Why I Bee

The year was 2002, and my guys had put in a hard day of clearing brush and mapping the site of Tzeme’, located west of Merida in the Yucatan Peninsula. The site, a beautiful Classic period Maya site, was owned by the Kinchil community, and the rancher who kept his herd there was named Severo Canul.

He also had bees.

After work, Severo asked me if I wanted to help him harvest the honey – to ‘castrar’ the hives. I figured I would be allowed to watch from a safe distance, but was secretly excited at the prospect. My journal for the day reads:

I figure I’ll just watch, but pretty soon I am being suited up with all kinds of equipment. An extra shirt (You didn’t bring an extra?), string to tie up my pants legs, a bee bonnet, the works. Then I am handed an oil can, filled with corn cobs. It has a set of bellows on the back, and forces air through the smoking corncobs, directing the smoke in the direction of the bees as they try to protect their hive.

I cannot even begin to describe the experience. I had heard that bees fan the hive with their wings to keep it cool. I did not expect the sweet smelling breeze that came out of the hive when they opened it. The bees swarmed all over, but very few found an opening that they took advantage of. I schlepped hives back and forth to the barrel, I smoked them out, I watched the honey extraction….it was simply magnificent!

The coolest part of the operation, the barrel. Severo took the screen out, honeycomb intact, and scraped the outermost layer off, breaking the seal to the honey inside. He then set four screens inside the barrel and began to turn the crank. The crank spun the screens inside the barrel really fast, forcing the honey out through centrifugal force. He then turned the screens over, so that the other side faced out, and turned the crank again. Handed me the empty screens, and grabbed the next ones. I took the screens back to the hives, where they were carefully placed inside. Fascinating process. Seven hives, all of them half-emptied, and over 200 pounds of honey extracted. And one quart for me.

Sweetest taste there is.

Since that moment, I have been reading and studying and asking questions and wishing for bees. I talked about bees when my wife and I bought our house in New Orleans, but the backyard was too small. Not for the bees. For my wife, who declined to share what she considered ‘her’ space with stinging insects.

I talked about bees with the beekeeper who lived down the street from us, and offered to be his unpaid help for the experience. He offered to sell me the bee business, but said he really didn’t want anybody doing it with him. I talked stingless bees with beekeepers from Yucatan and Guatemala (the honey is highly prized and very expensive) and I talked edible wasps with hunters in Hunucma. I got stung by wasps and bees over and over again, falling out of trees that I had no business being in, doing experiments to see if I could learn more about (ouch) the habits (OUCH) of bees in their native (OUCH!) habitat.

And last year, I moved from New Orelans to Vicksburg. One of the criteria that we used for deciding on a house was whether there was a large enough yard for me to keep bees.

I decided to keep bees in a top bar hive, and purchased one online, putting it together in my garage. The idea behind the top bar hive is that it is almost free to build, and the bees fluorish well in the space.

I bought the hive, rather than building it from scratch, so that I could see what it looked like. I am hoping to build the next one myself…

It is suitably far from my wife’s path to where she is actually excited about the bees, too. And this weekend, thanks to my sister, I will be getting my own bees – she is giving me a gift of a package of bees for my garden.

This blog will document the process. I can’t wait.