Made by Hand (23 page)

Kirk climbed down and pulled from his truck a white cardboard box about eighteen inches long and twelve inches wide and tall. It contained a “nuc” (pronounced “nuke,” short for
nucleus
), which is a starter hive containing eggs, pollen, worker bees, and a queen. It had come from a colony Kirk had removed the day before in Redondo Beach. He carried the nuc up the ladder and secured it next to the bee escape. The plan was that the bees in the wall would come out via the bee escape, then collect nectar, pollen, water, or whatever their assignment happened to be. When they tried to go back into the wall, the bee escape would stop them. They’d fly around in circles looking for an opening and would eventually enter the opening in the nuc box. Once inside, they’d discover the queen and switch allegiance to her.

Kirk said he’d return in about a week and a half to remove the nuc.

The day before he was scheduled to arrive, I told Carla that my hive was ready to be installed. Carla, who doesn’t like bugs of any kind, told me that she didn’t want the bees coming anywhere near the house, and especially not near the swimming pool.

I argued that even if we didn’t have a hive, the canyon below us would be full of bees and that they’d be buzzing around our house all summer anyway.

“But we’ll have more because of the hive,” she said. “How many bees are going to be in the hive, forty or fifty? ”

“Forty or fifty?” I said. “Are you kidding? No, more like ten thousand.”

“What!? We can’t have that many bees on our property! We’ll have swarms!”

“No, we won’t,” I assured her. “We already have that colony on the roof, and they don’t bug us.”

“That’s because they’re up so high that they won’t come down to bother us.”

“But they need to come down to get nectar from the flowers and blossoms,” I said.

“Oh, great. When are they going to do that?” she said.

“Well, my point is that if they aren’t bugging us now, when they’re moved to a hive, away from the house, they won’t bug us, either.”

“How do you know? How far away do they need to be? Have you researched it?” she said.

I had to admit that I hadn’t.

“I don’t want bees to ruin our summer by the pool! None of your friends’ wives would let them have bees.”

“Please, just let me try,” I said. “If they cause a problem, I’ll get rid of them.”

“I want the hive to be put in a place where there isn’t a problem to begin with.”

“OK. When Kirk comes tomorrow to take the bees out of the trap, you can talk to him about where we should put the hive,” I said.

Carla reluctantly agreed. We had established a truce—albeit an uneasy one—in the beehive war.

The next day, as I was walking back to the house after tending to the chickens a little after 9 a.m., I saw Kirk pulling up in the driveway.

“Howdy!” he said, getting out of the truck.

“Hi, Kirk. Did we say 10 a.m.?”

“I’m usually early,” he said. “Do you have your hive set up where you want it?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about that. My wife is concerned that the bees will pester her and the kids if the hive is too close. She’ll be here at ten or so.”

“Well, then, let’s put the hive as far from the house as we can,” he said.

I led him to the backyard, to the same area where I was keeping the chickens. “My idea,” I told him, “is to put the hive behind this bush, so if the bees fly toward our house, they’ll have to fly up and over the bush, keeping them up over everyone’s heads.”

“OK,” Kirk said.

“Will that work?” I asked.

“It might.”

I used a shovel to make a level spot in the sloped dirt, then laid a couple of pieces of lumber down as a platform for the hive. Kirk and I set the super box down, then walked back to the front of the house to get the nuc, hopefully full of the bees from our house walls.

Kirk put on his beekeeping suit and told me to put mine on, too. As he was preparing to get the nuc box off the roof, I went in the house to put on my suit for the first time since trying it on for size at the store a couple of months earlier. When I came back out, Kirk was halfway up the ladder, holding a smoker in one hand. He lifted the lid to the nuc box and squeezed some smoke into it.

“Yep,” he said, “there’s brood in there.” That meant that the bees were taking care of the new queen, so she could lay eggs. He replaced the lid.

I held on to the ladder to keep it steady as he climbed down with the nuc box tucked under one arm. He handed it to me. The box was buzzing like a vibrating cell phone. A couple of dozen bees were frantically orbiting around my head and body. My senses were on high alert. I knew the bee suit would protect me, but my lizard brain was telling me to drop the box and run.

It took a couple of minutes to carry the nuc box to the hive, and it was difficult to walk on the steep slope carrying a box of bees while wearing the beekeeper’s mask. At last, we reached the hive.

“Now, lift off the top,” Kirk said. I thought he meant the top of the nuc box. When I took it off, a bunch of agitated bees shot out, circling wildly.

Kirk stayed calm.

“Put the lid back on. Take the top off the
hive,
and use your hive tool”—it looks something like a small crowbar—“to remove five frames.”

I didn’t have my hive tool with me, so I had to go back into the house to get it. When I returned, I used it to lift out the frames. Kirk instructed me to lift the top of the nuc box, and he gave the bees a squirt of smoke, which immediately knocked them into a daze. The nuc box had five frames in it. They had combs on them, and hundreds of bees were crawling around them. I lifted the frames out and placed them in the hive box one at a time. The stupefying effect of the smoke began to wear off, and the bees started moving more frantically. The pitch of the buzzing went higher. I hurried to get the rest of the frames in.

“When the bees get more active like that,” Kirk said, “it’s natural for you to want to move quickly. But it’s the time for you to slow down. We’re in no hurry.” I followed his advice and finished transferring the frames at a normal pace. I put the lid on, and we walked back to the house to have a cup of tea and a snack.

We’d been sitting at the kitchen table for a few minutes when Carla arrived. It was about ten-thirty. She said hello and asked how things were going.

“We got the bees into the hive,” I told her.

“Oh, really?” she said, her back turned to us, putting dishes into the dishwasher. Kirk didn’t notice the hint of sharpness in her question but, being her husband, I instantly knew she wasn’t happy that we’d already populated the hive without waiting for her to OK the location.

Kirk stayed around a little longer, setting up another nuc box on the roof to capture more bees—apparently, the colony living in the walls of our house was large. When he left, I went back into the kitchen, where Carla was cleaning up.

“Is everything OK?” I asked hopefully.

Carla turned. “You were supposed to wait until I came back before you put the beehive down.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He got here early, but I talked to him about the best place to put the hive, and he said the spot I picked was a good one.”

“Show me.”

I led her outside, past the pool, past the chicken coop, to the bush at the far end of the yard.

“Oh, no!” she said. “They’ll be flying all around the pool.”

“No, they won’t,” I said.

“How do you know?” she said.

And then we had the same argument as before, only a little more loudly.

One evening not long after Kirk’s visit, the family gathered upstairs to watch a movie. Sarina pointed out that the recessed lights in the ceiling weren’t as bright as usual.

“I think there are bees in them,” she said.

I was about to blurt out, “That’s impossible,” but lately so many things had been going wrong with our bees and chickens (the coyotes had started snacking on the hens at this point) that I kept my mouth shut and peered up at the glass light enclosures in the ceiling.

Sure enough, they were filled with dead bees. That meant that the colony that had taken up residence in our walls was also in the space between the roof and the ceiling. In fact, one of the glass cups was so packed with bees that they were blocking out the light from the bulb entirely. We called off the movie, and I sent everyone downstairs while I removed the glass cups and got rid of the bees (which were all dead, presumably from the heat of the bulbs). There were thousands of them all over the floor. I had to empty the Dustbuster a few times to get them all.

Carla made a gagging sound and turned her head in disgust when I brought down a glass cup full of dead bees.

“This is horrible,” she said. “Our house is filled with bees. I thought you and Kirk had taken care of the problem.”

“I thought we had, too,” I said meekly. What else could I say? Between this and the chicken deaths, I was flunking animal husbandry. “I’ll call Kirk and ask him what to do next.”

“Are they going to make a hole in the wall and swarm through?” said Carla.

“No,” I said. “They can’t chew a hole through the wall.” I sounded more confident than I felt—at this point, I felt like I didn’t know anything about bees.

I e-mailed Kirk, and he said he’d come by to check things out. In the meantime, I’d been checking on the bees in the hive out back, and they didn’t seem to be doing very well. The ones from the five honeycombed frames that Kirk and I had added to the hive seemed to be ignoring all of the other frames: They were devoid of comb. Once again, I e-mailed Kirk and asked him what was happening. He replied:

Ants are a natural enemy of bees.

Kirk said he’d come over and inspect my hive when the Backwards Beekeepers club met at my house. In late August, more than fifty people showed up for the meeting, and while Carla served snacks to everyone and I manned the espresso machine, Kirk donned his bee suit and went out to peek at my hive. He returned with bad news. The entire colony, or what had been left of it, had absconded. The hive was completely empty. Kirk wasn’t exactly sure why the bees had left, but he thought I ought to try feeding my next batch of bees sugar water as a way of encouraging them to stick around.

“Meet me at the Solano Community Garden in Chinatown on Thursday, and we’ll get you some more bees.”

I was frustrated that my bees had left in search of better accommodations, especially on the heels of my chicken die-off. But I reminded myself that every chicken keeper I’d met had lost chickens to predators or illness, and that several other people in the bee club had lost their bees. Losing animals, as sad as it might be, is part of the homesteading experience. My job, I decided, was to get better at it to keep those losses to a minimum.

The following Thursday I drove to Chinatown and met Kirk at the garden, built on the grounds of an elementary school that was torn down in 1935. I parked my car, collected my bee suit out of the back, and entered through a gate. About thirty small garden plots were growing flowers and vegetables. I didn’t see anyone else in the lot, but I smelled the odor of smoldering newspapers, which meant a bee smoker was in the vicinity.

I followed the smoke smell and found Kirk and two other members of the bee club dressed in their bee suits. I put mine on and helped them wrangle a half dozen or so hive boxes full of bees that Kirk had recently pulled from people’s houses and fences. After transferring five frames to a cardboard box for one of the club members, Kirk told me it was my turn to prepare one of the boxes to take back to my house.

He pointed to a weather-beaten box and told me to take off the top. It was crammed with bees. Kirk squirted a little smoke on them, and they scurried into the depths of the box.

“They’re busy eating honey now,” Kirk said. I fetched a framed screen, and Kirk told me to use it to cover the top of the box and secure it with masking tape. I made sure the bees were sealed in, then taped the bottom to the box, too. The bees were now trapped inside. I carried the box—which didn’t weigh nearly as much as I thought a box of fifteen thousand bees should weigh—through the gate and set it in the back of Kirk’s pickup truck. Then we drove to my house in Studio City. Once there, I carried the bees to my hive and set them down. I gave Kirk one of the empty wooden boxes so he could use it on his next bee-removal call.

After we got the bees settled in, Kirk showed me how to make a simple spacer frame so that I could set a plastic bag filled with sugar water in the box and close the lid without squishing the bag. I thanked him for his help and paid him $75 for the bees.

Since they seemed to be agitated from the trip, I waited a day before disturbing them. Then, following Kirk’s instructions, I filled a one-gallon Ziploc bag with a fifty-fifty sugar-water mixture and brought it out to the hive, along with a bee smoker. The smoker helped calm the bees, but they still tried to get at my face. I set the bag on top of the hanging frames and cut a two-inch slit so sugar water would seep out. Then I replaced the top.

While I was at the hive, I applied a stripe of sticky goop called Tanglefoot around the perimeter of the hive box. This was to keep the ants out. (Earlier I had swapped the top and bottom covers of the hive so that the bees had to enter and exit from the top of the box instead of the bottom, which is how hives are usually set up.) A number of the club members had been complaining that ants were decimating their hives, and Kirk said that the bees weren’t able to stop ants because ants are too little to sting. While I was applying the Tanglefoot to the hive box, the smoke wore off, and the bees started going crazy. I remembered what Kirk had told me earlier about slowing down and taking it easy when bees were angry, so I kept my mind on the task at hand and tried to ignore the kamikaze bees. After I was done, I headed back to the house. The bees followed me about halfway and then gave up.