Bring Out Your Dead . . . and How I Became a Beekeeper

People frequently ask me why I took up the hobby of beekeeping. Was it to make honey? Did I want to “Save the Bees?” Or, maybe I wanted to raise pollinators for my vast garden of plants.

Truth is, I got them on a whim — so unlike my usual way of conducting business — when a coworker told me they were easy peasy. In a nutshell, buy bees in the spring. Check on them every now and then in the summer. Harvest honey in the fall. They could not be easier, she said.

At that honeymoon stage, I thought beekeeping to be the perfect project for someone like me, who could not imagine fitting another responsibility in my busy life.

Getting Started

That first spring, she helped me source bees and set up shop. I purchased a nucleus, commonly called a nuc (a mated queen and about 10,000 worker bees shipped from California in a small box). The next day, I transitioned them to their new hive home, commonly called an installation, and fed them a sugar water mix through the summer. For the most part, I left them to do their thing — build honeycomb in their new hive, gather pollen and nectar, make honey and care for their young, commonly called brood. Piece of cake so far.

My very first hive, shortly after installation of the boxed bees (far left) from California. Langstroth hives like this one (the most common style of bee hive in the U.S.) consist of several boxes, where bees raise their young and store food, a feeder for sugar water (with a slotted bottom floater so bees don’t drown), an inner cover (not shown), an outer cover and a hive stand (cement bricks, in this case). The bread-like object in the feeder is a pollen patty, which is a protein source for the bees.

My first disappointment came mid-summer when my coworker mentor told me one should not harvest honey from the hive the first year. What happened to harvesting in the fall? That is for second year hives and beyond, she explained. First year hives need all the honey they make as a food source to survive the winter.

The second disappointment came later that summer when she left our employer and me without a bee mentor. We corresponded briefly in the fall and she assured me my bees would be perfectly fine by leaving them with their honey and allowing them to follow instinct. After all, they are easy.

The Real Story

By mid-November, I was getting that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach about my bees. I was not so sure they were going to be okay on their own. Though it was winter, I had not seen any bee action for some time. So I contacted a local bee club on Facebook to get other beekeepers’ takes on the situation. Their advice: doing NO thing was the best way to have NO bees in the spring. Bees today need to be managed for survival. Gone are the days of our grandparents, when bee colonies thrived on their own, with little human intervention.

My heart sank. Not only had I invested a boatload of money in bees and equipment, I had let my little ladies down.

One of the members agreed to come to my apiary, also called a bee yard, when temps rose to about 50 degrees to check on my bees. One thing I have learned about this hobby is that beekeepers are committed beyond belief. I have not been involved with a more helpful group of people, eager to bring newbies under their wings and teach them the trade.

A couple weeks later, on a relatively warm December day, Marc and I suited up in our bee garb and headed to the hive. On the way he said, “I just have a bad feeling.”

Well, me too, I thought.

With a quick but gentle touch of a seasoned beekeeper, he pried the cover off the hive and took off the feeder box to reveal the innards of the lower hive body. “Well, I’ll be. Your bees are alive and they are beautiful,” Marc remarked.

“I have beautiful, live bees? Really? How in the world did that happen?”

He pulled out the middle frames of the hive with the bees intact and looked for my queen. Though he did not find her, he suspected she was in the middle of the mass of bees, which numbered about 10,000 (a typical sized colony for late winter). He returned the frames and closed the hive and told me to feed them sugar and pray they make it through the rest of the winter.

That I did, and waited.

I have since learned that waiting and wondering what will become of one’s bees post winter is par for the course for beekeepers. Often, we lose half of our colonies during the winter due to various weather conditions and varroa destructor mites.

My first bees hanging out on the “front porch” of their hive.

Go or No-Go?

The turning point for my beekeeping came one Saturday morning in early January, when I was looking at my hive from my kitchen window and contemplating an upcoming beekeeping class. I promised my bees, “If you guys are alive next week, I will take that class and learn how to take care of you. If you are dead, I will sell my equipment and more thoroughly consider my next project.”

Either way, I assured God, I was okay with the outcome. It was His call.

The next Saturday was an unusually warm day — over 50 degrees and sunny — and from my kitchen window thought I saw bees flying around the hive. I grabbed the binos, and, sure enough, there were loads of bees flying around. But, were those my bees? Or, were they rouge bees stealing my honey? How does one find out? Google, of course.

I discovered they were not rouge bees. They were indeed my bees, undertaker bees to be exact, taking out dead bee bodies. Apparently, bees do this to clean the hive when weather conditions allow them to conduct business outside. It is kind of like spring cleaning. Google noted, if you look on the ground outside the hive, you will see the bee carcasses. Sure enough, there was a pile of dead bees in the snow right outside the hive entrance. Google also noted that bees wait to excrement until weather conditions permit as well. Bees do indeed keep a clean house. Among other housekeeping duties for a bee include cleaning of her own honeycomb cell after she is born (hatched) to get it ready for the next resident.

The “Bring Out Your Dead” analogy came from a friend at the gym who told me my story reminded him of the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And yes, bees do actually carry out their peers who are nearly dead in some instances to capitalize on weather conditions, as the characters in the movie did during the Black Plague.

Lifelong Learning

In keeping with my promise, I signed up for the annual beekeeping class conducted by the East Central Ohio Beekeepers Association and began my journey to becoming a better beekeeper. Learning how to care for them is not easy. It is a lifelong endeavor that is best learned by working with mentors, making mistakes and getting hands-on experience.

I established my bee blog because friends, family and acquaintances are often fascinated with them and frequently ask, “How are the bees?” I named my blog the The Bad Beekeeper because I have done everything wrong that could be done wrong in caring for bees.

Yet, I still have them by the grace of God. In my heart of hearts, I believe He wants me to be a beekeeper.