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Should I keep bees?

Beekeeping goes in and out of popularity with the times. And if you haven’t noticed, right now beekeeping is the “in” thing to do. We are seeing the first major spike in hobby beekeeping since the 1970s when twentysomethings living in Volkswagen buses decided to save the planet by growing marijuana and keeping bees. Back then every hippie commune had a bee hive and a goat. At the time, my best friend and her husband even allowed the family goat to share their bed. (Okay, off topic but too weird not to mention.)

But then, as now, most people get in and out of beekeeping within a few years. I have no statistics on this but I hear from thousands of beekeepers. People start, spend a lot of money on equipment, read everything in print, and go to endless meetings. Even so, that first colony usually dies—if not the first year, then the second. The would-be beekeeper then buys the second—or even third—colony, but when that too dies, he gives up and sells his equipment on eBay.

I’m not being cynical; I’m just telling you what I see, what I hear. Personally, I’m down to the fewest number of hives I’ve had for years. It’s too much work for me to maintain a lot of hives and the website too. Something had to go.

I’m also not saying this short cycle is a bad thing. If you keep bees for awhile, learn a lot, and enjoy the experience, it is okay to go on to something else. But for many, the process is expensive and frustrating.

Some of the issues to consider:

  • Expense: Beekeeping equipment is not cheap. Shipping is not cheap. Even bees are not cheap, nor are queens. “Complete hive kits” are notoriously incomplete. There is always one more thing to buy.
  • Time: The bees themselves don’t require a lot of time, but things must be done at the right time, so you end up scheduling other activities around the bees. Also, most new beekeepers spend vast amounts of time learning and reading. This is important, but it cuts into other things in your life . . . just saying.
  • Space: You need a good place for your hive. It may seem charming to keep your hive on your little back porch, but eventually you may want to use your porch without feeling intimidated. It surprises me how often beekeepers write to say they want to move their hive a little further from the house, or further from their property line, wood shed, dog house, clothesline or whatever. Don’t just set it somewhere—think about it first.
  • Neighbors and local ordinances: These two items account for many lost beekeepers. Even though it seems like everyone is into bees right now, as soon as you actually have them, every third person you meet will be “terribly allergic.” And the threat of swarming can keep you awake at night. “What if they swarm into the street and cause a traffic accident?” “What if the swarm scares the neighbor lady who then falls off a ladder and breaks her neck?” The fear of lawsuits can make you crazy.
  • Difficulty: In spite of all those book titles, beekeeping is not easy. Oh, it seems easy in the beginning. You install a package and the colony erupts with bees—more bees than you’ve ever seen in your life. They are so healthy and so robust that you sneak a taste of honey that first year—and maybe skip a few of the winter preparations. They are so strong there is no way they will die in the winter. Then, come March when you’re all excited about the spring flow, no bees. Keeping bees alive from year to year is not easy.
  • The learning curve: Many people who start to keep bees know nothing about them, but they willingly put their heart into learning. That is great, but to be a good beekeeper you also need to know about your local climate, weather patterns, and freeze dates. It helps to know your local plants, including honey plants, pollen plants, what bees visit and what they don’t. It helps to know about other critters too, about wasps and wax moths and hive beetles and Varroa mites and tracheal mites and viruses and microsporidians and bacteria and fungi. It helps to know basic biology, chemistry, and physics. It helps to know something about pesticides and the difference between pathogens, parasites, predators, and pests. A bee doesn’t live in a vacuum and neither can a beekeeper.
  • That guilty feeling: Many folks feel terrible when their colonies die. The thing is, you can do everything right and still lose them. Honey bees are assaulted from every direction by a host of enemies that we don’t fully understand. When you lose a colony, you can’t beat yourself up over it. It happens. You try to learn from it and then move forward.

In spite of how it sounds, I’m not trying to discourage you from keeping bees. Heck, no. What would I do for an audience? Seriously, though, think about some of the issues before you jump in. If you still want to try it, go for it. You will learn much, you will never forget time spent with the bees, and you will develop a new appreciation for the environment around you. Just remember that beekeeping is a roller coaster ride where you’re down as often as you’re up—and you can get a bit dizzy in the process.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

The bee project of Shangri-la

After two weeks in Thailand, I travelled to Xiānggélǐlā (Shangri-la), a city in the Yunnan province near the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. The settlement itself is ancient, but “Shangri-la” was born in 2001. Originally called Zhongdian, Shangri-la took on its new title in order to encourage tourism in the area. Several neighboring counties also vied for the name change, but in the end a team of “experts” used geological “evidence” to pinpoint Zhongdian as the precise location of the Valley of the Moon.

English author James Hilton described Shangri-la as a mystical Buddhist retreat in his 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, but the term is most often used to represent a state of mind, a quest, or paradise. In these next few posts, I will tell you about my seven weeks in paradise.

In October of 2011, I contacted a beekeeper running a development project through the Yunnan Mountain Heritage Center (http://www.ymhfshangrila.com/). I was planning a semester of travel and wondered if she had advice as to how I might find beekeeping opportunities abroad. She replied that, unfortunately, she would be in the United States for March and April, otherwise I could join her working bees in Yunnan. A few weeks later, she asked if I had solidified my travel plans. Since I was going to be in the area (the hemisphere), would I be interested in running the Bee Project for a while?

On March 16, I arrived in Planet China, took a bunk-bed bus from Kunming to Shangri-la, and spent the next several weeks feeding bees, cleaning sheds, and organizing elaborate games of Varroa mite freeze tag for the Center’s Environmental Champions club.

Having witnessed the calamity of the Apis cerana invasion in Australia, I was initially concerned with the prospect of using European honey bees to forward development in China. Though I had little experience using bees for development, introducing species seemed a shifty business. I was relieved when the project lead explained that the Bee Project was not responsible for introducing European honey bees. In fact, migratory beekeeping and Western methods have long been established in Yunnan. Instead, we experimented with overwintering methods in order to determine whether Western-style beekeeping is a viable enterprise for Tibetan farmers and communities.

This is only one part of the Bee Project in Shangri-la. Other aspects include encouraging traditional beekeeping methods, cultivating Apis cerana in log hives, and providing villages with an efficient way to harvest the honey. To learn more about the Bee Project and the Yunnan Mountain Heritage Center where I lived and worked, visit http://www.ymhfshangrila.com/Newsletter.html and stay tuned for an account of my own (mis)adventures.

Maggie
HoneyBeeSuite

Looking out my front door.
Looking out my front door.
The view from Shangri-la’s 100 Chicken Temple.
The view from Shangri-la’s 100 Chicken Temple.
Kitchen at the Yunnan Mountain Heritage Center, where I lived.
Kitchen at the Yunnan Mountain Heritage Center, where I lived.
A local temple.
A local temple.
Nearby mountain view at Bai-Shui-Tai.
Nearby mountain view at Bai-Shui-Tai.
Our neighborhood.
Our neighborhood.

The hum of the hive

After the fireworks last Wednesday evening, at nearly midnight, one of our friends pointed to the top-bar hive and asked if we keep a fan in there.

“No,” I said, confused. “No fan.”

“So what’s making all that noise?” he asked.

I realized then that he was asking about the hum coming from that very busy hive. In the past I have compared the sound to a refrigerator and to the purr of a cat. But here was a non-beekeeper comparing it to an electric fan. Fair enough.

“What are they doing?” he queried. “I thought bees would be quiet at night, sleeping or something.”

My husband explained how the bees must cool the hive and how they must remove most of the water from the nectar to make honey. He explained that they accomplish these tasks by setting up air currents with their wings, and how the collective sound of thousands of wings make the noise that sounds like an electric fan.

It also occurred to me that the fireworks—which I had been torching only 40 feet from the hive—probably agitated the bees as well, adding to the commotion within the hive.

This discussion of hive sounds reminded me that beekeeping engages all the senses, not just some. We see them, hear them, and smell them. We enjoy the taste of their honey and recoil from the burn of their stings. Very few activities engage us as completely—and as viscerally—as beekeeping.

The discussion also reminded me how beekeeping ties our thoughts into other aspects of the environment: The bees are noisy because it is hot, because they have lots of nectar to cure (which means lot of plants are blooming), and because humans are doing obnoxious things. Bees cause us to think about assaults on the environment, things like pesticides, climate change, urbanization—and even fireworks.

So here’s a thought: Instead of banning beekeeping from certain municipalities and neighborhoods, perhaps we should require beekeeping in public schools. If we added a year of beekeeping into the traditional curriculum of reading, writing, and ’rithmetic, we might produce youngsters (and eventually adults) with a better appreciation of the natural world and of the complex relationships that make the damage we do in one place show up so painfully in another.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Beekeepers come and go

Recently a friend pointed out that the popularity of beekeeping ebbs and flows in a big way. The fluctuation is caused not by commercial beekeepers but by hobbyists and side-liners who tend to segue in and out of the hobby with the fad of the day. The previous big surge in beekeeping occurred in the 1970s after books like Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé focused attention on our food supply, and legislation such as the Endangered Species Act highlighted problems with our environment.

Today’s surge in beekeepers can be almost directly linked to colony collapse disorder. CCD focused attention not only on honey bees, but on native pollinators and other food supply issues such as pesticides and industrial farming. I say “almost” because other food and environmental imperatives pre-dated colony collapse disorder, among them outbreaks of e-coli 0157:H7, mad-cow disease, and salmonella in eggs.

Nevertheless I agree with my friend that the popularity of beekeeping will peak, then die off as some new environmental issue snares public attention. Her point (I think) was that I should be prepared to have something else to write about and perhaps what I’m doing here is all for naught.

However, I don’t see it that way. I think Colony Collapse Disorder—whether it actually exists or not—has done enormous good because it captured the public’s attention and focused it on creatures that have gone largely unnoticed. People who knew nothing about pollination or crop production became aware of the interplay between humans, bugs, and the food on our tables. Others learned that there was something to be treasured about stinging insects . . . that not all that buzzes should be banned . . . and that life as we know it depends on bees. How can that be bad?

Colony collapse disorder served as a wake-up call, a warning that things are not right in the world of industrial farming. A huge influx of hobby beekeepers will not, by themselves, save the honey bee—but a surge of public awareness might. Groups all over the country are pouring money into pollination research, bee breeding programs, pesticide inquiries, and alternative farming practices. This is the type of action that may ultimately solve—or at least ameliorate—the pollination problem facing us today and in the future.

As for me? I’ll always have something to write about.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Thoughts for a winter day.
Thoughts for a winter day.

Why so many new beekeepers quit

Every so often I read that 80% of all new beekeepers quit within the first two years. I don’t know who came up with this number, nor do I know how accurate it is. But let’s assume for a moment that it is close to the truth. The question that comes to mind is, “Why?” Why do so many new beekeepers quit so soon?

In my opinion, there are several compelling reasons:

  • A colony has a life expectancy of about two years if not treated for mites. I’ve seen many beekeepers lose their hives to mites and then give up. Sometimes they don’t even realize that mites were the problem.
  • Similarly, a beekeeper may give up when he doesn’t harvest honey in the first year or two. This happens frequently and is discouraging.
  • Beekeeping is more difficult than people realize. I think this is especially true of people who remember their parents or grandparents keeping bees effortlessly. But beekeeping has become a lot more difficult, especially since the 1980’s introduction of Varroa mites.
  • Beekeeping is more expensive than they imagined. The basic kit and the first package of bees are manageable. But when you start adding in special equipment, sugar and other feeds, replacement queens and packages, medications or alternative mite controls, honey extracting equipment, storage space, over-wintering needs, and other extras, the dollars add up.
  • The time commitment is greater than expected. I agree with those who say that the total time commitment is not large, but what must be done must be done on time. Scheduling bee management around jobs and family can be tricky.
  • The learning curve is steep. Today, a successful beekeeper needs a little knowledge in a lot of areas. Some basic biology, entomology, botany, chemistry, and physics stirred together with a little carpentry and engineering are very helpful. For most of us this is a lot of learning and it seems never to end. At least for me, the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know.
  • Making a profit is nearly impossible, especially for the hobby beekeeper. Those going into it with the idea of making a little extra money will be disappointed because expenses are high and honey is cheap. Most hobbyists will be upside down for years.
  • For many beekeepers, the neighbors are an annoying issue. Too many complaints (or threats) can send a new beekeeper packing.

Having said that, would I discourage would-be beekeepers? Absolutely not. I think even those folks who try, then quit learn so much that the experience is life changing . . . or at least attitude changing.

Yesterday I was walking in the woods with puppy and husband. On a deeply forested section of trail we came across three women equestrians. We stepped aside and held the pup, allowing them to pass. They all talked nervously about the bees they had just seen. “Be careful!” they warned us. “Bees up ahead! Hundreds of them! Watch yourselves!”

I thought about that for a long time. A short stint of beekeeping—even just a few months—would have set those folks to rights. I know, I know . . . horses can be spooked by bees. True, but horses can also detect your fear, making the whole situation worse. Knowing more about the world around us is always an advantage . . . no matter how hard the struggle. Learning about bees is no exception.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com