Sweet Collaboration

“How hard could it be?” I wondered on more than one occasion as I set up the beehives last year.  “Bees have been tending to themselves for thousands of years.”  

 

Despite the latter observation’s affirmative truth, the answer to the former question is, “More than one might think.”

 

I learned that the hard way.  Purchasing two “packages” of bees and setting them up for housekeeping around the back of the prairie, I apparently went out of my way to be inhospitable.  Within a month one of the colonies was gone – dead or merely departed I couldn’t ascertain.  I did my best to nurture and cajole the remaining colony through the summer and fall, and with the outer reaches of my microscopically limited knowledge did what I could to prepare it for winter.  Through the course of those bitter months I would pass by the lonely hive, neither seeing nor hearing any sign of life.  

 

On the foundation of this astonishing failure, I began the new year by ordering three new colonies for springtime. I would execute a “reboot.”  As winter faded, I made the sad journey to the apiary to dismantle the remaining hive, only to lift the lid and find a burgeoning colony, happily undertaking a new season.  That one, soon joined by the three I had newly ordered, and eventually joined by the two successful splits from that overwintered miracle.  The swollen population meant that August honey extraction season approached riding the momentum of six healthy hives.  Not all would be ready to share their stores, of course, but some were extending their hand.  Questions arose.  We consulted teachers and mentors and YouTube videos.  We purchased equipment.  We sanitized and organized and asked a few more questions.  Finally, when we could think of or justify no more impedimenting delays, we loaded up the Club Car, gathered the promisingly loaded frames, encouraged the clinging bees to stay behind, and returned to the processing area we had laboriously staged, and got to work.  

 

Yesterday.

 

It will likely take years to master the uncapping knife, but we got the job done.  It took awhile to finesse the electric extractor, but we eventually fell into a routine.  We spun, we drained, we strained the viscous gold.  We licked our fingers when we thought the other wasn’t looking, and we filled bottle after glorious bottle until we closed the bucket’s honey gate for the final time.  

 

And then, surveying the 52 pounds of bottled harvest, we smiled.  It’s hardly “free”, this liquid largesse.  The dollars invested in beekeeping have been surprising; the labor demanded has been as exhausting as it has been fascinating and disciplining.  And yet the abundant generosity of it all is a wonder to me.  Bees, themselves, were already a wonder.  A “super-organism” that functions enviably and organically as a whole rather than a collection of individuals, the hive is a throbbing body of specialization and efficiency; nursing, guarding, cleaning, gathering, reproducing, sustaining and monitoring.  And then the honey.  Honey manifests the bees’ alchemical accomplishment of spinning, Rumpelstiltskin-like, straw into gold; transforming the myriad pollens and nectars into a life-supporting pantry and medicine cabinet.  

 

That happens to be delectably sweet.

 

A friend asked how the bees feel about being robbed of the fruits of their labors.  I can’t imagine that they are thrilled, but they acquiesce.  Industrious, they’ve already gotten about their business of making more.  And we will help – planting more flowers for the long term, filling sugar water feeders to augment their efforts in the near term, attending to their health and preparing their space for winter.  It’s a partnership, after all; a reciprocity that nourishes and delights us both – the colony in the hive, and the colony in the house; sweeter for the collaboration.