A Girlhoood in the Bee Yard

I hopped out of my dad’s truck. A stifling dread washed over me as I stepped into a vibrating cloud of honey bees. I knew it was an irrational fear—the bees were much too busy gathering and making liquid gold to be bothered by my presence. The possibility of a honey bee finding the rip in my jeans, or getting caught between my finger and a hive box, was the reason for my dread.

I forced a calm front, flinching inside as the buzzing volume swelled and enveloped us. Meanwhile, I asked myself why I asked to join my dad on another one of his bee trips.

Why did I race from the house to hop in when I heard the diesel engine roar to life after supper? Why did my ears perk up when I heard my dad tell my mom he was going to be getting up early to move some hives? Why did I keep insisting on joining him when, although only occasionally, my fears were realized?

Being around bees is like dealing with horses. It requires a quiet, calm spirit and attentive, fluid movements. Because beekeeping can also be a business, speed, efficiency, and productivity are also key. The two can be a unique balance of energy and tranquility. A balance that’s easy to get wrong.

One day my dad and I were moving some bees to a new location. In the groove of getting the job done, I became a bit over confident about my strength and instead of leaving it for my dad, I lifted a heavy box of bees off the truck. It was too heavy and, unable to follow through with a soft, mindful movement, I set it down roughly on the pallet. Alarmed, the bees boiled out of the box and, suddenly, I was wearing bees—and being stung through the material of my jeans. I knew flailing up and down would make the situation worse, so I brushed them off as softly and calmly as I could. Their stingers penetrated through my clothes and when I knelt down, one found its way into my skin.

Pa resumed the heavy lifting while I moved onto the next task and willed the pain to subside. My next job was to apply a bee parasite medication. The bees were not having it. My previous antics angered them and the smell of the medication on my ungloved hands and arms irritated them even more. I was stung again and again.

We quit early that day. As soon as I started sniffling in pain and frustration, pa sent me into the safety of the truck. On the drive home, I flicked bees off me. I felt something wiggling in my boot—and found two angry bees trying to sting me. Revengefully, I squished them, cringing at myself.

Pa tried to make conversation as I attempted to stop crying.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with them today,” he said.
I sniffled in response knowing it wasn’t the bees’ fault.
Pa continued, “So, you’re cured, right?”

I knew what he meant: cured from wanting to keep beekeeping. I couldn’t answer him because I wasn’t so sure I did want to keep helping him.

For the next two days, I could barely move my fingers. My hands were so thick and swollen I couldn’t make a fist, grip a steering wheel, or write. One hand was twice the size as normal and swelled all the way to my elbow. Horrified at my fat, itchy forearms, my high school classmates gasped, “What happened?”

“I am a beekeeper’s daughter!” I answered proudly.

Whether bee fever had replaced the fear in 2014, or in previous years—during one of the countless early spring, frog-song mornings while moving beehives into bridal-white cherry orchards, on a summer afternoon sweating over honey-heavy hives in the thick, strawberry-sweet air, or during cool cricket evenings breathing freshly cut grass and billowing pine smoke from the bee smoker—I do not know. I just know I had it bad.

Scents always evoke such strong feelings and memories for me, and there are many fragrances assooiated with the honey bee. The sweet smell of warm wax and honey, the light perfume from blooming trees, pungent bee smoker smoke, and a dozen other outdoor smells meld into a distinct scent that makes me feel intensely happy. I miss that familiar smell during the winter months. Opening the first hive in the spring and relishing the warm, fragrant air that wafts up from the alive and happy bee cluster inside is a joy. Spending days sun soaked and sticky is a summer trademark and something that always transports me back to my girlhood when my dad and I spent hours together with the bees.

As the summer days of my late teens wore on and the honey flowed in from flowery places, we’d pause every once in a while to soak in our surroundings and sneak a taste of the fresh, bright honey that coated our fingers and tools.

One afternoon, in between opening hives and pulling out buzzing frames of bees, my dad came beside me and said, “Yours…late birthday present.” In his hands lay a shiny new hive tool and as he replaced his tried, proven and propolis-caked tool in my hands with the new one, I felt like I had been accepted into beekeeperdom. Bees flew around us with an infectious, sun-infused energy. And I tested the weight of the clean, sharp tool in my hands like a grandfather might a new knife, pondering how far I’d come.

The last few summers that I lived with with my family, my dad and I would tend to the bees all day and read about bees at night. Boxes appeared on the front porch full of books.

We drank in the words of Miller, Doolittle, Langstroth, and Brother Adam—masters of all walks of life and literal gold mines of bee knowledge. The intricacies of the bee world were opened up to me through hands-on experience with my father in the daylight, and the penned words of doctors, ministers, housewives, and scientists in the night hours. I lived the happy lives of many long-gone beekeepers through the black and white pages, and my sleep was infiltrated with wings carrying loads of pollen and nectar.

Beekeeping became more than a hobby or job, business or endeavor. To me—and to many of the bee-crazy writers I read—keeping bees is a lifestyle. I’ve realized that bees are a love and beekeeping is a wonderful, high-quality way to spend precious time. I had something in common with the people whose lives I was entranced by. Brother Adam said it best:

“There is something about bees that in all ages has taken men captive. Their extraordinary sense of order and precision, their ability to adapt themselves to anything and everything, their amazing versatility, these and many other characteristics provide an inexhaustible source of interest and delight.”

I was a captive. I still am….

I made the decision to buy some bees for myself. And the same spring I moved across the country, I purchased four small hives with my now husband. Witnessing him catch bee fever the first time he found the gorgeous queen bee was a real pleasure.

There is only one queen bee in each hive—the only fertile insect in a society of females. They are slender and beautiful, with a long abdomen of brown and gold, or sometimes almost black with deep maroon stripes. Her legs are long and shiny, unlike the functional hairy legs of the worker bees. She is constantly surrounded by a ring of doting nurse bees. Despite the differences between her and her bees, she is quick and can be hard to find between the constant activity on a hive frame. I could feel the awe and excitement vibrating off of him in the same way the buzzing reverberated from our hive. It was infectious.

Beekeeping in British Columbia’s soggy cedar forested Fraser Valley was very different than in the heat and cold extremes of Southwestern Ontario. I didn’t know when spring would come, when the honey flow would happen, which flowers would provide, how the wildfire smoke would affect the bees, or how to deal with the wet climate.

The first year I was a beekeeper, I harvested a small amount of excess honey and we enjoyed every precious, glistening drop. Unfortunately, at the end of that first summer, wasps came by the hundreds. We watched helplessly as they plundered our small apiary, leaving it a ghost town before the first snow flew. 

I knew keeping bees could be disheartening. I was better prepared to lose some bees over the winter and be disappointed in the spring than to have no hives at all to dream about during the winter. Although I was gutted, I knew beekeeping was about resilience, so I tried again the following spring.

The next season glowed hot and thick with blossoms. Late that summer, I opened a hive, anticipating the warm, sweet smell of a healthy colony and being greeted by a hefty mass of buzzing brown and yellow bees. Instead, a cloud of wasps emerged. It had only been a few days since I last checked them, but the hive was ransacked. A sad cluster of bees buzzed in a corner. I quickly checked the other eight hives we had built. Even the strongest, most promising colonies had wasps coming and going as they pleased, carrying the body parts of bees with them. 

The wasp attack had pulled me from a honey high to cold reality, and it lit an angry fire in my fever. In an attempt to rescue our bees, we moved all our hives to the other side of the valley to escape the wasps.

Crushed, angry and sickened as my bees and their hours of hard labor were carried off into oblivion, leaving stark silence where there once was a happy, busy bustle, I couldn’t help but cry helplessly.