The stragglers from the new colony making their way into the hive

None of this has looked like Colony Collapse Disorder, but losing bees for any reason at all is a double whammy. Not only do you have to contemplate your failure every time you look at your empty hive, you have a persistent sense that, given the plight of the honeybee, you’ve let down the side. The success of our food supply depends on our ability to keep these guys alive.

No pressure, though.

I know that the trouble Kevin and I are having isn’t all our fault. We just happened to venture into beekeeping at a time when the odds are stacked against us. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and admit that there’s something about this whole Colony Collapse Disorder thing that irritates me. Yes, I have a bee in my bonnet, and you’re going to hear about it.

Here it is. The investigation into what’s causing CCD seems agenda-driven, and I get the feeling that beekeepers everywhere want it to be the evil chemical companies that are killing our bees.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got a whole skeleton’s worth of bones to pick with chemical companies, but it seems to me that the way CCD has presented all but rules out a chemical culprit. We’re losing bees all around the world. We losing migratory and stationary hives, from large commercial apiaries and small backyard amateurs. We’re losing them in warm climates and cold, in all different agricultural environments. The chance that every single hive is exposed to a particular chemical – like a neonicotinoid pesticide – is all but nonexistent.

I’m no virologist (and if you are, please weigh in!), but it seems to me that a pattern like that has virus, or maybe fungus, written all over it. It’s got to be something that can spread of its own accord, not something that humans must expose the bees to.

Nevertheless, when a study released a couple weeks ago purported to have recreated CCD by exposing hives to imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid pesticide used on corn, it was beamed around the world as the answer to the CCD puzzle. And not by some ranting blogger (um … not that there’s anything wrong with that), but by what is arguably our most august academic institution, Harvard University.

The Harvard press release, dated April 5, began: “The likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006 is imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides, according to a new study from the Harvard School of Public Health.” Case closed! On to the next pressing public health issue!

The study in question was of twenty hives – five hives at each of four different sites. Each site had hives fed high-fructose corn syrup spiked with varying levels of imidicloprid, ranging from none (the control hive) to a lot. At the 23-week mark, 15 of the 16 spiked hives were dead, with the most heavily spiked dying first. The researchers report that the deaths looked like CCD, with empty hives and only a few dead bee bodies.

There are a number of problems with the study, including the short duration, the questionable resemblance of the deaths to CCD, and the fact that, according to a local beekeeper who attended the meeting where the study was discussed, two of the four control hives also died. But I want to focus on its main problem: It posits, as the near-definitive answer to one of the most intractable, complicated problems of modern agriculture, the simple solution of one culprit chemical.

The researchers focused on imidacloprid because it’s used on corn, and the authors claim that traces of the pesticide are found in corn syrup, so bees that live out there lives nowhere near a cornfield are exposed to it by their keepers, who unwittingly feed it to them.

There are a couple problems with this theory. First is that there’s no hard proof that there’s any imidacloprid in corn syrup, let alone at levels the experimenters fed their bees. Corn syrup, it seems, is too viscous to be tested; it gums up the equipment. The manufacturer, Bayer, points out that their product is used on less than one percent of corn, and the levels the researchers used don’t replicate real-world conditions. (Of course, there are other pesticides in the same class, all of which act on the central nervous system of insects, and those may act in a similar way. Or they may not.)

But the second problem is the real doozy. May I have a show of hands of apiarists who have lost hives to CCD despite never having fed them a drop of corn syrup? There, I thought so. If imidacloprid were the answer, it would mean that a hive that never came near the stuff (or a close chemical relative), would simply not die of CCD. And that just can’t be true.

I do not understand how smart, well-intentioned people can put their imprimatur on a hypothesis that is so spectacularly improbable.

As for what really does cause CCD, I think we beekeepers need to turn our focus inward. While it’s certainly possible that pesticides play a role, my suspicion is that the real source of the problem is the apian monoculture. We started breeding bees in earnest – and learned how to do artificial insemination (the imagining of which boggles the mind) – only in the last half-century or so. In that time, we’ve been focused primarily on docility and honey production, and disease- and parasite- resistance have not been front and center.

But the real problem is that only a handful of breeders have been supplying bees to vast numbers of beekeepers, and we have limited the gene pool and bred out hybrid vigor. We have millions of hives that aren’t as robust as they should be, all susceptible to the same organisms. Throw varroa into the mix, add a few pesticides (no, I don’t absolve them completely) to compromise the bees in yet another way, and you’ve got a situation just right for an opportunistic virus, fungus, or bacterium – or a combination of them.

It’s not always Monsanto.

We’ve created, if not a monster, a situation in which a monster is thriving. And my theory (which is mine) is that we can slowly reverse the process by doing exactly what the beekeepers here on Cape Cod are doing, and what I understand many others are doing across the country – breeding local queens, deliberately introducing varied genes, focusing on pest- and disease-resistance.

I’d like to try some of that myself, but first we have to manage to keep a hive alive for more than a few months.  To that end, we installed a new colony this past weekend.  Wish us luck.

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But the bees are defeating us.

How is it that I can’t manage to provide a hospitable home for an insect that, left to its own devices, lives comfortably in a hollow tree?

Our beekeeping began last spring. Over the previous winter, we attended Bee School, the beginner’s course offered by the Barnstable County Beekeepers’ Association, and it prepared us to order our equipment and know what to do with it when it came.

We got two standard-issue Langstroth hives, and packages of bees to put in them. All went well through summer and fall. There was no extra honey to harvest, but that’s often the case in the first year. We went into the fall cautiously optimistic.

In February we still had bees, but by April they were all dead. What happened? Hard to know for sure. Our best guess is that they broke cluster with a spell of warm weather, and then froze to death when it got cold again. I never would have expected that insects could make me sad, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I grieved for my bees.

Kevin and I talked about getting new packages this spring, but we decided against it. We didn’t know what had gone wrong with the others, and it seemed too much like that adage about doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Luckily, I was on the receiving end of some extreme apian generosity, and a local beekeeper who removes hives from houses gave me not one, but two hives that came out of someone’s eaves.

It was late in the season by the time I got them. The first one came in mid-August, and the second not until a month later. I knew that the chances of successful overwintering were slim for colonies that had such a limited time to establish themselves before the cold set in. But the bees were homeless, and I had homes and a score to settle, so I took them and did my best.

The second hive of the season, before it all went to hell

I was lucky in that I wasn’t flying blind. My friend Claire, who is an experienced and accomplished beekeeper, stopped by regularly to help me assess the hives and solve the problems.

And there were problems. The first queen wasn’t laying, so we replaced her with one of the queens Claire reared. There wasn’t enough brood, so she brought over a full frame. The second hive just wasn’t going to get big enough to reach critical mass, so we killed that queen and combined the two hives.

That was about a month ago, and it was with some satisfaction that I added frames of bees and stores from the second hive to the first. I had one deep that was chock-full of bees, brood, and honey. I had a local queen. I laid pieces of fondant over the tops of the frames, and left the hive to its business.

I opened it over the weekend, and it was almost empty. The queen was there, the stores were there, but there was only a handful of workers. I almost wept.

Claire came over this afternoon to take a look, but she can’t tell what happened. Nobody can. There are some dead bees on the bottom board, but not nearly enough to explain the population decrease; the bees seem to have simply left. Best guess is that there was rampant varroa in the second hive, and when we added the frames to the first hives the bees absconded. But that’s just a guess.

When you open a hive and all is not well, there are just so many things to feel bad about. You feel bad for the bees, who must be confused and unhappy (to the extent that an insect can be). You feel bad because you’ve been an inadequate steward – what didn’t you do? You feel bad because honeybees are in trouble, and you’ve let down the side. It is heartbreaking.

I was almost ready to throw in the towel on beekeeping, but Claire has been so encouraging and helpful that she’s made me want to stick with it. I know our hive won’t make it through the winter, but I’ll try again in the spring

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Brian, the bringer of bees

As astute commenter Kat noted when we got the bees, there’s an expression that goes, “A swarm in July isn’t worth a fly.” The later in the year you get a colony, the harder it is to coax it through to spring. It needs enough time to build up sufficient honey stores and a critical mass of bees. An August colony is an iffy proposition.

So when the phone rang yesterday morning and Brian, the beekeeper who’d taken me on the job to get the August bees, told me he had another colony, this one from a house in Brewster, I wasn’t sure what to say.

My first impulse was, of course, to tell him to bring ‘em on over. I’ve got an empty hive ready to go. But if an August colony is iffy, what hope is there for a September colony? Would housing them and feeding them be an exercise in frustration and a waste of sugar?

But there’s really only one possible answer when someone calls and offers you bees: Yes, please.

Brian came over with two vacuum canisters full of bees and a container of comb. The comb had very little honey but quite a lot of brood. We dumped the bees into a hive box with five frames of empty comb from my old colonies, and filled five more frames with the new bees’ own comb.

The colony had clearly come from a beekeeper’s hive; the queen was marked with a blue dot. Although I got the colony yesterday, it probably swarmed earlier than my August hive; the bees had been in the Brewster house for some time. The brood pattern looked good, there were lots of larvae, and there was reason to hope the queen was strong and active.

Wedging brood comb into a hive frame

As I looked at the frames of comb, and helped Brian put the bees in the hive, a funny thing happened. I realized I wasn’t completely at sea anymore. I had some idea what I was looking for when I looked at comb. I had a plan for this hive, which included getting it through the winter if it looked strong, or using it for spare parts for the other hive if it looked weak. I was beginning to feel comfortable with my bees.

I’ve talked before about how much I enjoy the steep part of the learning curve. The step from knowing nothing to knowing something is remarkable; it opens up a brand new subject. The steps after that, from knowing something to knowing something more, can never be quite as compelling.

It’ll be a long time before I’ll be classified as ‘expert’ at any of the things we do, and I wouldn’t even hold my breath for ‘competent.’ But ‘not clueless’ is a surprisingly satisfying start.

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The queen is the hive. Her eggs populate it. Her pheromones suffuse it. Worker bees attend to her every want, and beekeepers watch to make sure she’s healthy and prolific. When you spot her, and take her between thumb and forefinger, you’ve got the hive’s future in your hands.

Which is why it feels so wrong to squash her.

Of course, it didn’t quite go down like that.

Back in August, thanks to the kindness of strangers, I got to help a beekeeper remove a hive from the soffit of a house, and go home with the bees. It was a small hive, and I got the equivalent of one full frame of comb, with some brood but not a lot. I bulked it up with a couple frames of honey and some drawn-out comb, set up a feeder pail of sugar syrup, and hoped for the best.

I’ve opened the hive twice since then, and been disappointed to find a colony that was holding on, but not thriving. There was capped brood, there were eggs and larvae, but there wasn’t enough of anything. The queen was there – I saw her each time – but she didn’t seem to be up to snuff.

I’d kept Claire Desilets, one of the veteran beekeepers who run the Barnstable County Beekeeper’s Association, apprised of my progress, and she volunteered to stop by and look at the hive. She even brought a frame of brood and nurse bees to fortify my hive.

Claire, with the verdict on our hive

Claire is possessed of a contagious enthusiasm for bees. You can’t spend any time in her company and not want a hive of your own. She knows all about both the theory and practice of beekeeping, but she talks of the wonder of her successes and frustration of her failures in such a way that you forget just how much more she knows than you do and find yourself simply talking about bees.

Claire and her husband, Paul, have helped Kevin and me all along. They’ve been down to see our hives, they’ve answered questions by e-mail, they’ve done everything they can to help us succeed. Last year, we thwarted their best efforts and lost both our hives. (To freezing, we think.) This year, we’re going to try to get our one hive alive to see the spring.

Just to make it harder, we’re starting with a weak hive. When Claire came to open it with me today, she confirmed what I’d feared – our queen is old, insufficiently mated, lazy, or all three. As we looked at the one frame of brood, Claire said she happened to have one queen left from her queen-rearing program. She’d been saving it, she said, for an emergency. We qualified.

We’d have to kill the queen, wait 24 hours, and then introduce the new queen. Claire spotted her – the one advantage of a small hive is that it’s easy to find the queen – and I picked her up on the corner of my hive tool.

What I should have done was crush her between my fingers. I suppose it was squeamishness that made me want to step on her instead. I put a finger over the top of her, and transferred her, on the hive tool, to the ground. Where, naturally, she flew away.

When you’re trying to kill a queen, this is exactly what you don’t want to do. You need to kill her definitively. Luckily, Claire found her wandering around under a nearby leaf, and I did kill her definitively.

After taking heroic measures to keep bees alive, it feels like a violation of the natural order of things to deliberately kill their queen.

Tomorrow, the new queen arrives. We’ll put her in a separate box with some of her own bees, and put that box over the now queenless hive, with one sheet of newspaper in between. With luck, by the time the queenless bees eat through the newspaper, the new queen’s pheromones will have won their allegiance. Then she’ll start laying like gangbusters to get the hive up to critical mass before the cold weather sets in.

If she doesn’t, I’m hoping our bees will tell her what happened to the last queen who didn’t produce. I hear regicide comes easier, the second time around.

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What is it about bumper stickers? There have been political candidates I’ve supported enthusiastically, there have been causes I’ve believed to be important, and there have even been slogans I thought were pretty clever, but I’ve never wanted to put a sticker on my car.

It’s not because I have a practical objection, like residual glue on the paint, or traffic accidents caused by slow readers. I think I just divide the world into two kinds of people – the bumper sticker kind, and the no bumper sticker kind – and I’m the latter.

As stupid an idea as this is, it’s deeply enough entrenched that, when I think something on a bumper sticker is smart or funny or insightful, it feels like an illicit pleasure. It’s like eating the Doritos with the orange dust on them. I love those, but I know I’m supposed to be a better person.

Still, there are some excellent bumper stickers out there in the world. “Dyslexics of the world, untie!” “Support a lawyer. Become a doctor.” “Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.”

It was probably back in the 80s that I first saw “Mean people suck.” And, while it’s not particularly clever or funny, I thought it was a pithy expression of a fundamental human truth. Mean people do definitely suck.

Niceness sounds like such an insipid virtue. Nice is how we describe someone when we can’t say he’s smart or interesting or funny. But if I had to rank virtues in order of importance, I do believe nice would be number two, right after honorable.

It’s because of nice that I have new bees.

New bees!

Those of you who visit here regularly know that Kevin and I lost both of our hives over the winter. We thought they were going to make it when we saw them flying during a warm spell in February, but by April they were dead.

Losing a bee hive is remarkably demoralizing. When you open it up and find a pile of dead on the bottom board, there’s not just sorrow at the death of so many living creatures, compounded by the fact that it’s probably your own fault. There’s also the sense that you’ve let down your side. With bees in such big trouble, I think every backyard beekeeper feels like he’s part of a bigger effort to keep the species vibrant and robust.

I cleaned out the hives and froze any frames that showed signs of small hive beetle, which we’d had trouble with. I stored them, some with capped honey, in plastic boxes in the basement, against the day we’d have new bees.

We opted against buying a new colony this year, partly because of the expense, and partly because doing the same thing we did last year felt like an effort doomed to fail. Lots of our beekeeping neighbors are having trouble keeping colonies shipped from Georgia and Florida alive through the winter. And if people with more skill and experience are struggling, what hope is there for us?

I had volunteered my services to a couple of the local beekeepers who remove bees from places they’re not supposed to be (like the walls of houses), both because I thought I’d learn a lot about bees and because I might, at some point, be able to take one of the colonies home.

The nice began when one of those local beekeepers, Andy Morris, took me up on it. He was scheduled to remove a hive from a soffit on a house on the water in Cotuit, and told me I was welcome to the bees if I’d give him a hand. At the last minute, though, Andy couldn’t do the job, and he passed it on to another beekeeper, Brian O’Donnell.

Brian O’Donnell didn’t know me from Adam, but he called me to say that he’d be happy to have me along, and that I was welcome to the bees. A total stranger, willing to show me how to remove a hive and let me keep the colony.

Brian knew perfectly well I wouldn’t be terribly useful. He had his son, Colin, a skilled carpenter, to provide the real assistance. All I could do was plug things in, hand tools up the ladders, and tie back the bushes that kept getting in the way. And that’s what I did, while Brian and Colin showed me exactly how you go about finding and removing a bee hive.

And then there was Charles, who owned the house. It’s a beautiful house, on the top of a hill overlooking Cotuit Bay. It was built 150 years ago (there’s an ‘1863’ on the chimney), and Charles had it renovated, top to bottom, when he bought it. Yet he didn’t wince when Colin took an oscillating saw to the tongue-in-groove beadboard on the underside of the soffit. He never said, “Be careful with my house.” He was sorry, he said, to have to displace the bees. “Could I just install some glass and keep it as an observation hive?” he asked. He was nice. He was very nice.

The house with the bees

Brian and Colin opened up the soffit, and there was the hive.

The hive

It was small, with only about five pieces of comb attached to the wall. I handed Brian his Bee Vac (a Shop Vac modified to suction up the bees gently enough that most of them survive the trauma), and he vacuumed up all the bees he could see. One by one, he took out the pieces of comb, sucked up any bees, and handed the comb down to me.

Brian, vacuuming bees

I had rigged a few hive frames with a kind of net of fishing line so I could put comb in them, and I arranged the pieces in two of them. Rubber bands held the comb in place so I could put them vertically in the hive.

On the first day, Brian left a piece of comb in the hive so foraging bees would have a place to come back to as they straggled back. The next day, he’d go back for the rest of the hive, take out the last piece of comb, and close up the hole.

Brian came over to our house, and helped me figure out how to configure the hive for the new bees – how many frames, how much honey, how much drawn-out comb. Once I’d put it together, he took the canister out of his Bee Vac and dumped the bees right in. I gave them a bucket of sugar syrup, so they’d have something to get started with while they found new sources of pollen and nectar, and we closed up the hive.

Fitting comb into a frame

On the second day on the job, I was all but useless. Brian vacuumed the remaining bees, applied a clear lacquer where the hive had been, and filled the hole with insulation. Colin put the soffit back, and touched up the seams and nicks. Charles told Colin how good his work looked, and wished me luck with the bees. I untied the bushes, basking in the good will.

When Brian added the stragglers to my hive, he pulled out a couple of frames to see if he could spot the queen. If we hadn’t gotten her, or she had died in the process, I’d have to requeen in short order. But he found her on the second frame he checked.

Our new hive is small, and the queen will have to start laying on all cylinders if she’s going to build up a population big enough to get through the winter. We’ll give her at least a week, undisturbed, to get acclimated, and Kevin and I will check on her progress once she’s had a chance to settle in. Claire and Paul Desilets, from the Barnstable County Beekeepers’ Association, are, as always, making themselves available to answer questions and help us manage the hive.

I’m surprised at how happy it makes me to see bees flying again. The hive is close to the driveway, and I stop and watch every time I go by in the car. I’m willing them to be happy, to find food, to survive. I’m pulling for them.

It feels squishy and undisciplined to be so taken with niceness. As good a case as I think can be made for it, nice still sounds insipid. But there’s nothing edgy, nothing sophisticated, nothing intellectual in my appreciation for all the people who helped us get new bees, and continue to help us manage them. It’s warm and it’s fuzzy, and there’s no way around it.

So, if you see a beat-up green pick-up with a “Mean People Suck” bumper sticker on it, wave, will you?

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It’s not because bees thrive here, or because we’re in particular need of pollination. It’s because you can learn about beekeeping from the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, a group of insanely committed volunteers who are very generous with their time and expertise.

Paul, Claire, and a frame of Big Bee

A couple weeks back, I took a look in our hives and didn’t like what I saw. There were bees in both – just a few in Big Bee, a few more in Little Bee – but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of brood, and a lot of the cells were wet and empty.

I e-mailed Claire and Paul Desilets, club veterans who have been keeping bees on the Cape for two decades, to ask about the wet cells and lack of activity. Claire offered to swing by and take a look at the hives one day when the weather was good.

That was yesterday. They came over in the early afternoon, and we suited up. We opened Big Bee, the weaker hive, first.

The news wasn’t good. There were a few bees, and the queen was still alive, but there was no viable brood. Claire found a patch of dead brood, but the queen had clearly stopped laying, in the absence of a critical mass of bees to tend the eggs. We took both deeps off the bottom board, and found a huge pile of dead bees.

What happened? No way to know. It didn’t seem to be starvation, as they had plenty of honey stores and there were still fragments of the fondant we fed them over the winter sitting on top of the frames. Claire said it could have been that they broke cluster when weather warmed, and then didn’t re-cluster when it got cold again.

The heartbreaking remains of Big Bee

Big Bee, I’m sorry to report, is doomed.

Little Bee has a slim chance. We found more bees, and some brood, in that hive, but it wasn’t nearly as robust as it should have been. Compounding its problems is the probability that its queen is weak – last year, Big Bee was the strong hive and Little Bee didn’t even manage to draw out all its comb.

We’re going to let Little Bee take its chances. But what to do about Big Bee? The club ordered some nucs (mini hives of four frames, complete with laying queen), and we could buy one of them for $85. Or we could hope for a swarm.

Every year, people find swarming bees where they’re not wanted – in the eaves of houses, the parking lots of restaurants, the trees in parks – and call the few people who specialize in swarm removal to come get them.

I’ve never dealt with a swarm, but people who have say it’s pretty straightforward. You shake the swarm into a receptacle, make sure you have the queen, pop a lid on it, and Bob’s your uncle. Then some lucky beekeeper gets a swarm delivery. I have officially volunteered to be Swarm Removal Assistant, both so I can see how its done and so I can get on the list of hopeful recipients.

The only upside to all this is that there is some honey to be harvested from Big Bee. We’ll leave some, in case we get new inhabitants, but we’ll be able to take a couple of frames’ worth.

The state of the hives, in short, leaves much to be desired.

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It’s important to note, as I rant about the inadequacies of the most popular beehive in the world, that Kevin and I are only one-season beekeepers, and we haven’t harvested one drop of our own honey. When we open our hives and look at the frames, we need help from our friends Claire and Paul, of the Barnstable County Beekeepers’ Association, to make sense of what’s going on with our colonies. We are not experts.

One of our hives -- Big Bee -- still surviving as of this week

And the Langstroth hive is the industry standard. It’s those boxes you see in fields across the country, come pollinating time. I have no idea how many are in use, but it must be in the bazillions. So just where do I get off complaining?

My beef is not with the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, L.L to his friends. As far as I can tell, he was an entomological genius. Somehow, between writing sermons and ministering to the needs of his flock, he found time to make observations about bees that helped make large-scale beekeeping viable. The discovery that bees fill a space that’s a quarter-inch or less with propolis, but a space three-eighths of an inch or more with comb revolutionized the keeping of bees.

That was in 1851. One hundred and sixty years ago!

It is a testament to the importance of Langstroth’s discoveries that his hive design is still in use. In fact, his book, Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-bee, is still in print. As someone who can’t seem to keep a book in print for more than about a year, I very much respect that accomplishment. (I think Langstroth would be gratified to know that his text is available as an e-book from Project Gutenberg, and downloadable.)

But still, the hive needs a makeover.

My first inkling of this came at this time last year, when we were assembling the two Langstroth hives that now stand on our property. That meant turning almost 1000 pieces of board, frame, foundation, and pins into two bee-habitable boxes. It was a mind-numbing job.

We had to get it done quickly, though, because we had to paint the hives. They needed paint in order to withstand the elements, but we had to let them sit outside, painted, until the smell dissipated because bees hate paint.

Then we just had to cross our fingers, because if a disease like American foulbrood happens to infect your hive, you have to burn it to cinders.

And that is where my litany of what’s wrong with the Langstroth hive begins. It’s machined in a zillion parts, many of which are ill-fitting. It has to be painted in order to survive outdoors. It’s made of a material hospitable to certain pests, and that must be destroyed in the event of infestation.

Not to mention that it’s made of modular boxes that stack, and lifiting the top one off to get to the bottom one is both disruptive to the bees and, since a full chamber can weight 90 pounds, heavy work. It’s also not cool enough in the summer, or warm enough in the winter.

Besides that, at about $200., a Langstroth hive is expensive.

To hell with the better mousetrap. We need a better beehive.

There are alternatives. I’ve been following along as Paula, of Weeding for Godot, builds a top-bar hive from scratch, and she seems to be doing it in about the same time that it took us to merely assemble ours. She’s making it out of wood, so she’ll still have the paint and pest issues, but at least she’s doing it on the cheap.

I’ve read about both successes and failures with top-bar hives – a simple hive with only one chamber and foundationless frames – and I don’t know enough about them to have an opinion. The kind of better beehive I’m looking for, though, is mass-produced and weather-resistant.

There are a couple of companies making beehives out of plastic, and that, I think, is the wave of the future. In particular, the good folks at Omlet, a British company that brought you the Eglu chicken coop, sell a hive called the Beehaus. It’s made of plastic, it houses the bees on one level, and comes at least partially assembled.

Too bad it’s $765.

There’s also an Australian company, Bindaree, that sells plastic hives, which look like standard-issue Langstroth, but in high-density structured foam polypropylene. Also assembled. Also expensive, though not quite so very.

Here’s my question – where’s Little Tikes when you need them? Somehow, they seem to make molded plastic boxes of all shapes and sizes, and incorporate them into products that don’t break the bank. It seems to me that the Turtle Sandbox, at $34.99, could be retrofitted to be a beehive without much trouble.

Sandbox, $35.

Beehaus, $765.

I know that bees are finicky about plastics, and some materials might have your colony abandoning your hive for the nearest hollow tree, but the fact that Omlet and Bindaree have found plastics that work indicates that it can’t be that hard.

Any plastics specialists out there? Want to work with me to develop a better beehive? I think it’s a money-maker, but that’s not what I’m in it for. I want a book that stays in print for 160 years.

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It started just after midnight, when Kevin and I were woken up by the sound of something either falling on or falling off our house.

The latter, it turned out to be. The wind, which hadn’t been more than breezy when we went to bed, had started to blow alarmingly hard. The trees were swaying and creaking, and anything that could flap, whip, or bend was doing just that. The clunk-clunk-clunk we’d heard on the roof turned out to be the varmint-guard on the chimney of our oil burner, which had been blown loose.

We put it in the basement for safe keeping and went back to bed, but it was windy enough that we couldn’t help thinking about just how many trees were in striking distance of the house.

It was a restless night, but there was no further mishap. Even so, we didn’t sleep all that much, and were up at 6:30, checking the tip-ups. We had three flags up, but it was wind, and not trout, that did it.

And then a funny thing happened. The temperature started to go up. I can’t say it actually got warm. We only made it to the low forties, but the sun was out, the ice was melting, and it was the first day in a long time I could imagine warmth in my near future.

We let the chickens out, and they pecked at what little greenery they could find poking through the drooping piles of snow. The bees were flying, and we opened the hives and gave them fondant to help them through the rest of the winter. We walked the property to check for damage from the windstorm.

It felt better than forty-three degrees had any right to feel. I was outside with Kevin, watching the chickens stretch their wings and the bees take their cleansing flights. We watered the plants in the hoophouse, and sat down by the water for a while even though we weren’t really expecting a trout. Kevin fixed the chimney. I chipped some of the melting ice off the driveway. Even the cat ventured out.

I know it’s only the beginning of February, and we’ve got a long way to go before spring, but today was the first indication that there would, some day, be a spring. We were outside voluntarily, feeling the sun penetrate through winter layers, watching the ground come up through the ice.

It was a good day, today was.

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Not that we’re having a drought. It’s just that we had four weeks of almost rain-free weather. From the last week in July to the last week in August, we had a little over half an inch of rain, and our garden felt it. We watered almost daily, but it’s just not the same. A few things died, and a lot more failed to thrive.

A frame of Big Bee. The white in the corner is honey.

Worse, though, was the toll it took on the bees. We got an e-mail from the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association: STARVATION ALERT! There’s been such a paltry supply of nectar this summer that some hives in our area have consumed all their honey stores, evicted all their drones, and stopped producing brood.

It’s unfortunate that the weather that’s ideal for humans is distinctly sub-optimal for crops and bees. We’ve had warmth, sun, and low humidity for long stretches this summer, and it’s been a pleasant change from last summer, which was unrelentingly cold and wet.

This week, the skies opened up. In three days, we got over two inches of rain. That was four days ago, and already we can see the benefit. The garden is finally popping, with squash growing up the woodpile and a tomato plant topping Kevin’s most optimistic trellising.

Six inches in diameter!

There’s grass coming up, which makes the chickens happy enough so we hope they’ll stop scratching up the mulch. The bees are coming in with loads of pollen on their back legs. And the mushroom logs, which had been dormant for two months, delivered a couple of shiitakes the size of dessert plates.

I think we can flush the toilet now.

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We’re making a similar deal with our turkeys, only without the egg part. It would be the same with any other animal we raise for food. We provide food, shelter, and, we hope, some modicum of happiness. They take advantage of these amenities, and then ultimately give us back the life we gave them in the first place, sometimes providing eggs or milk along the way.

Big Bee, trying to stay cool

The animals, though, have no say in the matter. If they don’t like the deal, there’s not much they can do. It’s like one of those elections in totalitarian countries – we’re the only choice they have. They can’t really make a break for it, since they’re poorly equipped for life in the wild, and when the time comes for making the ultimate sacrifice, there’s no negotiating. There’s no appeal to a civil court system or board of arbitration. However good a deal it is, it’s a deal we enforce by fiat, despotically.

Totalitarian, indeed.

Bees, though, are different. They can survive perfectly well without our intervention. In fact, if it turns out that the captive breeding of bees (which has only happened in the last fifty-some years), has some role in colony collapse disorder, we will be able to say that they survived much better without us. There’s nothing we do for bees that they can’t do for themselves.

They can also take off, and head from greener pastures, any time they feel like it. Successful beekeeping is all about providing a more hospitable home than your bees could find in a hollow tree. They need to decide to stay.

It’s lucky, then, that they don’t know what those two little boxes on top of their hive are for.

A hive frame. The white cells on top are honey. The darker cells below are brood. The fuzzy spot is on the camera lens.

One of our hives, Big Bee, is doing so well that we added two honey supers a couple of days ago. (Little Bee seems to be fine, but it’s a bit behind.) We’d added the second hive body about a few weeks before, and when we checked it last week the frames were almost all drawn out with comb, and the center seven or eight were quite full with brood and capped honey.

That’s the point at which you’re supposed to give them a new area in which to store their honey, and the two shallow boxes on top of the hive serve that purpose. The bees naturally fill the upper combs with honey and the lower combs with brood, so we can expect that the two honey supers will have almost nothing but honey in them.

Better than a hollow tree, we hope

Many beekeepers use a queen excluder – a screen that workers fit through but the queen doesn’t – between the top hive body and the bottom super to make sure no eggs are laid upstairs. Our local veteran beekeepers work successfully without one, though, so that’s the route we’re going.

Because there aren’t many plants that bloom in July, it’s late for optimal honey flow. We’re not sure how long it’ll take the bees to fill out the supers, and we’re resisting the urge to check on them every few days.

Right now, I suspect the bees are thinking their accommodations are pretty luxurious. We’ve given them two completely empty boxes in which to store their honey – that’s like giving a packrat a shed. When we wait for them to fill those boxes and then take them away, though, I wouldn’t blame them for hightailing it to the nearest hollow tree.

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