The Apiary
by Christopher Goetz
Growing up in suburban upstate New York and raised by parents with an affinity for the outdoors, I was indoctrinated early on with an understanding of the intrinsic value of the environment and all its inhabitants. In my twenty years, I had no shortage of environmental concerns to draw my attention and test my capacity for worry. One worry that stuck to my radar in my middle school years was the loss of pollinators worldwide, a crisis with far-reaching implications. It didn’t take long before I discovered the world of beekeeping and determined it would be a way to for me to feel that I was having a positive impact and combating this loss. My interest piqued, I dug further into the issue, compiling well-founded justification to bring to my parents in a cogent plea for the purchase of a beehive. It took less convincing than expected, perhaps they were just happy to see me excited. Within a few weeks I was assembling three beehives in the basement with the help of my father. The scent of the tung oil we used to stain the cedar hives will linger in my olfactory memory. Beekeeping would become a hobby that my father and I shared for years.
Mid-April was when we picked up packages of bees from a fellow beekeeper, having split some of his own hives to serve as propagules for new ones. Stacks of rectangular boxes comprised of wooden frames and mesh screen walls were unloaded from his truck, each containing several thousand bees packed tightly and crawling over one another. In no obvious order, he handed boxes into the group of hobbyist beekeepers assembled around the truck. The queen bee was enclosed alone in a small carrier that was taped to the inside of the box and surrounded by worker bees compelled by her pheromones. A hole was drilled in one side of the small cage with a piece of opaque congealed sugar substance behind it. The beekeeper removes the cork in front of the sugar which allows worker bees to then chew through and release the queen. This provides her and her compatriots some time to acclimate to their new conditions. We received three mesh boxes in the morning and returned home to inoculate our hives.
It is a rather brutish introduction process consisting of opening the package and forcefully shaking the bees out into the hive. We got about eighty percent in through the top of the hive and set the rest beside the hive to find their way in eventually. It was essential to wear bee suits during this process as shaking bees in any context is a surefire path to aggravation. Over the next few days I was anxious for the bees, hoping they would take to their new home instead of picking up and flying away. Luckily they remained.
I wanted to designate the grassy span along the south side of our vegetable garden an apiary, even though we only had three hives. Honeybee colonies can be competitive, sometimes robbing resources from each other, so we spaced the hives around thirty feet apart to deter that. The southern boundary of the garden is close to a small meadow heavily populated by goldenrod, a fall flowering species that was a favorite of the bees and would serve as an excellent nectar source while gearing up for winter. The apiary would be a significant place for several years in my life and within it my confidence in beekeeping grew.
The summer was when I could devote the most time to the bees, and visiting the apiary to watch them became a constant part of my daily schedule. It’s best to minimize disruption to hives and let them find their rhythm. I brought a black folding chair outside to sit and observe more serenely. I gained comfort in my active admiration of the bees. I felt generous energy released while watching their cooperation and relaxed satisfaction drawn from their finely tuned coordination. Despite the surface-level erratic quality of their movement, when I had the hive open during inspection there was a calming effect produced by their work. For hours I could sit by the meadow with the bees and enjoy the pleasant weather the summer months bring to New York. I became intrigued, even entranced, by the behaviors that governed, fueled, and organized their insect lives. My fascination filled me with questions surrounding the way thousands of individuals fit together and spin into a cohesive group.
In the backyard, while thinking about flowers and picking up sticks for a bonfire, I hear the vocals of a wood thrush in the woods. There’s agitation in its voice and I think how we may detect complaint in animal behavior, and whether we have that capacity at the insect level. I wonder how worker bees feel as they appear to expend endless effort to benefit the hive. I cannot imagine it is comfortable to be squeezed into the tight space of a beehive, crowded by your kin, and breathing the hot stale air churned through the hive by thousands of tiny wings. I question whether they are exhibiting altruism out of choice and if the work these bees perform is mindless.
It is the tireless ministrations of the bees that keep the hive functioning. Female bees do all the work for the colony and their roles are often delegated by age. The brood is overseen and succored by nurse bees who are between zero and ten days old. Middle aged bees between ten and twenty days are dispersed through the hive and outside it, cleaning and guarding, as well as fanning with their wings to cool the hive on hot days. The oldest females, twenty to thirty days old, serve as the foragers, traveling from flower to flower collecting nectar and pollen to bring back to the hive.
Just four years past the creation of my apiary, my bee colonies died out, having succumb to one of the primary threats to honeybee populations, the varroa mite. Varroa mites invade colonies and lay eggs among the brood of the bees. The young mites hatch and parasitize the bee larvae, causing malformations and spreading disease. The main treatment to prevent their takeover is the spraying of hives with harsh chemicals to kill the mites, an action I avoided in the pursuit of naturality in my apiary.
When I am asked if I have any pets, I always cite my two dogs, though I waver when it comes to mentioning my bees. I’ve come to know there is a pool of people who harbor distaste for bees, including honeybees. Sometimes it is fear driving this perception which is unfortunate because there is an undeniable brilliance to be observed and appreciated within insects.
I was stung more often during my early days beekeeping and it was usually because of my mistakes or carelessness. After a length of time and width of experience I deemed sufficient, I decided to forego a bee suit while opening the hive for an inspection. Fortunately, I don’t have an allergy to bee venom because I received nine bee stings in quick succession. Oddly enough I think it brought me closer to apiculture.
My experiences with honeybees took me into a realm of expansive thinking. The sensation of a honeybee walking down my forearm brings me into a space of empathy. As one walks around on me occasionally licking my skin and then flying away amicably, I feel close to my environment. I would feel in tune with my surroundings once I’d been vetted by the bees.
On a nice day in June, I walk outside to the front corner of the vegetable garden stopping before the peonies in bloom. Ants consistently climb all over them interested in their viscid syrupy sweetness. The familiar flowers are comforting. I remember how often the bees would visit these plants, enjoying their sweet and plentiful nectar every summer.
The bees are gone but I still enjoy thinking about them and how they helped me put a more critical lens to the insects and plants I encounter. I remember their hard work and reminisce on their drive for survival. Supporting the flowering species that I planted a couple years ago to help the bees will still be valuable to other pollinators. Still, I miss beekeeping and feel disappointment in myself. I feared that if we chemically treated the bees for mites it would endanger a greater pool of life, so I neglected to do so. I believed to be using better judgement, though that decision may have shortened the apiary’s longevity.
We had neighbors not too far away that also had honeybee colonies, but they did not follow the same natural strategy I committed to. Each year a person donning a hazmat suit would dispense clouds of chemicals over their hives. Prior to getting started I did a lot of research on beekeeping, enough to believe I could keep productive colonies alive using no chemical intervention. Quickly it was clear that experience was the most valuable teacher.
The feeling as though I’d fallen short in my hobbyist venture has conspired to build a wall of hesitancy around my urge to start beekeeping again. I can justify new strategies for protecting my bees from parasites and disease, though years later I don’t have full confidence to execute those new decisions.
There is no complete certainty that chemical treatments will successfully eliminate the varroa mites. The same people who sprayed their hives also used chemicals to manicure their lawn. It was simple to make a sickening connection when I heard how their golden retriever, at just four years old, developed cancer and died. I think of my own dogs and see a cautionary tale that illustrates the sacrifice of life.
At least for a little while, I think most people could find themselves marveling at the bees while storing their resources, tending to young, and contending life in a language we understand. When I played caretaker to this insect society, I found it was a path to introspection. Through their decline I could see the brevity of life in the face of infiltration. At every scale in our relationships with nature we should recognize the difference between immersion and insertion. Doing so introduces mutualism that improves our ability to distinguish when human intervention endangers and when it protects.
Cultivating patience and sitting in my folding chair, I felt immersed in the apiary and did my best to have neutral effect on the bees. Reflecting broadly on the loss of pollinators, it is intriguing to contemplate the likelihood of finding a sustainable balance in how we connect ourselves to different natural systems and affect the species inside them.
Even though it has been several years since the hives in my garage had bees occupying them, I still try to remain engaged with learning about apiculture. I mostly read about commercial beekeeping, which is significantly different from what I went through with my hobbyist apiary. It is deeply intertwined with agriculture and much of the money comes from pollination jobs rather than the raw products of bees like honey or wax.
For commercial beekeepers, the queen is the focus as she is the one that propagates the rest of the hive, and the success of a queen is measured by her laying rate of brood. The industry of queen-rearing that emerged with commercial beekeeping is valued at $1.2 billion. In this commercial lens, the queen bees are expendable tools that will be removed when their laying rate declines. It saddens me to see bees from this perspective when I valued my colonies for such different reasons. Ultimately, objectives will shape ethics, and it isn’t hard to see how we reached this point when we so naturally position resource acquisition opposite environmental quality.
There are devastating facts written into the present and future of commercial beekeeping. One positive that came from my cowering in the inevitabilities of industry was learning to lessen the residual guilt and anticipatory fear resulting from my shortcomings in hobbyist beekeeping. I go back and forth, but I think if I start beekeeping now, I will again try to do it naturally without chemicals.
My restraint in buying bees and repopulating my hives boils down to the self-criticisms that feed the culpability I feel for the death of my bees. It was a protracted struggle to realize that I am almost always my harshest critic. By recognizing my insignificance and tacking ‘hobbyist’ onto my beekeeping endeavors, I was gifted some freedom from self-judgement. Keeping healthy hives can be a dispiriting adventure with a variable schedule of success and defeat. Even so, it was easier to enjoy days when I would walk around the apiary and feel the once hollow boxes hum.
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Artist’s note: The majority of this was written many months ago and in the last few weeks while given the chance to revisit the story, I’ve enjoyed reviewing how my thoughts and writing have changed since its inception. Striving to learn how we adapt to new settings and peering into the details of the ecosystems around us are rewarding efforts that enable our growth. We are constantly pursued by deflating realities, and the motivations that drive a reflective mindset are often suffocated by the stress of our daily urgencies. Fortunately, there is always an enticing chance to awaken and cultivate the unavoidability that sticks us to our interests and hobbies. It’s nothing short of interesting how we pick up and let down and torture each other. At least for a while we can reflect and share gratitude in the sanctity of nature outside ourselves.
