I’m wearing a white full-body canvas suit with a net veil zipped to it, arm-length leather gloves and a mesh pith helmet the same shape as the ones British colonists wore in tropical climates. That last item feels particularly appropriate, since I’m with a group similarly outfitted and getting ready to descend on some potentially hostile colonies.
These particular bees are a scrappy bunch naturally, and the weather today is cooler than they would prefer. To compound matters, we’ve been told they might be feeling a little defensive; the skunk living under a neighboring water tank recently launched a nighttime offensive on their hives.
The bees, the skunk, Ian Coulson and his wife share a plot of land on a piney mountainside at the top of a long, winding offshoot of Highway 9 outside Boulder Creek. Coulson, the sitting president and co-founder of the Santa Cruz Beekeepers Guild, has brought us, a group of intrepid wanna-beekeepers, here as part of a workshop he is leading at Mountain Feed and Farm Supply in Ben Lomond.
In years past, Mountain Feed has carried a few beekeeping supplies, but this season the store is going all-out, stocking every conceivable piece of beekeeping equipment—from hives and honey extractors to packets of the bees themselves—and hosting a few hands-on workshops and demonstrations for aspiring backyard beekeepers. It’s all in response to an increase in customer curiosity, says Karla DeLong, Mountain Feed’s in-house beekeeping expert.
One of every three bites we take is from a food pollinated by bees, DeLong tells me, so it’s a natural for the store to offer beekeeping “as one of our services, as well as seeds and plants and compost and then canning stuff. We have all the different parts of the adventure,” she says.
The workshop begins on a sunny weekend morning with the 10 of us seated on a semi-circle of hay bales at Mountain Feed and Coulson giving an introductory talk on bees and the keeping thereof.
Getting ready for your packet to arrive is kind of like awaiting the arrival of a baby—a lot of preparation is involved. Veterans recommend reading lots of books, talking with experienced beekeepers, getting safety equipment, picking out a hive and placing it.
Unlike a child, once a hive is in place, it is relatively low-maintenance. Minimalists say you can get away with interfering in it as little as eight times a year, mostly in the spring and early summer, when you’ll remove surplus honey, or to troubleshoot specific problems like ants or mites.
Coulson, who has about 20 hives on his property, is careful to emphasize the difference between himself and a commercial beekeeper. He is less interested in harvesting honey than in raising queens from what he calls “survivor stock.”
“People like me are trying to find bees in the wild—a swarm that’s lived in a tree for 10 years or something,” Coulson says, “trying to get swarms from them, and breeding these swarms so the bees have natural resistance. My goal is not to use any chemicals at all for controlling Varroa.”
While there is not consensus on the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, which has caused the massive and mysterious die-off of one-third of the country’s commercial honeybees between 2006 and 2010, according to surveys collected by the Apiary Inspectors of America, the parasitic mite known as Varroa is thought to be implicated, along with many of the practices used by commercial beekeepers like artificially inseminating queen bees, allowing bees to pollinate chemically treated areas and trucking hives around the country.
Clarion Call
A week before Mountain Feed’s class, I was in a different beekeeping class. This one began with 17 of us taking deep, eyes-closed breaths in a Live Oak backyard spotted with salvia and borage bushes before introducing ourselves by saying one thing that we were grateful for (example: “limits on our environment”).
Palika Benton, who led the class, calls Colony Collapse the “clarion call” to our society regarding the industrial food system. Last November Benton lost her 10-year-old “mother hive” to what she believes was CCD; unlike a regular swarm, when half the bees would remain in the hive, there were only a few very young bees left behind.
“Most of the colony,” she says, “was completely gone—disappeared.”
Colony collapse, as it turns out, was one of the main reasons that prompted my 30-odd classmates’ interest in keeping bees. Half the attendees at both workshops cited a variation on “helping the bees” as their motivation—a more popular answer than “harvesting honey” or “pollinating their garden.” Coulson, Benton and my companions see cottage-industry beekeeping as a way to create hardier bee populations and ensure the continued survival of the species.
Luckily, there are relatively few barriers to entry for people interested in keeping bees. The nonnegotiables are a full bee suit, or at the minimum a veil and light-colored long layers, and a smoker (used to calm the bees when opening the hive).
On a number of occasions Coulson said, “Ask 10 beekeepers one question you’ll get 12 answers,”—a saying that rang true for everything from what to feed to how to house and when to interfere in the affairs of your bees.
Coulson doesn’t have a problem feeding his bees with sugar water, while Benton refuses to feed anything but honey. For hives, Coulson is a traditionalist, preferring the Langstroth method (stackable boxes), while Benton, more of a New-Age naturalist, will be transitioning to top-bar hives this year. (A top-bar hive, sometimes called a Kenyan hive in reference to its country of origin, is a long trough-shaped box with angled wooden bars off which the bees build their comb in a way that is thought to mimic nature.)
Once the hive is set up you can either buy a packet of bees (Mountain Feed is taking orders, and many online retailers ship them as well), or get in touch with a swarm-catcher and get on a list to be notified the next time one is caught. With additional equipment that will be helpful—a hive tool, a frame rack and an extractor for removing honey—the basic set-up will cost around $300 and can run upwards of $500.
The different beekeepers–different answers adage rings mostly true, but there is solid consensus on a few things: If you’re interested in keeping bees, talk to your neighbors first, find an experienced beekeeper to act as your mentor for the first year or two and accept the fact that you are going to get stung.
I’ve heard that last part over and over again before I’m standing in the suit, listening to the hum of hundreds of bees hanging in a cloud around my classmates and me. I forget, though, while I’m holding a frame of honeycomb, watching the bees crawling around, checking out the larvae and a hatched queen cell. When I pass the frame off and see a bee with its stinger caught in my glove, I freeze for a second before looking at Coulson, who is, without any gear on at all, calmly pulling a bee from his hair. It’s OK to try this at home, kids—just take the workshop with a pro first.
DIG Gardens (diggardensnursery.com), Love Apple Farm (growbetterveggies.com), Mama Earth Matters (831.464.9664) and Mountain Feed and Farm Supply (831.336.887) offer beekeeping workshops. The Santa Cruz Beekeepers Guild meets the first Wednesday of every month in the community room at the El Rio Mobile Home Park, 2120 N. Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz.
