepared to hive them, for the following reasons:

• When I was three, I went to a daycare named Busy Bees. There were no actual bees, but there was a mural of bees on the outside of the building near the play yard. I hated that place, and while it made me despise fish sticks, I think it still left me with an affinity for bees. 
• I took an introductory beekeeping class in February. Because I paid for the class, I was presented with a pre-printed certificate of completion at the end of the day. 
• My name is Melissa, which means “Honey bee” in Greek. 
• I like honey in my Greek yogurt, which I think takes us full circle. 
• For added insurance, I watched a YouTube video on “How to Hive Your Bees” a solid five minutes before I picked up my bee suit and walked out the door to hive them. 

All in all, I was feeling pretty prepared. I am sure you are nodding in agreement. Upon arriving at my bee supplier, Capitol Bee Supply, the company owners gave me a refresher:

Step 1: Use your hive tool to remove the feeding can from the traveling cage of bees, thereby opening the traveling cage.

Step 2: Take the queen out and put her in your pocket.

Step 3: Shake the bees from the traveling cage into the hive and spread them around the hive “Like spreading pizza sauce on a pizza.”

Step 4: Put the queen in.

Step 5: Close up the hive.

Step 6: Stand back with a self-satisfied grin and watch the bees cheerfully adjust to their new home. Take a selfie and post it on Facebook. (They did not actually say this last bit about the self-satisfied smile and selfie, but I could tell they probably just forgot to say it.)

As I drove away with my girls buzzing in their traveling cage, I went through all six steps in my head. This wouldn’t be so hard. Six steps? Heh. Baking bread is more complicated than that. But I was a little nervous, so I decided to have a heart-to-heart talk with the bees just, you know, to get that out in the open. I felt it was important to start our relationship with honesty and respect:

“Hi bees. My name is Melissa (which, by the way, means honey bee in Greek, so I really get you). I am your beekeeper. I am new at this, but I promise to take good care of you. I will treat you with love and respect and kindness. I’ll protect you and keep you safe. My job is to make sure you can do your job. So if there is anything you need from me, please just let me know. I am kind of nervous right now, but I am going to try my best. Just know that I’ll always treat you with love and kindness and I want our relationship to be one based on mutual respect.” 

I continued this conversation, even giving pauses to allow them to respond to my questions, through much of the twenty-minute drive. They didn’t really talk much, but you know, everyone has a different comfort level when meeting someone new, so I didn’t judge.

The hive is located on a friend’s farm, which consists of about a hundred acres of organic fruit and vegetables. There are apple and plum trees and strawberries and raspberries and clover and dandelions and thistle and violets and all the flowers a bee could dream of here.

 The farm manager approached me as I got out of the car. “Oh! Are you the beekeeper? Neat!”

Can we just pause here in the story? Because I would like to slow that moment down and relish in the feeling of coolness which I have never felt before and probably will never, ever feel again. At that moment, I finally knew what it felt like to feel cool. Intoxicating. That hipster farm manager living on an organic farm with her boyfriend in a super hip “tiny house” just said, “Oh! Are you the beekeeper? Neat!” 

Neat.

Like, is that how pilots in the golden age of airlines felt as they self-importantly strutted through the airport? I don’t know, but I swelled with pride. I wanted to clear my throat and swagger and say something like, “Yup, that’s me. I’m the bee lady. Just here doing my job and being awesome at it. It’s no big deal.” But since there is another person who keeps hives on the farm (and she actually knows what she is doing) I felt compelled to admit that I was just one of the beekeepers, and that this was my first visit out with my bees. 

End of cool moment.

Still, the farm manager was fascinated at the box of bees in the back of my Prius, so she watched them with curiosity and then called her boyfriend over to see them. As they asked me questions that I couldn’t answer and marveled over the bees crawling around the cage in the back of my car, I pulled on my gloves. And then, like something out of a National Lampoon’s movie, my box of bees fell over onto its side. “Uh oh” muttered hipster farm manager. I regarded the box for a moment and then calmly explained that it was ok, because I was supposed to knock the box once or twice to get the bees off the top of the box when it was time to put them in the hive.

No biggie, I assured them.

No biggie, I assured myself.

But as I stepped to the box to sit it upright again, the feeding can fell out and hundreds of bees swarmed out. They swarmed into my hair, the swarmed into the Prius, they swarmed all around me. My head net sat, inertly, next to the rapidly emptying box of bees. Bees, who minutes before had sworn to be biffles with me, were now burrowing into my hair and furiously trying to inject me with pure hatred. As I swatted them from my head and hair, more flew at me and the box remained open, slowly draining of bees.

I grabbed my head net and jammed it over my head, securing the drawstring safely around my neck. In doing, so I trapped twenty-some bees in the net with my face. Knowing that approximately 10,000 bees came in the box, my calculus was that having twenty bee stings was less worse than 10,000 stings. As the bees found their way through my hair, they plunged their stingers into my scalp. Others went for my cheeks and neck.

Now holding the open box of bees, I mall-walked the remainder of bees over to my hive, and holding the box with one hand, I used my free hand to engage in war with the bees who were now sharing my head net. I smashed bees into my hair and face to prevent more stings and hotly ranted, “Ok, it’s ON bitches. Is THAT how it’s gonna be? Bring it. I will CRUSH you.”

 Loving-kindness earth-mother-goddess cool beekeeper no more. I was a raving lunatic, madly power-walking with an open box of bees and furiously hitting myself in the head over and over again and shouting expletives. I got to my hive and, taking the lid off, removed several frames to make room of the bees. I tried dumping what was left of the bees into the hive but they wouldn’t come out. I tried harder. Shaking, tilting, shaking. Shaking more. Shaking harder.

Then I remembered that the queen was still in there, safe in her own little traveling box inside the bigger box. I needed to get her out for the others to come. I plunged my hand into the box of angry, angry bees and pulled her out, placing her in my pocket. Once she was in my pocket, it became easier to get the others out of the box. I dumped the box again and this time got more out.

Then I went to work on the queen. I removed the cork stopper and replaced it with a marshmallow. Over the next several days, the worker bees would work to eat through that and release her. I settled her in between two frames and closed the lid of the hive. Then I went back to the Prius.

Here’s what I saw: Hundreds, quite possibly thousands, of bees walking over, on and around the back of the car. Bees covered the back of the Prius and everything that was in it. A blue sleeping bag was black with bees. Notebooks, sweatshirts, a pair of shoes, a cardboard box and my unused bee smoker crawled with bees.

My car hummed.

My car seats undulated.

They clung to the inside windows and the reading lights on the car ceiling.

I contemplated abandoning my car right there. We only have a few more payments on it, and it was a nice evening for a twelve-mile walk home. I considered how difficult it might be to remove the license plate and pretend it was never my car, but realized that the hipster farm manager now knew my name and I couldn’t get off that easily. So I took a deep breath and got to work.

I took the bees—by the handful— over to the hive. I carried item by item to the hive and gently brushed them off into their new home. A notebook. A sweatshirt. A plastic bag. A cardboard box. After an hour or so, the Prius had sufficiently been cleared out of bees, many of them brushed into the hive.

Maybe it was the endorphin rush from the multiple bee stings but as I brushed the last of the bees from the Prius, I felt an incredible peace fall over me. I felt serene. Blissful. The bees buzzed around the hive and the travelling box which was now positioned next to the hive entrance.

I leaned against the car and took off my veil. When I did, I discovered a lone bee on the inside of the veil, curiously investigating me. She had been there all along inside my veil, but hadn’t stung me. I spoke softly to her and named her Mary. She climbed up and down my arm, touching and tasting as she went. I studied her and she studied me. We sat there for a long time.

As night fell, I packed up my gear and wished the bees a good night. A dozen or more bees accompanied me home, despite driving back with all of my windows open. When I got home, Chris sweetly listened to my story and pulled stingers out of my face and scalp. Afterwards he said, I just want to know, “Why didn’t you just put the feeding can back into the travelling box and close up the hole?”

Close up the hole?! I wanted to smack my bee stung forehead. Why didn’t I think of that? Closing up the hole to stop the stream of bees was a no-brainer, but in my panic, it never occurred to me. I’d like to think that this is one of those if-it-doesn’t-kill-you-it-makes-you-stronger moments, and because it didn’t kill me, I will consider the experience a success. Also, I did learn a lot from this experience. I learned that bee stings are not the worst things in the world, that head nets work better if you don’t pre-load them with bees, and that feeding cans sometimes fall out—and you should probably put them back in— to prevent bees stinging the shit out of your hairline.

I also learned that I really, really love these girls.

Here is Mary, investigating my gloved hand: