I don’t quite know why, but for some reason I expected the pile of boxes to be bigger. Admittedly, the stack is about seven feet tall, but still, for the number that showed up on my credit card statement, I thought there should have been more.

That’s right, the beehives have arrived.

My purchase of the hives may seem a bit premature -I can’t install the bees until spring – but I figured that, with my tendency to procrastinate, even with four months of lead time I’ll still only be about half-way done getting the hives ready by the time the bees show up in April. That would not be a good thing. So, in anticipation of many delays to come, I thought I should start early. Also, because this project is so big, so industrial in scale, it’s something I’m going to document every step of the way. Hence, and to satisfy the incessant whining from you “artists” out there, pictures.

In fact, I think that this whole bee thing is going to be such a big deal, I’m going to reach back into my past and dredge up a little backstory on my interest in bees to go along with all the information I can give you on the care and nurturing of the fuzzy little insects which I am going to enslave and then steal from them, the products of their hard labor. (That last bit is just so the vegans among you can go “Yeah, right”. Or something.)

First the information.

Okay, that was everything I know about keeping bees. I am starting from scratch. Absolute zero. Square one. Some of you might suggest that that does not bode well for the bee-minions under my control, but I’m much less concerned about that than I am say, dying from anaphylactic shock as my bees rise up in rebellion and sting me repeatedly. Besides, I’ve got four months to get up to speed, read a few books, take a class, that sort of thing, before I actually have to touch a bee.

Historically, my interest in bees can be traced back to New York City, where my next door neighbor decided to put in a beehive. I was in fourth grade and don’t remember much of the details except that he had a typical white box surrounded by the typical cloud of bees. Then his wife ran off with another guy (or so I assume but she may have been driven off by the bees) abandoning him and their family. They moved shortly thereafter so my first introduction to bees did not culminate with the taste of honey.

Fast forward to 2005. I’m floating on my sailboat in turquoise-blue water, tucked away in an isolated cove in the Islands of the Bahamas, palm trees lining a sun-warmed, pink-sand beach, and listening to All Things Considered on the satellite radio. This is just as cool as the image you now have in your head. The guest on the show was one Holley Bishop author of Robbing the Bees, subtitled: A Biography of Honey, sub-subtitled: The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World. The interview was a very interesting discussion on how honey has been used throughout history interspersed with seasonal vignettes of a modern-day beekeeper in north Florida. Sort of Quest for Fire meets Ulee’s Gold.

I wanted to learn more so, upon my return to the land of stuff, I ordered the book from Amazon, and, just so I would better understand the complexities, bought Beekeeping: A Practical Guide. The combination order, when received, got me into a world of hurt which does not need to be discussed here.

Then my sister – she of Mocha the Attack Llama – took up bees on her ranchette in sunny New Mexico. The bees all died.

Most would consider those experiences something along the lines of people wearing Red Cross windbreakers waving them away from imminent disaster; something more along the lines of a warning than a welcome. But my interest was piqued and I figured that if I ever again lived in an appropriate place, which I do now, I would have to give it a try.

So, a few months ago I began looking into the whole idea of “keeping” bees. I read a few things, visited a few websites, and, based upon the recommendations of others, decided to start small. Two hives to begin with, and then see how it goes.

Which is how I now find myself confronted with a seven-foot tall stack of boxes and the mind-numbing industrial scale of hobby beekeeping. Now, I’m sure you’re still having a little laugh – at my expense – about my statement that two hives of bees comes anywhere near industrial scale. Which, I think, is how they trick you into this line of work to begin with. However, when I started cutting into the cartons, the lightest of which weighed over fifty pounds, I came face to face with the reality of keeping bees.

When you get your typical order-by-mail, the set of coasters you bought are packed in a box that could easily hold a refrigerator suspended in a sea of packing material. The beehives came in boxes that couldn’t even fit a beehive. Said hives, when extracted from the cartons, were found to be packed with even more stuff.

Because with bees, it’s all about numbers.

The basic unit of beekeeping, to the uninitiated driving by in air-conditioned comfort, is the beehive. That cute white box you see sitting out in the field. It just sits there all filled with bees and honey. The reality, to the bee-stung hobbyist sweating inside the white, level-four containment suit and funny hat, is that the basic unit is the cell. And in every hive, golly-bob-howdy, there are a shitload of cells.

The cell, of course, is one of those cute little wax hexagons so immediately associated with bees. The industrious insect uses these cells for the storage of food, i.e. honey and pollen, or for raising baby bees. Simple enough, but then you open the boxes and see what that means.

The hives I got for the micro-farm are special small-scale hives designed for weak-backed, suburban pussies, like me, who take up hobby-sized beekeeping. Each hive – in the setup I settled on – is built from five smaller boxes. The basic design dedicates three small boxes to use as the bees’ living area, and two small boxes to use for honey production.

Within each of those boxes are eight rectangular wooden frames known, coincidentally enough, as frames. Each of those frames has a piece of wax-coated, double-sided plastic mounted within it and each side of the plastic is stamped in the shape of hexagonal cells. Just to give the flying darts a clue where to start. In the case of my wussy-scale frames, this works out to 2,400 cells per side, 4,800 cells per frame, 38,400 cells per box, or 192,000 per hive. Sixty percent of those frames are given over for the bees to do with whatever they want and the rest will be filled with honey that I get to keep.

In theory.

Now, most of what the bees want to do is make more bees to fill up all those cells with honey which is no mean feat considering that each bee lives but a few weeks. In fact, each hive will have a population of about sixty thousand bees which, over the course of the season, needs to be replaced every six weeks or so. This means, that over the season from April through September, each hive will produce some two-hundred-forty thousand bees, or, to put things in scale, over six bees for each cell of honey I get to collect. For our two micro-hives this figures out to a workforce fifty percent larger than Microsoft’s, all of which dies off four times a year. Like I said, industrial.

But, hopefully, I’ll get to collect a bunch of honey. Once the cells are in the frames, and the frames are in the boxes and the boxes stacked into hives, then the bees go in and make the wax that makes the comb and fill it all with honey using up about ninety-nine percent of the space available in the box and yielding about 120 pounds of honey per hive. This 240 pound grand total is about 238 pounds more honey than we need.

About which more another time.

And so, as the season ends, the bee population falls to about twenty percent of its maximum and the hive goes into maintenance mode for the winter. Assuming it survives the cold season, the population starts to grow again in spring. The new bees start collecting nectar and process it down into honey. Then, when the blossoms of spring start to fade, the bees eat as much of the honey as they can and then swarm away, looking for a better place to live.

Because we don’t really “keep” bees. They really just let us provide a place for them to live. For a while. They retain all of their wildness; they still live as they have since before we, as a species, came onto the scene. The bees tolerate our little white boxes because they can make-do with them and because the hives are usually close to flowers. In return, they let us rob a little honey from them. 

Maybe.

So that’s square one. Starting there, with that hive just over there, I’m going to see how this bee thing goes. Hopefully I won’t screw things up for them too badly and hopefully they’ll reward my efforts with a little bit of honey. Maybe not the full 240 pounds. Maybe almost none. But whatever amount I get to rob, it will be sweet.