Adventures in Learning Urban Beekeeping

Beekeeping is always one of those things that I romanticized. I’d daydream of learning one day, but it always seemed so far out of the realm of possibility. For starters, I didn’t know anyone who kept bees, nor did I know the first place to start. The gear! The stings! The learning curve!

Maybe someday, I’d tell myself. And then continue on my merry way, fawning over urban beekeeping photos, and telling myself that it wasn’t in the cards for me, at least for now.

But let me tell you something. While Instagram can be a toxic cesspool that breeds insecurity, depression, and FOMO for many (honestly, I never post on my personal account anymore and rarely look at anything anyone posts), it’s a secret gem of a community for gardening. When we started on this little adventure to transform our patio/front yard/slab of concrete driveway, I turned to Instagram to document our endeavor. All of the gardening tips and advice I found seemed geared towards experienced gardeners, and we were total beginners. We made lots of mistakes, have learned a ton, and enjoy it more and more each season. What started as me sharing photos of our rinky dink, higgledy-piggledy semblance of a garden started to turn into a place I looked forward to sharing and connecting with fellow gardeners every day. For the first time in years, I started enjoying Instagram again.

After searching around for months for a mentor/someone to volunteer with to learn gardening tips, I was floored when a local master gardener reached out, after finding me through a hashtag she follows on Instagram, and offered me a volunteer opportunity with her, to learn edible gardening… and urban beekeeping if I was interested! Robin, from Honey Girl Grows, is a wealth of knowledge and as of last week I’ve started helping her with a local garden project and soaking up every ounce of information that she’s shared with me. And I naturally jumped at the opportunity to learn about beekeeping!

I met her yesterday for my first lesson, and I showed up with my handy dandy new beekeeping suit that she recommended, a pair of sturdy boots, and some gloves. I adore bees anyways, but I can say that after spending an hour getting up close and personal with thousands of them, they’re some of the coolest creatures on the planet. They’re fascinating! And so smart! And responsible for like, pretty much all of the delicious food in the world. Seriously, have you ever seen the images of what a salad bar would look like without bees? This image has been seared into my brain since seeing it a few years ago.

From Whole Foods 2015 campaign with the Xerces Society to protect pollinators:

• Avocados, tomatoes and berries are just a few of the favorite offerings that would become scarce or disappear from the salad bar without the help of pollinators, which play an integral role in more than 100 types of crops in the U.S.
• Only about 40 percent (26 of 63) of the store’s original salad bar offerings remained. In addition to produce options, shoppers would have to give up salad toppers like almonds, macadamia nuts and sunflower seeds, too.
• Beef and dairy options would be scarce. Pollinators are vital to crops that feed cattle, which means no more yogurt, cheeses or other dairy options on the salad bar.

Pretty bleak, huh?

So bees! Before even putting our suits on, we got down on the ground and started plucking fallen bees out of the damp grass, where they were getting stuck somehow. Robin said that some of the bees were likely from flight school, and showed me what a young bee looks like compared to a mature bee. They’re smaller, very blonde, and blind! Next, we focused on trimming grass around the hive legs so as not to provide any way for ants to get up into the hives because an ant infestation can devastate an entire colony. Then, we prepped the smoker to keep on hand in case we needed it, but honeybees are so docile that though we were surrounded by thousands of them, they didn’t seem to mind whatsoever.

I’m writing this post to document all of the rad stuff that I learned, and will continue to learn, and as a reminder of this incredible opportunity that I once figured was just a pipe dream.

Below is some of the info that I picked up yesterday from Robin , coupled with some other info from ThoughtCo and the American Beekeeping Federation that I discovered while researching honey bees:

• Every bee has a job! Nurse bees care for the young. Attendant workers bathe and feed the queen. Guard bees stand watch at the door like bouncers. Construction workers build the beeswax foundation in which the queen lays eggs and the workers store honey. Undertakers carry the dead from the hive. Foragers must bring back enough pollen and nectar to feed the entire community.
• Which bees are produced by eggs depends on what the larvae are fed. The larvae that become queens are fed only royal jelly. Other bees become female workers because they’re fed fermented pollen (bee bread) and honey.
• If a hive loses its queen but she’s laid eggs in the last five days, the hive can create an “emergency queen” by changing what some larvae eat—removing the beebread and honey and feeding them on royal jelly exclusively. The beebread and honey shrink the ovaries of the worker bees, so emergency queens aren’t going to be as successful as queens as ones fed only royal jelly, but if there’s no other option, the new queen will do in a pinch.
• The male bees in a hive come from unfertilized eggs and make up only about 15 percent of the colony. They are a good sign for a hive, though. Their existence shows that a hive has enough food, but even so, they’re ejected at the end of a season because they drain a hive’s resources. All they do is mate and eat. Unlike the female bees, they don’t have any other jobs—and they don’t even have a stinger.
• Honey bees generally won’t even die inside the hive most of the time. They’ll go outside to keep their corpse away from their food and nursing young.
• When a bee is squished, it releases an alarm pheromone which tells other bees to sting or charge.
• If the honey bee finds a large amount of nectar, she will do a waggle dance (seriously, watch that video. It is SO COOL!) once she arrives at the hive. The dance is to show the location of the nectar source. She’ll give some of the nectar to surrounding bees so that they can taste it.
• Honeybees are not aggressive by nature, and will not sting unless protecting their hive from an intruder or are unduly provoked. (We didn’t have to use smoke at all yesterday!)
• On average, a worker bee in the summer lives six to eight weeks. Their most common cause of death is wearing their wings out. During that six- to eight-week period, their average honey production is 1/12 of a teaspoon. In that short lifetime, they fly the equivalent of one and a half times the circumference of the earth.

My big takeaway from my first lesson was to move slowly, like doing Tai Chi underwater. Taking care to never squish, or smoosh bees. Moving slowly and deliberately, giving the bees a chance to relocate or scoot over when you’re moving things around in the hive. No jerky movements, just fluid, slow, and steady.

It was a pretty magical experience, and I’m excited to learn more. She said that next week, I’m doing the whole hive inspection by myself and she’ll supervise!