Let the mystery bee ~ September 21, 1995

David Heiller

Last Saturday I went out to my one bee hive to take their honey. I started the year out with three hives, but two of them died in a cold spell in late April. That was a sign of things to come.

Before I went to the honey bees last week, I made a side trip to a nest of yellow jackets. I discovered them when I was moving an old brush pile about a month ago. They came bub­bling out of the ground so fast I literally ran away.

Bees are a lot of work, especially in a bad year.

But with my bee suit on and a spade in hand, I dug them up on Saturday morning without a sting. I found their eggs and squished them between my fingers, and found the queen and squished her too, and I hate to admit it but it felt good. We play God all the time. It’s just more noticeable with bees and wasps.

It must be man’s baser nature that if it’s a threat to people, it has a lesser value. Those yellow jackets pollinate flowers and vegetables and apple trees just like the honey bees. They sting just like honeybees too. They just don’t make honey, and I just don’t want to have them around.

This is what those bees were supposed
to do for us, but did not in 1995.

Then I went to the bee hive. It had two boxes on top which I thought would be full of honey, after the wonderful summer we had. But I was disappointed to find that the boxes were almost empty. I ended up with just two frames of honey, when I should have had 15 or 20.

I don’t know why. A friend, Sandy Lourey, Moose Lake, had gathered 30 full frames of honey from her two hives the previous weekend. She extracted nine gallons of honey from them.

When I told Sandy about my situation, she asked how old the queen was. I told her three years. “Too old,” she said. She learned in a class that you shouldn’t even try to raise bees with a three-year-old queen. We both agreed we had to learn how to re-queen a hive. Maybe, someday.

Then I called Lee Anderson, who lives five miles away, to see how his bees had done. Maybe I was looking for bad news in the back of my mind. Misery loves company.

But Lee had mostly good news. The first thing he told me was that his son, Chris, age 16, got first place at the Carlton County Fair for a bee display that he made with a frame full of live bees in a plastic box. He went to the state fair with it and got a blue ribbon there. Lee and his wife, Karen, sounded pretty proud of their son, and rightfully so. Chris belongs to the Happy Hour 4-H Club of Kettle River.

Lee hadn’t extracted his honey yet, but he thinks it’s going to be a good year. When he and Chris were gathering bees for the fair display, they found that the frames were full of honey right out to the edges.

He figures his two hives should each yield 20 to 30 frames, depending on whether he kills them off or not. Killing a hive is a sad occasion, Lee said. He does it only when he needs the ex­tra honey, which he did during two recent rainy summers when the bees didn’t produce much and his supply dwindled. He kills them by vacuuming them up with a Shop Vac, then bury­ing them.

Not only is it sad to kill off a hive of bees that worked hard for themselves, and consequently for you, it can be counter-productive. If a hive makes it through the winter, it is healthier the following spring, and gets a head start on honey production, and therefore gives you more honey, unless the queen gets old. This beekeeping stuff is complicated. It’s a guessing game whether to kill off a bee hive, and a moral dilemma too.

One of Lee’s hives did bomb out, which made me feel better. He had put a new queen into a hive this spring, and she kept walking out. Lee stayed there for two hours, putting her back in the box, watching her come out, and putting her in again. Finally she stayed.

But Lee was suspicious of that queen. When his partner, Erv Prachar of Willow River, came out a month later, they checked that hive and found only 50 bees, when they should have found maybe 20,000.

“They hadn’t made one drop of honey,” Lee said with disgust.

Bees are interesting, even for a lazy beekeeper like me. I’m not serious about bees. I want to check them in the spring, put out a new swarm or two, check on them once or twice in the summer, add a box of frames if they need it, and take the honey in the fall.

It’s an approach that usually works. Usually I get honey like Sandy and Lee, enough to eat for a year or two, enough to give away a few jars to friends. Enough to justify the cost of a new swarm, which is about $35.

But this year the hobby didn’t pay off. It bothers me a little. But life is full of mysteries, and in this case I’ll let the mystery bee.