…or, rather, honey that came as a surprise. Last Tuesday I popped out to the hives to do a mite inspection, and noticed to my horror that Colony A was in the middle of swarming. This is a disaster, because unlike the spring swarm where you can get two colonies if you are careful, the fall swarm weakens both colonies without giving them enough time to rebuild before the coming cold, leaving neither much chance of making it through the winter. Ugh.

But, luckily for me, that particular Tuesday was the beekeeper’s meeting, and Terry and I usually carpool there. We passed the farm on the way out, so I asked him if he’d take a look.

“That’s not a swarm,” he said. “That’s bee bearding. Is your hive honeybound?”

Honeybound is when the hive is so full of honey that there’s no more room for the bees to work. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that’s exactly the situation here; last time I checked, there was a lot of space left, and I was worried that the bees would not have enough honey to eat for the winter. But in the last three weeks, the bees have worked with a purpose and harvested some odd, blood-red honey and PACKED THE HOUSE with it.

Terry’s solution? Pull a few frames out of each hive body, and extract honey! This gives the bees more space, and gives me an unexpected honey crop after all.

At the beekeepers’ meeting, the blood-red honey was a hot topic. Richard got some too, and mentioned that it turns dark brown once you extract it and expose it to the air. Dark honey is also a premium product, it seems, fetching a higher price for its especially flowery taste. There’s some debate as to where the dark honey comes from; Terry thinks it comes from the Japanese Knotweed, a pernicious invasive species that covers the local riverbanks and blooms in late August. Some internet research supports this theory; that honey is called “bamboo honey” and tastes somewhat like buckwheat honey. Richard says it might come from the honeydew of various poplar species, though I couldn’t substantiate that. Regardless, it’s supposed to be loaded with antioxidants, giving even more health benefits than regular honey, according to this source.

The next day, I took a few frames of honey from the center of the hive, as Terry advised, and extracted the honey from them. Richard let me borrow his extractor, which is basically a centrifuge made to spin frames of honeycomb. The honey runs out the bottom, and the sticky-but-empty combs can be put back in the hive for the bees to clean and reuse. Here is a picture of my dark honey as it goes into the bucket strainer. Terry warned me that a few frames gives a lot more honey than you’d expect, and he was right: my seven frames yielded just over six quarts of sweet honey goodness. Mmmmm.That’s not enough to sell, but that’s OK- it’s way more than I expected this year, and besides giving us plenty for household use, allows me to fill a few karmic duties and provide gifts to some of the peole who have really helped us out this year.

The latest round of beehive inspections has left me with sad news: it appears that both my hives are queenless, for whatever reason, and likely to not survive the summer. The strong one has a few queen cells, though, so there’s still hope. We were discussing the situation at the monthly beekeepers’ meeting last week, when the local hornet exterminator (a friend of ours) dropped in.

“I was just on a call up the Trask river today, and there’s a guy with a woodshed infested with honeybees,” He said, passing the buck. The homeowner’s wife thought they were yellowjackets, and called the wrong guy.

Everyone looked at each other, then pointed to me. “It’s your turn,” they said. “Besides, it looks like you’re going to need another colony pretty soon.”

Both scared and excited, I accepted the offer but explained that I would need some guidance, as I’d never extracted a feral colony before and I was also short on equipment. Terry, my beekeeping mentor, offered to let me borrow a hive top and base for the season. Bob, the president of the local club and probably the oldest guy present, offered the use of his bee vacuum (more on that later). “I’ll go along with ya, too,” he said, “As long as I don’t have to do any of the work.”

That’s how I found myself driving through the countryside, bright and early the next morning, with Bob’s blue pickup following. The directions were somewhat vague, in country-living style: follow the river road 12.5 miles, turn right at the abandoned green store, follow the gravel road to the end. After a few wrong turns, I discovered the gravel road in question, and was stopped by a friendly neighbor.

“You must be the bee guys!” he said with a toothy grin. Word gets around fast in these parts. “Keep on going; you’re almost there.” He tilted his head. “You mind if I bring a lawn chair and watch?”

Bob and I parked our trucks, and I went in the house to introduce myself.  The teenage daughter took me outside to show me the hive, which Bob had already found by himself.  It was hard to miss, a six-inch knothole in the siding of the shed with a constant stream of bees coming and going. Our new friend Joel had already set up his lawnchair about 20 yards away.

I went back to the truck and suited up, grabbed a prybar and smoker, and returned to find Bob already tearing siding off of the shed. So much for not doing any of the work. “Whooee, I’d get one of those suits on too!” Joel said from a safe distance.

I shrugged. “These old timers, their blood is half bee venom anyway,” I said as I started helping Bob tear battens off of the wall. By now we could hear the bees really buzzing in there, and Bob muttered something under his breath.  “You getting stung?” I asked, worried.

“Yeeep,” he drawled, as he slowly backed away. “Guess I’d better get my veil.”  This is the part where I tell you about old beekeepers. I don’t know why it is, but most of them wear scant protection. Maybe it’s because they are bee whisperers, or maybe they’re immune, or maybe they have diminished pain receptors, but most of the old beekeepers I’ve had the pleasure to work with are VERY nonchalant about the protection issue. Neither Terry nor Bob wear gloves or coveralls, though Bob did wear dishwashing gloves today- a trick I will try next time, as my leather gloves were absolutely drenched with honey by the end of the day.

Bob returned with his jacket and veil about the time I got the main boards off the wall. WOW! Look at the size of that hive! (click on the image to enlarge it; check out he freeze-frame on the bee in the upper left) By now, there was a cloud of bees buzzing around us, and even more on the combs, eagerly gobbling all the honey they could due to the smoke I’d pumped in there. All told, the hive was about 30 inches wide, four feet tall, and four combs deep. A quick estimation led me to realize that there were three times the bees in this colony as both my hives put together.

The click and hum of the bee vacuum brought me back to the present, and Bob began sucking up bees. The bee vac is a clever device; it has a vacuum motor attached to a plywood box, about three feet square and two feet high. Within this plywood box is another plywood box, with steel mesh sidewalls. A wide vacuum hose with angled tip, much like you’d see on a shop vac, passes through the sidewall of both boxes. To use it, you simply suck up bees just like so many dustbunnies on your living room floor. The bees fill up the inner box, and you can remove it to transport it to the bees’ new home.

As Bob sucked up the hapless bees, I cut out comb after comb from the wall cavity. They were loaded with both honey and brood, so I took the largest ones and laid them down on a board. With my hive knife, I cut them down to fit into the frames of their new home: a portable beehive that I’d brought with me. Four of the best combs were saved; the rest went into two 5-gallon buckets.

You can see a video of it HERE, since I can’t get the embedded code to work…

After a few hours, we’d cleared the wall of bees and comb. I clamped the portable hive together with a pair of ratchet straps, and sealed the entry with some steel mesh to trap in the bees that had already moved in. As I loaded it into my pickup, Bob opened the bee vac and pulled out the interior plywood-and-screen box, humming with bees. Judging by the weight of it, it held about 30,000 bees. The box itself looked like it’d seen some hard use; the nails on the sides were loose, the wood was severely weathered, and Bob had sealed the entry with two pieces of duct tape.

“Don’t leave them till morning; you better take ’em home now or they’ll overheat and die,” he advised as he set the buzzing box in the back of my pickup with all my equipment. I closed the hatch and we took off our suits. “I’ll see you back here at about 9pm to get the rest of them.” Um, what? Turns out, you have to do this TWICE, returning a second time in the evening as well to get all the bees that are away from the colony foraging during the day.

My mind was racing with all the stuff I had to do as I was bouncing down the country roads back to the farm. Get some weatherproof wood from the scrap pile, make a new hive stand, level the stump I was going to place it on, pop into the hardware store to get some lag bolts, grab a quick sandwich and an empty super at home… then I happened to glance in the rear view mirror. Apparently, the turns and bumps of the road had jiggled something loose, and there was a crack in the bee box. Oh dear.

As I went about all these errands, I saw more and more bees whirling around in the back of the truck with each passing minute. Thank goodness I don’t drive a van! I chuckled to myself as I went into the hardware store without locking the back of the truck; anyone opening it to steal my tools would be in for a REALLY unpleasant surprise. By the time I finally got to the farm, the fog of bees in the back of the truck was pretty thick, and many of my tools were carpeted with bees. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but I had accidentally thrown my bee suit in the front seat of the truck, instead of the back where I normally leave it.

After donning my bee suit, I opened the back and got to work. I must have been quite a site, moving the traveling hive, hive parts, and various pieces of bee-covered equipment out to the middle of the orchard surrounded by a giant cloud of insects. After a little quick carpentry, I had the hive stand in place with hive on top, and I poured in the bees.

A quick sandwich and short break later, it was time to head back to meet with Bob to get the remaining bees. We rode out together in my truck this time, and as we were chatting about this and that I couldn’t help but think about what an under-valued asset the elderly are to our society. He has a lot of knowledge in that head of his, and he was spending much of his day giving a part of it to me and asking nothing in return… maybe because he was bored or lonely, maybe because he takes pride in his expertise, or maybe just because passing along such secret wisdom to an eager listener is the right thing to do for the sake of humanity.

Sucking up the remaining bees was almost anticlimactic, which really puts things in perspective, because this time last year I would have thought catching a few thousand bees a pretty scary experience. Bob let me do most of the work as he chatted with the neighbors; he didn’t even put on his suit. “Make sure you let the bees out first thing in the morning,” he warned me, “or they’ll overheat and die.”

I thought of this and many other things as I was driving home in the dark at about 10pm, a very tired beekeeper.

* * *

Postscript

That long day of beekeeping was just the beginning of the work. In the next few days, the two five-gallon buckets yielded almost two quarts of tasty honey and quite a bit of wax that will likely be used for waxing bowstrings and making candles. My last task was to return Bob his bee vac. He gave me some pretty vague directions to his house, but as soon as I saw it I knew I’d found the right place: