“Beware any enterprise that requires new clothes,” warned Henry David Thoreau. I think he meant getting married or becoming a stockbroker or undertaker, but it could easily apply to beekeeping.
People, who haven’t actually kept bees, think of it as a set-it-and-forget-it enterprise. It’s not. It’s animal husbandry. Like other animals, honeybees need food, water, protection from weather extremes, and periodic health checks. And, when they get too crowded, they’ll swarm. A large portion of the colony boils out of the hive and goes off to find a new home together. (This is wonderful to watch – a tornado of bees 30 feet or so in circumference maybe 15 feet in the air flying counter-clockwise until the queen lands, and they all eventually bunch around her in a Big Ball o’ Bees. Unless a beekeeper comes along and bops them into a swarm box, they’ll send out scouts looking for likely new digs. The scouts each come back with a report about what they’ve found and offer it to the swarming colony. Then the colony votes. Democracy in action.).
While honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native, they have long been productive naturalized citizens of our ecology.
“Honeybees have been here for four centuries,” says Kim Mehalick, past president of the Maryland Beekeepers Association. “Settlers brought them from Europe.”
“Our connection to honeybees is ancient,” says Dr. Anthony Nearman at van Englesdorp Bee Lab at University of Maryland. “There are cave paintings of beekeepers and bees.”
Honeybees have always been treasured for their honey and their beautiful wax comb for candles. But gleaning these products without getting stung requires new clothes – and equipment.
“There’s an outlay to start,” says Mehalick. “After the second year, you have the hope of honey.”
That outlay includes the cost of hive boxes, frames, tools and packages of bees – or a captured swarm.
While their products are great – I’ve put an indecent glob of honey in my morning coffee since my husband started keeping bees – it’s long been their efficient pollinating for which they are most valued.
One of the reasons honeybees are such great little pollinators is they tend to return to the same blossom more than once, which is crucial.
Queen emerging from queen cell
“It takes eight visits to an individual bloom to produce a cucumber, for example,” Mehalick says. “The year before we got our bees, we got no cucumbers. But after we got them, I made so many pickles the kids were pleading with me not to do anymore.”
The majority of honeybees in agricultural pollination are commercially raised and trucked around the country to coincide with regional bloom times, but there has been a significant rise in honeybee hobbyists as well. The Maryland Beekeepers Association has over 800 members, and the Virginia Beekeepers Association boasts over 900.
Mehalick insists that keeping bees is ‘easy.’ (But then, she’s worked on the NASA telescope so everything else must seem easy). Having watched it up-close-and-personal, I disagree. Fascinating? Yes. Easy? Not so much. The deadly Varroa mite, hive beetles, pesticides, pathogens, development, which has decimated their natural food supply, and the increasing extremes in our climate challenge the bees and the keeper.
“When I first started forty years ago, I could put out a hive and just make sure it had some food at the end of the summer,” says Bruce Hamon, 1st VP of the Virginia Beekeepers Association (VBA). “In August, I’d take off a couple of boxes of honey, and that was life. Now, you’re reading, you’re planning…”
VBA treasurer, Ian Henry, who began keeping bees in his native Australia and has been keeping bees here for over 30 years, agrees.
“There are so many more pests here,” he says. “They don’t have Varroa in Australia, and the nectar flow there is ten months long. Here it’s only two months.”
Nectar from successive blooms of native plant colonies is the source of honey, the colony’s food. Which is what makes upping our complement of native plants throughout the season for all pollinators so crucial.
“What we’ve lost is really good forage,” Mehalick explains. “Clover is one of the first sources of nectar in spring. Black locust, tupelo trees, American holly. Many people don’t realize that trees bloom. Maple trees are the first pollen [a source of protein] in Maryland.”
To find nectar, honeybees generally forage two miles from the hive. They’ll go farther when pickings are slim, but beyond four miles it’s like asking a person to do a daily 15-mile walk for water and food. It wears out their wings, shortens life expectancy and therefore threatens the colony. Forty years ago, there were still corridors of native plants that offered forage from spring through fall. Development has destroyed those corridors and replaced them with hardscape and uninterrupted turf. (Which is what Homegrown National Park is working to change).
Gary & Dick install bee captured swarm
Since the 1950’s, we’ve been persuaded to chemically purge our once-diverse lawns of dandelion, chickweed, and clover to the tune of billions of dollars, and subsequent damage to ground water, waterways, and the Bay. It’s also been death on pollinators and other wildlife.
Fortunately, things are beginning to change.
“People are now recognizing that a green lawn is a desert to a pollinator,’ Mehalick says. “They need to have a diverse season-long environment with different native plants and food sources, and awareness of not using pesticides for a green lawn.”
“Because gardens are… groups of plants, they have the potential to perform the same essential biological roles fulfilled by healthy plant communities everywhere,” says entomologist Doug Tallamy, PhD, who urges each property owner – private, public, and commercial – to devote at least 50% of the available landscaping space to native plants.
This kind of stewardship, which is also like adding the Nature Channel to your yard, has multiple benefits since it also helps prevent fertilizer runoff, which produces algae blooms. And it costs less and draws and supports a host of diverse and fascinating creatures. Win-win.
Homegrown National Park
https://homegrownnationalpark.org
Maryland Native Plant Society/Washington College Conference
September 6-7. To register: https://mdflora.org/fall-conference
Upper Eastern Shore Beekeepers Association
Bee swarm video: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=bee+swarm+videos&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:260f2fd9,vid:sDZa3h5NFUc,st:0
Longtime journalist and essayist Nancy Taylor Robson is also the author of four books: Woman in The Wheelhouse; award-winning Course of the Waterman; A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, a Modern Love Story; and OK Now What? A Caregiver’s Guide to What Matters, which she wrote with Sue Collins, RN.
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