Backyard Beginner Beekeeper, Part 1

The happiness of the bee
and the dolphin is to exist.
For man, it is to know that
and to wonder at it.
         -Jacques Yves Coustea

Well first off, who doesn't love Jacques Coustea? (for the younger crowd who might not know him, he was the oceanic 'Steve Irwin' of his time with a lot less dumb danger thrown in).

In addition to watching his television documentaries, my parents had this fantastic hardcover reference book set called The Ocean World of Jacques Coustea....I remember spending hours pouring over pictures and text in wonder of the amazing diversity of sea life (it was pretty exotic stuff for a land-locked Dakotan).

Anyhoo, I have to agree with him - I can't think of 2 animals that have brought more sense of wonder to me than the dolphin and the bee.  I've been lucky enough to kayak right next to curious dolphins on Florida family vacations, amazed at their playfulness, speed and curiosity. They have a well earned reputation for high intelligence and their capability for social learning.

But maybe less well recognized, so does the bee. And my luck has increased as I can now observe this up close, right in my own backyard.

Because I am officially a beekeeper.

Yikes! Two weeks ago, I picked up the 2 packages of bees I ordered back in February -  which are essentially wooden screened boxes each containing ~4,000 bees with a caged queen attached inside.   After installing, there are now 2 active hives buzzing away on the side of my house....no going back now.

Scary and fascinating at the same time with lots to learn.  Beekeeping appears to be one of those topics where you can never 'know enough'...perfect for perpetual curiosity cats like me.

Why go down this road? I guess part of it is to continue to bring a bit of the farm to our suburban life - keeping my kids close to nature and part of my quiet resistance to identifying as a big city girl when I still 'carry the prairie' in me.  The idea of our own fresh eggs, veggies, and honey reminds me to slow down and connect to our little slice of nature.

Our yard, thanks to a ton of work by hubby, has been beautifully planted with flowers, trees, and shrubs that bloom at various times for much of the year that should provide plenty of 'food' for the bees.  I'm also thinking my vegetable garden can only benefit from some better pollination.  So it seemed a natural progression after we committed to chickens a couple years back.

As a teenager in North Dakota, my sister's boyfriend's family had an apiary, and I remember a summer job working for them pulling heavy frames full of honey out of hive boxes to load into the centrifuge that would spin out the good stuff.  The family was one of many members of the co-op that produced Sue Bee Honey from the happy bees pollinating the abundant sunflower fields in the Dakotas.

Working in summer heat in just t-shirts and jeans, I don't remember wearing gloves (maybe we did?) but my recollection was that we only got stung if we accidentally pinched a bee as we picked up the frames.  Otherwise they just buzzed around or crawled harmlessly on us. That seemed like a good enough reason on the bee's part to sting so I guess I've never had a fear of bees (which seems a good first step toward beekeeping).

So those are the practical reasons. There's also the somewhat romantic ones too.  Most folks are aware that honeybee populations are declining worldwide.  It's not really clear what the exact reason is but maybe my hives will provide a little help to local pollination in my neighborhood?

And who doesn't like honey?  I admit to Pinteresty ideas about honey and beeswax to share. The general meeting of the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association I went to last night had someone showing us how to make spun honey, which I'm really interested in making myself....yum!

Once you start learning about bees, its hard not to get caught up. Take a few minutes now to share in a few factoids that will really give you a sense of wonder at bees' remarkable abilities. 

For a creature so small, their feats are enormous!

•  A typical hive will contain between 20,000 and 60,000 bees.
• 1/3 of the food we eat is the result of pollination by bees. We would not have the following with them: almonds, broccoli, asparagus, cantaloupes, cucumbers, pumpkins, blueberries, watermelons, apples, cranberries, and cherries.
• Other than primates, honey bees have the most complex symbolic language on Earth. The bee has a million neurons in a sesame seed sized brain that calculates foraging distances, figuring out the shortest route to the targeted flowers - a complex mathematical problem better suited to computers. 
• Bees communicate these complicated distances and angles to other bees by doing the 'waggle dance'.  Karl Ritter von Frisch won the Nobel prize for cracking the honeybees' communication code in 1973. Watch the video - you will be amazed.
• The queen can lays an average of 1500 eggs per day and determines whether they are female (worker bees) or male (drones).
• The bee has an incredibly acute sense of smell - they have actually been trained by scientists to detect and track down illegal drugs and explosives.
• And lastly (for the 10 year olds at heart), bees do not actually poop inside the hive except for the queen and that is cleaned up efficiently by worker bees. (You know you wondered.)

There is so much to learn and it's exciting to get started.  I like that I'll be able to learn as I go with this hobby, building knowledge over time and seasons which I hope to share.

Which brings me to doing something new here at the blog....a two-part post!

You just experienced Part 1.  I just wanted to capture some initial thoughts on this new adventure and share with you a few facts about what makes bees so amazing.

Part 2 will go into a more detail on how I got started and some of the basic issues involved in modern beekeeping.

Did you know you actually shake the bees into the hive to get started??? If you want to see that in action, make sure to continue onto Part 2!