Bees Make the Best Pets. Jack Mingo

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      FIRST BEEHIVE

      When I mention my beekeeping, people sometimes ask “how did you get started?” (and sometimes “In the name of God, why?!?”). I wish I had a story that shows that I'd had noble environmental intentions and coherent motivation. But honestly, I got into beekeeping in the same way I've made a lot of big decisions of life, love, career, and philosophy—by stumbling into them in an unfocused, whimsical, and alarmingly superficial manner.

      When I think about it, most of those decisions turned out all right. Either there's method in my madness, or I've been pretty damned lucky. As a case study, here's how I stumbled into beekeeping.

      Ant Farm on Steroids

      Blame the shortcomings of ant farms for my introduction to beekeeping.

      Remember ant farms? My several siblings and I got one as a present one year. At first it was fascinating, elbowing the others to get a better vantage point while watching the ants digging new tunnels through the virgin sand. Not much time passed, though, before the farm collectively became just another ignored and neglected pet. The tipping point came when the soil was thoroughly dug and the farm became a depressing existential hell filled with depressed and moping ants with absolutely no purpose in the world. Worse, their numbers slowly dwindled, as they died off one by one to be buried by the survivors—for reasons not fully explained—in the northeastern corner of the farm. When the farm got down to just one of the social insects listlessly pushing a clump of dirt pointlessly from point A to point B, it was more than a tender heart could bear.

      The ideal would've been to have gotten a queen ant. They lay eggs so the colony wouldn't die out. They also have pheromones that keep an ant farm both motivated and populated. But ant suppliers don't provide queens and when digging up my own ants I never found a queen, so I finally gave up on ant farms.

      Then, a decade after my last ant farm, I found something even better, something like an ant farm on steroids: a fully functioning observation beehive. The best part of it was that these bees looked happy and industrious, and I soon saw the reason: they had a queen. They had eggs and larvae. It was a working, thriving community that looked as if it were purposeful instead of tragic. I wanted one.

      I Got One . . . Sort Of

      It was only a year or two later that I saw a newspaper feature about a local guy who built and sold observation hives. I called him up right away, drove to his house in San Francisco, and bought one. Well, the box anyway. No bees. He suggested finding a local beekeeper and asking to buy a couple of frames of bees and a queen. No problem.

      With some effort, I found the name of a beekeeper. I had already arranged to keep the bees in the library of a small counterculture “hippie” school where I taught middle and high school students art, phys ed, history, film, and so on for a very modest wage. One snag: when I called him, he wouldn't sell me just a couple of frames. What he said made sense: “An observation hive is so small that it will be just barely self-sustaining. You'll probably need to add bees to it now and again, trade out old frames and add new ones full of larvae if you lose your queen, and so on.” He suggested I get a whole, standard beehive and use it to keep the observation hive going. “You might even get a little honey out of it,” he added.

      “You might even get a

       little honey out of it,”

       he added.

      20,000 Bees—Postage Paid

      This was getting more complicated than I'd intended. It wasn't like I really wanted to interact with bees. They scared me to death, actually. I'd just wanted to watch them from a vantage point that was safely behind Plexiglas.

      In those pre-internet days, finding out what to do next wasn't that easy. I did what I usually did when confronted with a great unknown: I went to the library and found a book on the subject. Bolstered with book learning and absolutely no direct knowledge, I discovered that I could buy equipment and bees from the only retail establishment foolish enough to issue me a credit card, Sears, Roebuck & Co., back when it was a retail powerhouse. Besides its huge general catalog, it issued a dozen specialized ones, including Farm & Garden.

      I was making $8,400 in 1980 and I'd already spent about $100 on an empty observation hive. A beekeeping starter kit, complete with a build-it-yourself hive body box, smoker, “sting-resistant” canvas gloves, book, and protective veil cost maybe $60, and three pounds of live bees with queen, another $30. This was becoming a very expensive whim, but I was halfway in and I couldn't quit because an empty observation hive would be as depressing as a dead ant farm.

      Luckily, the kit came first. It gave me the chance to put everything together, read the book, try on the frighteningly flimsy gloves and the gap-prone veil. With it came a notification that the bees would arrive in a few weeks when the weather warmed up a bit. “No hurry,” I thought.

      In 1980 a beekeeping

       starter kit, complete

       with a build-it-yourself

       hive body box,

       smoker, “sting-resistant”

       canvas

       gloves, book, and

       protective veil cost

       maybe $60.

      Weeks СКАЧАТЬ