Yas, Queens!

If you follow me on Twitter and Instagram, you know I raise bees. Or keep bees, rather. Whatever the verbiage is. I mean, they pretty much raise themselves, so I guess keep is more accurate. And the act of doing it is called “beekeeping,” which makes me a “beekeeper.” (I actually prefer the term apiarist, because there is a literary quality to the word. Like someone might decide to write a book about me one of these days.)

Anyway, I have bees.

I got the idea to do it because I garden and there is a dearth of pollinators here in our suburb of Atlanta, so I was hand-pollinating all my tomatoes and cucumbers and squash and pepper plants. I’d spend thirty minutes every morning with a battery-powered toothbrush (for the tomatoes), a blush brush (for the squash blossoms), and an eyeshadow brush for the peppers and cucumbers, doing the work of bees in my tiny raised bed garden in the backyard. I’d spend thirty more minutes every evening after work. It was very zen, don’t get me wrong, but it was also tedious.

Then I watched the movie Honeyland. If you haven’t seen it, you should, even if you have zero desire to be a beekeeper. It’s a really good movie.

It made me think I could get just one small hive of bees and have all the pollinators I would ever need for the garden. Still, I didn’t get serious about acquiring bees until COVID-19 shut the world down and I had a lot more time on my hands to research beekeeping. And there is a lot of information out there: books, online articles, YouTube videos. I buried myself in it all. And when I was sure I was ready to take the plunge, I drove an hour and a half north of Atlanta, to the foothills of the North Georgia mountains and deep into Trump country, to put a deposit down on a starter package of bees and a queen.

I bought the hive, a suit, a smoker, and all the tools I needed. Did I want a marked queen? Sure! I had no idea then what it meant, but it sounded important. Turns out, marking a queen makes it easier to spot her when you’re doing hive inspections and want to separate her from the worker bees. I’d already decided I would name her Esther.

I painted the hive pink and set it up in a corner of the yard that would become my bee yard. I was already scheming more hives and I hadn’t even picked this package up yet—that would be in March. They would call me and let me know when the bees would be ready to pick up. I wasn’t sure how I would make it to March, but I did, and rushed back to Gordon County to pick up my bees.

At that point, I was fearless, despite a childhood spent terrified of any insect that flew and stung. I remembered being stung and I remembered it hurt like hell, but there I was, not wearing a suit or gloves, carrying a wooden box filled with bees out to my Toyota 4-Runner. I loaded them in the back and jumped into the front for the hour and a half drive back home. Yeah, sure, a couple of them were outside the box, but I was fearless—until I hit standstill traffic in Marietta and was trapped in an SUV with three pounds of winter bees trapped inside a tiny pine box and looking for a way out.

Worst thirty minutes of my life, let me tell you, and I spent summers growing up in Alabama.

But I made it home and I got the bees installed in their hive and it was just as easy as all those books and articles and videos had made it out to be. They did basically raise themselves, I just had to make sure they had what they needed to thrive. Being suburban, that meant regular feedings of sugar water at first, until we were out of nectar and pollen dearth. (Dearth, in beekeeping, is when there aren’t many flowers or trees blooming and pollen levels are low. Sugar water gives the bees a source of food for themselves and the raw material to form honeycomb.)

I did everything right, and they were low maintenance. Then, in the fall, I had to get them ready to overwinter. That meant changing to a thicker sugar syrup before ultimately going to just granulated sugar (and supplemental pollen cakes, from time to time). And with our relatively temperate winters here in Georgia, I would not need to winterize (insulate) the hive. It did get down to 10 degrees a couple nights in January, so I just wrapped the hive in some old blankets and that did the trick. They lived. I was a success at beekeeping! And when the red maple started budding, I knew it was time to start the sugar water again.

As the hive grew, I added a honey super on top of the brood box. As a general rule, you never take honey from a colony the first year because they need to build up their own supply so they can survive the winter. I’d learned that from all those books and articles. But now that I’d seen Esther and the girls through their first year and gotten them through the winter, I could start planning for a honey harvest.

And that’s where things went wrong. I took too much and I think I took it too early in the season, although I did wait until the danger of a swarm was over. But by the time I was ready to pull honey, I’d added a second honey super and I think this was a no-no, because while the colony was large enough and strong enough to manage a brood box (where the queen stays and lays the eggs) and one honey super, adding the second honey super gave the bees too much space to patrol for pests (turns out there are quite a few bothersome pests when you have bees) and make honey. Then, when I harvested the honey from both supers and returned the empty frames to the hive, it further taxed their ability to maintain the hive, and that’s when things went south.

In late summer, after Labor Day, I did a hive inspection expecting to find more honey to harvest. I found maybe a half cup of honey and noticed erratic behavior in the bees. Like, at night, they’d be outside the hive and buzzing around our lights in the yard. Or sleeping on the side of the house. But I didn’t know enough then to know that both those things were signs of something worse, so when I did the hive inspection and found almost no honey from a hive that had been so strong, I started looking for other things.

First thing I noticed inside the hive was that the sweet smell of honey was gone, replaced by a sour smell. And there was honey dripping from the hive entrance. When I saw that, I knew what had happened: I had an infestation of small hive beetles. Then I panicked and tore the hive apart, sprayed everything with water, put everything back together and began a daily vigil. Morning, noon, and night I would check the hive activity for… something. I didn’t know what. Signs of healthy bee behavior, I guess.

It was too late, though. I’d already lost the queen and the remaining bees were kind of lost. They buzzed around the hive. They cleaned all the honey from the comb I spread on tarps in the bee yard, but without a queen, there was no real reason for them to do any of it. And as they died off, there was no queen laying more eggs for them to tend and no new bee babies being born until one day, I walked out into the bee yard and there was nothing. Just dead bees all over the place.

It fucking sucked, I’m not going to lie. Even my husband commented on how sad it was to go outside and not see and hear the bees buzzing around.

So, being the person I am, I drove to Chatsworth and put in an order for not one, not two, but three new queen packages. Yes, I would like them marked. And I bought the new hives—ten-frame hives this time. Esther’s (the pink one) was an eight-frame. I was going big this time, because I knew what not to do. And the first year would give me time to plan honey harvesting the second year. I’ll do it right this time. Like Hatidze said in Honeyland: “Don’t take too much. Leave some for the bees.”

I picked up the girls last Saturday. Esther the Second (because, of course), Dvora, and Rachel. They seem to be doing fine, but I have PTSD, I guess, because I’m constantly checking on them. They seem okay. They act okay. I sit in the bee yard and just listen to them, and they sound okay. Maybe they are okay. Maybe I’m not okay. But maybe I’ll get okay.