Beekeeping

interior of beehive super end of summer 2004

There are exactly five good reasons to keep bees and exactly two good reasons not to keep bees.

 jar of honey    honey jars
Pro
  1. When one keeps bees, one has gotta learn about bees, and they are really really interesting.
  2. In addition, merely the process of keeping beehives is life expanding: One is obliged to do new things, learns skills, meets people that one otherwise never would have known.
  3. It's really fun to talk to people about bees once they discover that one keeps them.
  4. With a lot of work one can jar tons of honey every summer and give it to one's friends.
  5. With even more work one can make honey wine (mead) and drink it or give it away, although this has about a one or two-year turnaround time.
Con
  1. When one keeps bees one finds that it takes up a fair amount of one's time... and maybe one should be doing something else.
  2. When one keeps bees, one is gonna get stung which is potentially lethal and at the very least often a drag.

Some photos of honey extraction from the honey frames that I steel from my bees.  The knife plugs into the wall, heats up, and is used to scrape and melt the caps off the honeycomb...

hotknife and honey frame 1


This frame is about one quarter of the way to being uncapped...

Hotknife and honey frame 2

The honey extractor is a simple centrifuge that holds uncapped frames.  The frames are spun around whipping the honey against the interior wall, whereupon it drips down to the bottom of the cylinder. Frames are reversed periodically to empty both sides, hopefully without damanging the beeswax comb. In this way the bees can start over again next year on the empty frames without having to build a lot of new comb.

Honey extractor interior

Honey pours out of the extractor and through a filter into a bucket.  Yes, a bucket of honey. Knock yourself out.

Honey through filter


honey jars from 2003 harvest


Addendum: An old blog entry
Assuming one survives being stung, one will have mildly amusing anecdotes to tell about getting stung.  The following is an excerpt from a web log concerning a good learning-day in the bee yard.

Saturday, May 17th, 2003... beekeeping
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I started [the web log] with the idea that i'd use it to keep track of problems I'm working on. My main tool for solving problems is learning. Today was a very good day. I learned a lot.

One thing I learned is that [the queen bee named] Jenny has been remarkably prolific throughout the last couple months, has produced a 50-thousand-strong hive. The good rain and snow this year have helped considerably.

I learned that a fully primed smoker takes a bit more trouble than I am used to but is well worth it. I learned that it is possible to tear apart an entire beehive if one is careful, so that one is surrounded by thousands upon thousands of bees like a living carpet at arm's length. I learned that a torn apart hive makes several hundred guard bees very very very unhappy. And I learned that I was not really doing a good job sealing up my bee veil. I learned so many things.

I learned that my veil was bee-permeable in a sudden flash of intuition. I was standing there looking at the torn-apart hive thinking about how I was going to put it back together, where the brood was, whether they were making new queens, all that cool bee strategy stuff. Suddenly I halted in mid reflection because there were a lot of very angry bees inside my veil, all busily stinging me. I realized that they blamed me for destroying their home. I conceded that this was a valid point of view. It was then that I made a very bad mistake.

I began to run towards the barn. And I pulled off the veil and the hat. This was the mistake. The bees followed me into the barn and together we did a sort of a dance for about ten minutes. The dance consisted of me jumping about and flailing sort of like Lucky in Waiting for Godot. This comparison did not occur to me at the time. The bees meanwhile continued to swarm around, land, and sting me.

It is interesting to note that when one is running away from fifty thousand bees with a bunch of them in hot pursuit and a bunch more inside one's personal space stinging one on the face, the following thought does not pass through one's mind: "Oh I think I'll let the ones inside the veil keep stinging me as long as they like."

Upon relocating [my dog] Maia, who was also running very much afoul of the bees, and upon taking stock, I realized I had no choice but to go back and put the hive back together. I re-cinched the veil, made everything as bee-proof as I could manage with some help from [host and property owner] AE and went back to work. No sooner had I gotten the first brood chamber back on the bottom board then I had another realization.  At the risk of being tediously repetitious, I realized I had a bunch more really really angry bees inside my veil. This time as I ran towards the barn the following thought occurred to me: "Oh I think I'll let the ones inside the veil keep stinging me as long as they like." I kept the hat and the veil on, because tearing them off is much much worse. I was quite pleased about having learned this.

By this time Maia is in an extreme panic--although she is 40 yards away she is still constantly being harrassed and stung--and I've picked up about 40 stings so she's probably got close to as many. We're both extremely hot and dehydrated and the hive is still almost completely disassembled.  It was at this point that I really began to enjoy myself.

Jonathan kindly lent us his garage, we hydrated Maia, he helped me become bee-impervious by adding some nice winter scarves, and I calmed down having finally gotten all the bees out of my clothing. There's nothing like having a quiet bee embedded in the clothes at your neck who suddenly starts to go bzzzzz on her way to trying to sting you again. For ten minutes after I thought it was all over, different parts of my clothing would come to life and try to sting me. The novelty of this wore thin in a hurry.

It was at this point that Andrew called. My cell phone has this really intense bright blue glow, in fact so intense it glows through clothing. Like the Cerenkov radiation coming out of a Triga reactor, though this comparison did not occur to me at the time. Unfortunately I didn't remember that my phone was in my overalls front-center pocket left on "vibrate". Jonathan said I looked like a teletubby frantically trying to perform a self-appendectomy.

...
Codacil: Apitherapy notes from the web

The previous entry neglected to mention just how much 40 bee stings hurt. For some reason yesterday they didn't hurt much at all. Today they hurt a bit more. From this web page

"Fifty to one hundred stings can cause a cramp, temporary shortness of breath, the skin turns blue or rapid pulse and symptoms of temporary paralysis follow."

Scaling this by body weight, Maia was in a lot more trouble than me. And as you rack them up it gets worse. Some people regularly survive 1000 stings...  and a little more web searching turns up this article. The author describes the inconclusive / negative results of clinical studies on apitherapy as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.

"The lead researcher called the results [from a 1941 study] 'very discouraging,' and no human trial since has led to a different conclusion."

For MS he goes on to say the results are hazier still. Naturally as alternative medecine, anecdotes in support of bee sting therapy abound. And as is often the case this has unfortunate consequences.

"The benefits of this therapy are still uncertain, but the dangers are clear. Approximately 2 percent of people have allergic reactions to stings from bees and wasps. A severe reaction after only three or four bee stings is extremely rare, but the danger grows with the number of stings. (Beekeepers and their families in particular are likely to be highly sensitive to bee venom). A person who's having a severe reaction to a bee sting may develop hives on the skin and swelling around the eyes, lips, throat, and tongue. He or she may vomit, slur spoken words, show signs of mental confusion, and even struggle to breathe. Soon the person may lose consciousness. These are signs of anaphylactic shock, a condition that can be fatal if not treated quickly. If you notice these signs, call 911 right away.

Anyone undergoing bee-venom therapy should have a bee sting kit handy. The kit includes a syringe and a dose of epinephrine (also known as adrenaline), a drug that can save your life if you go into anaphylactic shock. It's also a good idea for a beginner get a single 'test sting' on the knee or forearm before undergoing a full bee barrage. But remember, the fact that your body tolerated the first 49 stings doesn't automatically mean it can handle the 50th."

(Author credit reads in part "Chris Woolston, M.S., is a health and medical writer with a master's degree in biology. He is a contributing editor at Consumer Health Interactive, and was the staff writer at Hippocrates, a magazine for physicians.")

This might explain why it didn't hurt too badly yesterday; I was completely amped on adrenaline. Sue Hubbel says you get a sequence over a dozen days from 1 sting up to 10 or so and you're desensitized for the summer. I wonder if she's right about this.
Convolvulus arvensis
Meadow bindweed: A big part of the nectar supply

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