Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [68]
And so when I finally screwed up the nerve to get bees, I followed Pellett’s advice and chose the most secluded location on our lot: smack up against our house, invisible from the street, sheltered by our majestic California buckeye tree. There I set up a pair of wooden boxes the same color as our house, for camouflage.
One spring day, shortly after we had acquired our chickens, I drove up to Sonoma County and picked up our bees. They came in two mesh-lined crates. The queens were confined to tiny cages affixed to the sides, each queen cage the size of a pack of Dentyne gum. Mark and I put on veiled hats and gloves and embarked on moving the bees from their temporary crates to their permanent home in the boxes. With a screwdriver, I removed a screw from each tiny queen cage and plugged up the hole with a miniature marshmallow. Over the course of a week, as the workers nibbled away at the marshmallow, they would gradually get to know the queen and by the time the marshmallow was gone and she was free, they would all be ready to welcome her to the colony. We rubber-banded each queen’s box to a frame within the hives, and poured the bees into the boxes. They gushed out in a vibrating mass, some of them moving straight into the boxes, some of them forming a cloud around us. It was exhilarating and alarming and as easy as that.
You can’t identify with a bee, or intuit what it needs, or hug it. Sometimes bees’ energy seems more electrical than biological and you have to learn about bees the way you have to learn physics or calculus. In high school, I was very bad at both. But I was not in high school anymore. I read my bee books and I read beekeeping websites and I liked to observe the bees who, on warm days, dive-bombed in and out of the hive, shooting toward the horizon like guided missiles. I sat outside and watched them come and go, their legs covered with bright orange pollen.
And every few weeks, for the first several months, I pulled out my hat and gloves and went to check inside the hives. I lifted the lid and pulled out the frames and found them loaded with eggs and larvae. Then more eggs, more larvae. Then the frames began to fill up rapidly with honey. What would it taste like? Because our bees lived beside that great, flowering buckeye tree, I Googled buckeye honey. I had heard of orange blossom honey and tupelo honey and eucalyptus honey, but never buckeye honey. We’d have our very own varietal!
There was a lot of literature about bees and buckeyes, but none of it was devoted to delicious honey. The native California buckeye turns out to be toxic to bees, who eat the pollen and feed it to their young, who grow up wingless. “Just make sure your colonies of bees are at least 3 miles away from any buckeye trees,” one California beekeeping site warned—one California beekeeping site I had somehow not been following.
For a while, the bees seemed fine living three feet from a poisonous tree. Then, in the late fall, I noticed a sharp decline in activity around the hives. A few weeks later, there was no activity whatsoever. I didn’t even put on gloves when I went out and lifted the lid off of the first hive, so certain was I of what it contained: nothing. As I had suspected, not a single bee flew up to greet me or sting me, not in the first hive, and not in the second. I tested the hive for American foulbrood, and it wasn’t that. It could have been varroa mites. And it could have been the buckeye. No one could tell me for sure.
Now that the bees didn’t need it, I could harvest all the honey, and there was a lot. Capped honeycomb is one of the most extraordinary objects in the natural world, on a par with a full-blown rose or a conch shell. The honey is sticky and liquid and yet immaculately suspended in wax hexagons. Man could not invent such an ingenious container; the best we can do is a