The Accidental Beekeeper

I never wanted to be a beekeeper. I mean, I was all for saving the bees and whatever, but at a theoretical level. On a personal level, not so much.Then early in 2013 one of our neighbors decided he really wanted to keep bees. And by “keep,” he meant he wanted to keep them at our house, as his wife made it very clear that she wasn’t having 40,000 armed insects sharing a backyard with their 3-year-old son.

So somehow here I am, two years and four hives later, keeping bees. My bees. Don’t tell anyone. My husband, Patrick, and our neighbor, Charlie, think they’re our communal bees, but they’re not. They’re mine. I pet them. I talk to them. I bring them little droplets of juice on the end of my finger to snack on. I may have promised to knit each of them a tiny little sweater to ward off the winter cold.

My transition from civilian to beekeeper was slow, I admit. I hid in the house while Charlie and Patrick “installed” the bees. This is a process not at all like installing an air conditioner or a new pope. It’s far more chaotic. Basically, you buy a “nuc,” or a box ‘o bees, which has been shipped on a tractor-trailer up from Georgia, and is, as a collective, not in a good mood. They have been uprooted, jostled, stirred and shaken; they are unamused.

Aside: Last week, a tractor-trailer loaded with bees overturned on the interstate in Washington state. Forty million bees. Forty MILLION bees, already cranky from all the uprooting, jostling and shaking; overturned and suddenly free. Let’s just say people were stung.

But back to my bees, which were not dumped unceremoniously onto hot asphalt. They were offloaded into a bee yard—in this case, the yard of Ray Lackey, a Long Island beekeeper with 30-plus years’ experience. Ray claims he has been stung only four times. I’m pretty sure he’s lying. Everybody who has ordered bees drives up, gets their sealed (oh please God let them be really sealed) box ‘o bees deposited into their car, and then toddles off home, repeating the prayer of their choice that the 10,000 angry bees in the back don’t find some way out of the box.

I can’t really speak to the transport process with any great insight, as I was preparing for the bees’ arrival at home by locking down all the windows and barricading myself safely inside, in the unlikely event that Charlie and Patrick even made it home alive.

Per Ray’s directions, the buzzing box of death was placed next to the bees’ future home, a brand-new, gleaming white yuppie hive, and everybody had a chance to settle down. The boys had a beer, the girls had some honey, everybody went to their respective corners and vowed to start clean tomorrow.

I was, not coincidentally, out the next day when Charlie performed the installation. Witnesses tell me he donned his white hazmat beekeeper hat and veil and his sting-resistant long gloves. A few minutes later another neighbor called to report that Charlie had just run screaming past her house, bees in hot pursuit. I decided to stay out a little longer.

When the coast was clear I edged cautiously back home, told the boys that if those damn bees made so much as one false move toward the kids or dogs who played in our yard I was heading out there with a can of Raid, and embarked on a stringent program of ignoring the bees.

The hive was tucked away in a corner of the yard, and I wasn’t the only one ignoring the bees. We all sort of figured that if they needed our help they’d ask for it, otherwise we didn’t want to intrude on whatever it was they were doing in there. At some undetermined point in the future, maybe in a year or two, we would politely knock on the door and request some honey, but other than that, the whole plan was pretty vague.

Next time: Things get ugly.

In addition to being an accidental beekeeper, Lisa Daffy is a freelance writer and marketing consultant in Southampton. Her email address is lisadaffy@optonline.net