Adventures in Beekeeping
❝ I’ve always wanted to raise bees.❞
That offhand comment was all it took for my friend Pete to give me a beekeeping gift, complete with bee box and how-to books, two years ago. But Pete’s thoughtful present arrived a little late to order bees, so it sat on a shelf in the garage for a year.
Last spring my daughter told a beekeeper about my failure to launch. The next thing I knew, two enthusiastic beekeepers, Cesar Cerna and Carol Kremer, were buzzing around my Wisconsin yard, ready to get my hive off the ground. Beekeepers for seven years, they learned by attending workshops. Now they pay it forward and mentor newbies like me.
The first thing I needed was a complete bee box. I had only a 10-frame super (the structure to hold the bees), and I lacked other critical items such as inner and outer covers, a bottom and a stand. I also didn’t have a protective veil or gloves. Or bees. But Cesar and Carol helped me order everything I needed. Cesar also lent me a top for the box, and Carol offered her sugar water jar, to feed the bees until they got comfy in their new home and started foraging.
One thing I did have was the perfect sunny spot for the hive among the fruit trees and flowers in my large garden. Sheltered inside a fenced area, it’s also safe from strong winds and hungry animals.
I started my hive with a nucleus colony, which is fully established with a fertilized queen, larvae, combs and honey. The queen is larger than the others; her wings cover only two-thirds of her body. We located her nestled among the drones, which mate with the queen, and the worker bees, which guard the hive and collect nectar.
We set the five-frame nucleus colony inside the 10-frame super, added the lid, set out the sugar water and let the bees settle into their new home. After a week or two, Cesar and Carol came back to check on the queen. We needed to
make sure she hadn’t packed her bags instead of producing offspring. It didn’t take much searching to find white, ricelike eggs and healthy, pearly white larvae and pupae in capped cells. Things were going so well, I had to expand their home with another super to give the bees more space.
I was excited to find many of the bees visiting my flower beds. On hot days, I saw clusters near the hive entrance.
Cesar assured me this was normal behavior during hot weather. He said it was called bearding, which is when some worker bees exit the hive to keep things cooler inside. They fan their wings to move cooler air through the hive.
About two months in, it was time to add a half-super for the bees to store honey. Although the colony had been coming along nicely, we realized the hive was leaning to one side. The wooden stand was not holding up to outdoor conditions as well as we’d hoped. So Pete and I put a new one together, this time made of tough cement blocks so it would last.
It was a perfectly simple solution, but then we ran into a different problem: How to transfer the heavy bee- and honey-filled hive to its new stand. We definitely didn’t want to agitate the bees. But Cesar and Carol came to the rescue once again. We smoked the hive to keep the bees calm during the move. The smoke hinders their sense of smell, which bees use to communicate. Normally, if there’s a hive intruder, bees release an alarm pheromone to ready a group attack. If they can’t smell the pheromone, they stay calm.
Cesar was excited to share the hive progress with Pete, and he handed him a bee-filled frame after the bees were soothed. Pete hadn’t expected to be quite so involved with my beekeeping adventure!
Then it was time to hold the bee-filled super, which probably weighed more than 50 pounds. Pete later told me that he was so focused on the risk of an angry bee flying up his shorts that he didn’t even notice how heavy the super was. The good news is that none of us, including the bees, were harmed during the move.
Once everyone was settled in again, the super filled up fast, and I added a second one a month later. I left the honey for the bees the first year so they’d have plenty of food to get them through the winter, and added straw bales around the hive to keep them warm in chilly Wisconsin. They huddle inside to live off their honey stores until next spring, when the flowers bloom and the bees return to my backyard garden.