I believe that beekeeping is one of the most enjoyable things you can do with your clothes on. When I teach beekeeping, I always emphasize the importance of having your clothes on when you open a beehive.
I have kept bees for almost all of the last thirty years in four places in the West: San Francisco with its cool fog; South Central Oregon, where spring arrives late and winter early; Portland, Oregon, where winter is not only chill but wet; and most recently in Tucson, where summer is torrid, and Africanized bees are a challenge. I liked San Francisco best because that is where I began to learn the craft and because my experience keeping bees there reflected the character of that unique and odd city.
Whatever the location, keeping bees is much like playing chess with nature. As with chess, one can learn the basics fairly quickly. Also, as with chess, becoming good at it is much harder than it first appears, and developing any real level of expertise takes years, if ever. There is a saying among long-time beekeepers: having bees is easy; keeping them is hard, damned hard. Bees do nothing invariably. Although I might sound as though I know a lot about bees, I do not. After three decades with bees—typically about two dozen hives, in four places with differing climates and conditions—I feel I know just enough to begin. Over the years, my bees have often pointed out my ignorance, sometimes quite painfully.
I started keeping bees almost as a fluke. I had become interested in beekeeping in 1988 after reading an article in The New Yorker by Sue Hubble, a writer who had become a commercial beekeeper in her forties. I decided beekeeping wasn’t practical for me at that time since I was busy with two small children and my own consulting practice—and because I lived in San Francisco with about 800,000 other people. One evening in the mid-90s, however, I was going to a meeting on geographical information systems (GIS), about which I had seen an announcement in the paper. As I was looking for that meeting in the local community center, I happened to pass by a room in which the San Francisco Beekeepers Association was meeting. On a whim, I changed my mind and joined that meeting. Since then I have attended at least a couple of hundred meetings on beekeeping but never one on GIS.
When I tell people about my experience with bees, particularly in San Francisco, many are impressed—until I explain that two dozen colonies is a relatively small number; commercial beekeepers typically have several thousand colonies, and one has more than 80,000. The words hive and colony are generally interchangeable. Both are a group of bees living together with a queen. A hive of bees, a beehive, usually refers to a group of bees maintained by a beekeeper, living in a stack of boxes such as one sees in fields next to the highway. A colony, in contrast, is a more formal term either for bees in beekeeper boxes or for feral bees in a tree, a water meter box, or your attic.
Keeping bees in San Francisco was a challenge due to several factors. In such a densely populated city finding a location to keep bees is difficult. Also, many people have a fear of bees and are reluctant to have beehives nearby. That problem is exacerbated by the fact that at least one out of every two residents, including children, is an attorney with a litigious attitude. Finally, there is the simple fact of engaging in such an endeavor in what some people think is a psychiatric petting zoo based on news stories of its politics and cultural clashes. My experience with bees in San Francisco honed my sense of humor about this unusual craft. For example, I fantasize about telling people that I am in the livestock business and have several hundred thousand head. Of course, I would neglect to mention that my stock has six legs and not four, although I would of course brag that I never have to brand them or use ear tags. One of the advantages of keeping bees is that people think that you are a few bubbles off plumb and subject to irrational acts, so they don’t mess with you.
I have many stories from a decade of keeping bees in San Francisco. For example, according to the old saw, necessity is the mother of invention, and in San Francisco, beekeepers certainly have to be inventive to find a place for their hives—on rooftops, in community gardens, on balconies. One long-time beekeeper practiced urban guerrilla beekeeping, hiding colonies in brushy areas next to busy thoroughfares. I kept bees in many places in the city. I lived in a row house in the Sunset District, where my backyard was about 25 by 60. Despite its small size, I sometimes had as many as a dozen colonies there. Fortunately, I had understanding neighbors and high fences. I also kept bees at two community gardens, on the campus of City College of San Francisco, and on public land a few miles south of San Francisco. I kept half a dozen colonies in back of a business in the Haight Ashbury District, and I had to carry the colonies through the office because there was no other access to the back yard.
One of the more interesting places I had bees was at the home of a man named Jim whose young adult daughter was paralyzed with multiple sclerosis. He had read that bee sting therapy was helpful in some cases for that disease, and he contacted me about putting two or three hives of bees in his backyard so that he could take bees and use them to sting his daughter. After about a year, he realized that the bee stings were not helping her, but he invited me to continue keeping my bees in his yard because he liked watching them from his dining room while he ate breakfast and drank his morning coffee. I kept bees there even after his daughter died, and only removed them when Jim was diagnosed with terminal leukemia.
I had many beekeeping friends in San Francisco, every one odd in some way, a sort of character trait among beekeepers there—except for me. Steve kept his colonies on the roof of a six floor apartment on Van Ness at Geary as well as surreptitiously on some property of the SF Water Department where he worked near Fisherman’s Wharf. He moved small colonies between the two on the No. 47 bus. Only in San Francisco. I am still in touch with Steve nearly twenty years after leaving San Francisco. Recently, he sent me photos of newly-painted hive boxes that I had sold him when I moved away.
And then there is my friend David. Although David is quite intelligent, he sometimes falls into the trap where his cleverness outmaneuvers his smarts. For example, when he first started with bees, he put a small hive on the living room table in his tenth-floor apartment on Russian Hill and kept the living room window open so the bees could go out and forage—because of the climate in San Francisco, there are few mosquitoes or flies, so windows commonly don’t have screens. That was certainly a clever idea on David’s part, but there was one hitch: often the bees would become confused and return through the window of a different apartment. Responding to many resident complaints, the landlord began to investigate. From the roof, he could tell which apartment was the source of the bees, and my friend was nearly evicted. Only in San Francisco.
It was David from whom I got my first bees. Although he had been keeping bees only three years at the time, he had over one hundred colonies. As with most beekeepers, he started with only a few colonies, maybe four, which he kept on some property he had in the Sacramento Valley—after realizing that keeping bees on the table in his living room on Russian Hill was quite clever but not smart. In his second or third year with bees, he bought more than a hundred colonies intending to rent them out for almond pollination, an important source of income for commercial beekeepers. Being an accountant with his own successful practice, he did that because he figured he could amortize his investment in a couple of years and thereafter reap a big profit. This was another example of the difference between clever and smart. Being caught up in his grand plan for achieving financial success in keeping bees, David forgot to consider a key point: the busiest and most important time of the year for both beekeepers and accountants is early spring. While accountants are hectically preparing tax returns, beekeepers are just as busy placing their colonies in almond orchards for pollination and doing the necessary work afterwards to prepare them for summer nectar flows. The number of colonies David owned followed an interesting curve: over the next few years, the number went from four to over a hundred to about four. He now has none.
My dear friend Paul kept bees on top of a high rise in the Financial District, on the roof of a church in the Tenderloin, at several community gardens, and even his own backyard. I met Paul when I got my first two hives. He was in his second year and knew only a little more about bees than I. We learned beekeeping together and had many interesting adventures with bees over the next decade. He became one of my best friends. Our style of beekeeping was similar, and we simply liked working our hives together. One of us would often say to the other when we were uncertain about what to do, “What do you think?” The standard reply was “I don’t know. What do you think?” That exchange evolved into a joke between us.
After I moved to Oregon and then to Tucson, every time I went to in San Francisco I would stay with Paul. We would go inspect some of his hives and over meals and drinks retell stories of our adventures and misadventures with bees, the sort of things that are an inseparable part of beekeeping—helping each other move colonies, catching swarms, being officers in the local bee club, teaching beekeeping classes, and so on. In addition to beekeeping, we supported each other through the tough times we each had. He has since died, and I miss him greatly. (https://turn-stone.com/paul-here/)
I learned a lot about bees and beekeeping from an old guy named Louie, one of those legendary San Francisco characters that the city produces. When I met Louie, he was in his late 80s and nearly blind with macular degeneration. I would drive him to the place where he kept his bees and help him inspect his colonies by describing what I would see and answering his questions as best I could. He in turn would answer my questions about beekeeping. I well recall his answer when I would ask about doing something that I now realize was foolish, “Well, you could do that,” often leaving unsaid the obvious: “but that would be a big mistake.” When I asked questions about things like the proper color for a hive or about a fancy piece of equipment, he would say, “The bees don’t care.”
On the way back from the beeyard, we would stop at McDonalds where he would order a double cheeseburger and a senior coffee. Always. During those meals he would tell me stories about running away from home in Maine in his mid-teens, ending up in Missoula where he lived alone above the J.C. Penny store whose manager and wife seemed to be sort of surrogate parents. It was in Missoula in the late 1920s that he began to keep bees. Once during the Depression, he hopped freight cars to ride the rails from Montana to Texas to attend a national beekeeping conference. He came to San Francisco just before WWII and found work as a sign painter. In his first months there, he was attending an outdoor music performance in Stern Grove when a swarm of bees landed on stage. He found a cardboard box, caught the swarm, and resumed beekeeping in his new home. By the time I knew him, he was well known as San Francisco’s Official Beekeeper, a ceremonial title awarded him by the city’s Board of Supervisors.
It was Louie who taught me a lot about capturing a swarm of bees. A swarm is the way a colony reproduces by dividing into two parts like an amoeba. First, the colony raises a new queen, and just before she emerges the old queen and about half the bees fly off in a group to start a new colony. The bees in the swarm almost always stop first a short distance from their old hive where they cluster, often hanging from a tree branch or an eave. From there scouts go out to search for a new place to live, such as a hollow tree. Based on what the scouts find, the bees somehow make a decision and soon fly off as a group for their new home. When people see a swarm cluster, they often are fearful and call to have the bees removed, not realizing that the bees will usually leave on their own in a few hours or days.
Beekeepers try to prevent their colonies from swarming because if a colony swarms, it will take a month for the new queen to produce bees to replace those that left with the swarm. Because of that interruption, a colony that swarms is unlikely to produce honey that season, and there is a chance that the new queen will be inferior or even be killed on a mating flight. Because swarming is the way a colony reproduces, however, it is nearly impossible to prevent it completely. It is akin to the challenge of preventing teenagers from having sex. In other words, despite the best of a beekeeper’s intentions, swarming is probably going to happen. When a beekeeper opens a hive and realizes that it has swarmed, the emotion that he or she feels is similar to that of a parent who goes into a teen’s bedroom one morning and realizes that the bed has not been slept in. Although, beekeepers try to keep their own colonies from swarming, they don’t mind swarm calls because they like to get swarms to use to increase or replenish their stock of bees.
In the late 90s, beekeeping was not nearly as popular as it is now. Louie was about the only person on the swarm list maintained by San Francisco public agencies—he was the person the police or fire department would contact if someone called about a swarm. Because his eyesight was failing, he could no longer respond to the requests, so he passed my number along to city agencies. As a result I had a chance to capture dozens of swarms. Before then, though, to help me learn various techniques, Louie would have me go along and coach me as I captured the swarm.
One thing I learned from Louie about swarm calls has been particularly useful. When we met the person on whose property the swarm had landed, Louie would almost immediately offer congratulations. The response, of course, was usually confusion bordering on incredulity, and the person would ask why. Louie would explain that according to legend, when a swarm of bees comes to your house or place of work, you are going to have good luck for the year. Almost without exception, the person would smile. It seems that almost everyone has a bit of superstitious nature and welcomes the prospect of a year of good luck. I continue to use Louie’s words, and I share the tip with other beekeepers as well.
In addition to calls about swarms, I got many others from people seeking advice on bees—often from new beekeepers. My daughter Rachel, who was a teenager at the time, had often overheard me giving information over the phone, enough so that when I wasn’t at home, she would confidently answer the questions of the callers. Despite that early exposure to beekeeping, she has dogs and horses rather than bees, preferring animals with four legs to those with six.
I’ve made my share of mistakes in beekeeping, especially in that first decade when I lived in San Francisco. I got a call one Sunday morning from a San Francisco Fire Department dispatcher about a swarm on Market Street in the Castro District. When I arrived, I saw that the swarm was hanging from a branch about fifteen feet up a slender tree next to the sidewalk. When I told the resident who called that I could not get the swarm because the tree was too spindly to support a ladder, he complained that I had to do something because the bees were flying into his window. I reported this back to the Fire Department dispatcher who said, “I think we can help. Don’t go anywhere” I was wondering what the dispatcher meant when I saw a huge SFFD hook and ladder truck pull up to the curb.
This being San Francisco, the arrival of the truck immediately drew a big crowd. The firefighters maneuvered the truck and extended the ladder up to the swarm. I confidently ascended the ladder without wearing a veil, the expert beekeepers demonstrating his expertise, and began shaking the swarm into a box. This almost never is a problem because the bees that have swarmed are not defending a colony and don’t sting. Not this time, though. When I began shaking the branch to dislodge the bees, they began to sting—a lot—and I soon got several dozen stings. I had no choice but to go down the ladder, put on a jacket and veil, and go back up to finish the job. The bees taught me two important lessons that day: swarms will occasionally sting when disturbed and, more importantly, I should never show off as a beekeeper. Bees are smarter than I am, and they have a strong tendency to punish arrogance.
About a year later, just up the street from that swarm, my friend Joe needed help moving a couple of hives from his backyard to a place in the country. He lived in a row house, so we had to carry the hives through his garage before loading them into my truck. We got the first one to my truck with no problem and slid it under the rack on the back and into the bed. The trouble began with the second one. It was taller and heavier than the first because it had a box of honey on top. It weighed about 120 pounds, and Joe and I were out of breath after schlepping it through his garage. We were relieved to rest it on the tailgate of my truck and catch our breath before sliding it into the bed. There was a problem, though: the hive was about a half inch too tall to fit under the crosspiece of the rack on my truck. Rather than go to all of the trouble of removing that crosspiece, we decided that we could merely tilt the stack of boxes a tiny bit so that it would clear the crosspiece. That was a big mistake, a David sort of mistake: tilting the hive was quite clever, but it was definitely not smart.
The smart thing to have done, as we realized later, was to simply remove the crosspiece, a five minute job. The reason our decision to tilt the hive was not smart is that in a typical colony, the hive boxes are merely stacked, and their weight holds them in place sitting on the ground. To move each colony, we were following the typical procedure of using a ratchet strap to hold the boxes together. The strap worked quite well as we carried the stack of boxes to my truck. When we tilted the stacked boxes on the second hive to clear the crosspiece, though, the weight of the boxes caused the strap to loosen just enough to create a gap through which bees began pouring out. Joe and I said something like, “Oh shit!” at the same time. There was nothing to do but quickly scoot the hive under the crosspiece and put it back together. That wasn’t quick enough, though, to prevent several hundred bees from escaping, bees that were already disturbed and defensive by having been shaken as Joe and I carried their colony to my truck. They began to attack me and Joe as well as passers-by. This was the Castro District, one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in San Francisco, with many pedestrians. Bees were flying everywhere, and people were swatting them and crossing the street to avoid them. The specter of lawsuits came immediately to my mind. Fortunately Joe had on a bee suit and did not get stung. I, however, was wearing only a veil. Another big mistake. There was nothing for me to do but start my truck and drive away as quickly as possible trying to see through the veil so that I would avoid hitting pedestrians fleeing the bees. Before it was all over, I had received at least 80 stings. Only it felt like more. Once again, the bees were good teachers with a thorough lesson plan.
When asked why I keep bees I reply it is because I think bees are interesting and because I like people. The first reason is because bees are social insects and a colony of bees is the organism—an individual bee cannot live alone. The queen is the equivalent of the female reproductive organ since after she emerges and mates with males, called drones, all she does is lay eggs. She does not lead the colony, forage for food, or protect the colony as do the workers. Similarly, drones are equivalent to the male reproductive organ. Their only job is to mate with queens. They do not forage or protect the colony. In fact, drones do not even have a stinger. A colony has the ability to allocate work among its members, make decisions, and reproduce itself.
The second reason is more important to me—I like the social aspect of beekeeping, connecting with other beekeepers, either near where I live through local beekeeping associations or through state and regional organizations. Before coming to Tucson in 2016, I was a member and officer of local bee clubs in San Francisco, San Mateo, Klamath Falls, and Portland. I still have beekeeping friends in all of those places, even San Francisco although I left there twenty years ago. All of those groups had a strong sense of community. They welcomed and recognized new members. They had interesting programs with a variety of speakers. They included newbies in all club activities, even presentations, and avoided having the same people running things and making presentations meeting after meeting. The clubs taught beginning beekeeping classes with members doing the teaching according to their interest or expertise. There was a sense of camaraderie. I miss those clubs and the fellowship of a community of beekeepers. I wish I could somehow still be an active member in them. Until recently, I was a member of the Southern Arizona Beekeepers Association, here in Tucson, but I have drifted away.
Until a couple of years ago, I kept about a dozen colonies here in Tucson, but right now, I don’t have any. There are several reasons. A primary one is that I don’t have a location isolated enough from people and animals that I feel comfortable keeping hives of Africanized bees, which are quite defensive. I don’t mind their defensiveness myself, and I am intrigued at how different they are from the more gentle European honey bees which are kept elsewhere in the country. Another is the impact and influence of social media on beekeepers in which Facebook groups have begun to supplant the camaraderie of local clubs, which seems to be the case here.
Although I still would like to have a handful of colonies, I don’t think I want a dozen any more, much less the two dozen I typically had over the years. Having that many colonies would require more time and effort that I would want or able to commit at this stage of my life. I still yearn for the fellowship of beekeepers, though, and deeply miss the lack of it.
Despite not having bees right now and bothered by the challenges of keeping bees here in Tucson, I still am proud to be a beekeeper. I am a member of the guild of an ancient craft whose traditions beekeepers celebrate and carry on today, whether as hobbyists in a large city or commercial operators with thousands of hives. Beekeeping is more than just bee husbandry, though. It has resonated through art and literature for thousands of years. Cave paintings from a hundred centuries ago show people gathering honey, as do drawings on Egyptian papyri and figures on pottery. Greeks and Romans wrote about bees and gave advice on how to keep them. Shakespeare mentions them several times in his plays, including this oft-repeated quote: “He is not worthy of the honey-comb that shuns the hives because the bees have stings.” Yeats writes about a cabin in Innisfree “with a hive for the honey-bee” to “live alone in the bee-loud glade.”
In one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes retires to Surrey where he wrote a book on raising queen bees, and the film “Mr. Holmes” refers to him and his beekeeping. Likewise the film “Ulee’s Gold” is a drama about a Florida beekeeper, played by Peter Fonda whose father Henry kept bees. By the way, Van Morrison’s splendid song, “Tupelo Honey,” is prominent in the film. There are bee hives on the roof of the Paris Opera House and Chicago City Hall. The Obamas had beehives at the White House. Edmund Hillary was a commercial beekeeper who waited to attempt Mt. Everest until he harvested honey for the season.
Here are other posts on turn-stone about bees and beekeeping: