Tucking in the Bees

I love keeping bees because they are both industrious and exciting. Plus they are healthy.

Today, when my son came home from a weekend with the flu, I felt a sympathetic pang of nausea. But it was time to insulate the beehives, not baby myself. Out I tromped to the bee yard with a pile of Styrofoam insulation, tarpaper, lathe and a cordless drill. Briefly I considered donning my bee suit, then rejected the idea. It’s November: the bees would be in the hive, huddled around the queen to keep her at a balmy 90 degrees. They wouldn’t bother with me.

Have we gone over this? It’s actually controversial whether to insulate beehives. There are beekeepers who insist that it’s unnecessary. Don’t bees in the wild do just fine without manmade insulation, they argue? More beehives are done in by poor ventilation than cold, causing condensation to drip onto the bees and do them in. Both true, but if bees have to huddle in a tight ball to stay warm and protect their queen, they can’t even get to their store of food that surrounds them, only inches away. It’s a very sad sight to open a hive in spring and see plenty of honey and pollen surrounding a wad of dead bees.

My girlies are not going to suffer that fate, if I have anything to say about it! This year’s plan is to not only use insulation, but to then wrap the hives in tarpaper to maximize the sun’s warmth on the hives, so on sunny days, the hives will heat up enough so the girls can move around in the hive a bit.

I keep saying girls. That’s because at the end of summer, the drones (boys) are ejected from the hive. They eat too much, I guess, and it is time for a little triage. It’s a ruthless business to see a pile of boxy-bodied little boy bees outside the hive entrance, but the politics and intrigue in a beehive would make the court of Louis the 14^th look like a cub scout meeting.

I started on the back of the friendly, innocent Ufizzi hive. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a cloud of alarmed bees. What an exhilarating sprint we had across the field! How quickly I forgot my iffy stomach!

I ducked into the house for the suit, then went back to the bee yard to resume my tasks, making sure the two entrances were not blocked. Bees need to come out of the hive on warm winter days for “cleansing flights”. They don’t defecate for about a month, and then they Have To Go. If there’s no January thaw, the bees can get sick, because they won’t sully their hives if they can help it. They also use that warm spell to haul out their dead. Bees are very hygienic, besides being adorable, if somewhat misanthropic.

I now have nothing left to do but visit the hives from time to time over the winter, shovel a path to them and listen for the reassuring buzz that tells me they are weathering the winter. That winter buzz is a wonderful sound. It is the sound of hope, endurance, and spring.