My Summer of Bees

Over a weekend in May, I went to our small Jersey City basement apartment from which I worked and dreamed for four years with an increasing vitamin D deficiency, and packed it all up. By myself. Picture me, terribly out of shape and asthmatic as a rule, shoving three rooms worth of absolute junk into boxes and bags, eventually just putting things out on the street for other people to deal with, and moving out-of-state in just over 48 hours. It was HELL, I tell you. HELL. I quarantined in Connecticut for two weeks before joining my husband in New Hampshire, where we were moving in with family to assist with a health emergency. Even though we've been here a few months and all our things are unpacked and put in their places, I still have an anxiety under my daily thoughts that tells me I'm supposed to be somewhere soon. I wonder if the swallows of Capestrano have a similar pang of worry when they see packing tape. 

My reward for my efforts, which were many and varied and terribly important, was bees. My husband, knowing how well I respond to positive reinforcement and constant validation, had ordered me a five-frame nuc of Italian honeybees based on a decades-long baseless desire I had to be a beekeeper. It wasn't until we were on our way home from the Merrimack Valley Apiary with a box full of bees that I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

Just kidding, I knew exactly what I had gotten myself into, and that was bees. Bees are fantastic. They make honey, they have a lovely buzzing sound, they pollinate the flowers, I'm one-hundred percent into bees, and this is before I even kept them. Now that I have a hive, it's all I'm willing to talk about. From the moment they hesitantly stepped outside the nuc for the first time, my hear is all hexagon-shaped.

 

The first few months had many challenges. I couldn't identify the queen, but it seemed like she was laying eggs. It took some time for them to start making comb, so I fed them with a 1:1 simple syrup for a few weeks. There was a case of tracheal mites, which is about as pleasant as it sounds, for which I made oil patties to keep the mites from sticking to the bees. I even had to re-queen the hive when it seemed no brood was being laid, the results of which remain a mystery to this day. All this while negotiating the strange and cumbersome bee suit, wielding a smoker full of, well, smoke.

I like to sit out with them and read on sunny days, and watch them fly in and out of the hive. Sometimes I come across them in the yard and say hello. They say 'buzz buzz buzz' back, which definitely means, 'Oh hello, Erin, I see you and appreciate all you do for us. You are our mother'. 

There have been stingings, but only in cases where I have been incredibly stupid. Honeybees, particularly the Italian variety, are gentle and don't want to hurt you unless they absolutely have to. After all, they die after they sting you, and who wants to do that when there's so much honey around? No, each time I've been stung, it's been because I'm trying to mess with them when I shouldn't, when I haven't taken their cues and observed their behavior before I act, or when I drop the box and have to make a run for it. That last one only happened once, but it resulted in four stings, two of which occurred from bees that got inside my pants. I think that described adequately highlights how stupid I was being. 

A lot of the time, the bees are fine with me being there, watching them like their overly-familiar weirdo god.

Even with all the wonderful experiences I had enjoyed with the workers (all called Terri) and drones (all called Biff), I had still not seen the queen. After the re-queening fiasco, I had begun to see evidence that someone was laying eggs. Whether it was the queen or workers (whose eggs result in drones) remained to be seen. It wasn't until late July, a day when they were particularly calm and required no smoke for the hive check, that I finally saw her. Look at her in all her beautiful glory!

Ok, she's under a couple other bees, but she's there. She's longer than the others, and has a smooth, lithe body that kind of wiggles while she pushes her way through the hive like she owns the place. To have finally seen her after months of is-she-isn't-she, I finally felt like not just a keeper of bees, but a beekeeper.

To have moved from New York City (people will say it's not, but JC constantly gets elected Best Pizza, so your move, knickerbockers)...

Ahem. 

To have moved from New York City to a farm town in New Hampshire has been a weird direction for my life to take. It feels as if 2020 saw my success at getting on the bottom rung of a very difficult ladder (a ladder made of ice, slathered with BAM), and just SHOOK IT SHOOK IT SHOOK IT until I fell off, hit my head, and woke up several hours closer to Canada. Like many people have experienced during these crazy times, it's been a shock to the system. I still wonder if I can recover my momentum, if my anxieties will win the day, if I have to start completely over, and how can I survive in a place where I can't get sushi at any time of the day. But when I look at pictures of myself with my bees, I see a genuine, carefree happiness. I know those types of moments are few and far between these days. I'll take it where I can get it.