Bee careful

The pungent aroma of raw honey and herbal tea permeates the air in my kitchen as I type this, and I think to myself: I'm glad I didn't die from a bee sting earlier this week. I love honey, and quite enjoy beekeeping, but after a bee sting about a little over a month ago I began to worry that I was developing a more serious allergy to the little flying ladies.

It was late April, and had finally stopped raining for a day. My beekeeping mentor, Kevin, and I were inspecting the West End Community Garden's five hives. All was going fine that sunny afternoon, except I was getting a bit antsy with us poking and prodding around, box by box, frame by frame, for a solid hour and a half as we checked for brood, hive beetles, and nectar stores. I had been feeling a little tickle on my shin for a few minutes, and began to worry that a bee had wandered up my untucked pant leg. Foolishly, perhaps, I gently shook my leg a bit while I tried to remain calm and pry another frame out of the hive. The tickle moved a bit further up the inside of my pantleg. I froze. I lifted another hive frame out for inspection. Further north still, the tickle moved. I shook my leg a little more and started to sweat. Bam! Stung. Right on the ankle, probably while the disoriented bee was trying to escape my khakis. It hurt, sure -- it always does -- but a few hours later my ankle began to swell. The couple glasses of wine I had at the WAMU donor reception that evening meant that popping a couple of Benadryl probably wasn't a good idea, so I just slapped an ice pack on it, put my foot up, and called it a night. I wasn't having trouble breathing, at least, and there wasn't a rash. See? Nothing to worry about.

The next morning, as Matt and I took the bus up to Connecticut for the weekend, the swelling and aching continued. By that night, one couldn't even tell I had anklebones. For the next week, I popped a couple of Benadryl a few times a day, icing and elevating my foot whenever possible. I got back to town and checked in with my doctor, and though the swelling was going down she immediately had me tested for bee venom sensitivity. I figured it was just a precaution: I've been stung a few times in my life and while it smarts for a few minutes, or at most a day, I never showed signs of a serious allergic reaction. Well. It turns out you can develop a serious allergy to bees. My bee venom blood test came back positive. Suddenly everyone I mentioned this to had a story to share about a friend or family member who had an extreme and unforeseen bee sting reaction. Not the best thing for a hypochodriac to be hearing.

My doctor prescribed an EpiPen. Wouldn't you know it, there is a shortage of EpiPens on the market right now. "Just call back at the beginning of July and check and see if we have any in stock," the pharmacy worker at Kaiser told me over the phone, "And try to stay away from bees."

I work in school gardens, lady! And what exactly am I paying hundreds of dollars a month for, if my insurance company doesn't have a common medicine in stock and can't be bothered to call me when the potentially life-saving medicine is ready for me to pick up? Honestly.... So now I carry around a bottle of liquid children's Benadryl to chug if I get stung. Because I certainly wasn't going to miss out on the honey harvesting last week. Luckily we were only messing with the bees for about 30 minutes, then it was on to the serious -- or perhaps not so serious -- harvesting of the honey from the frames:

Bees, I would like to propose a truce. I will continue to make sure your hive stays healthy, and you don't sting me. We can split the honey 50/50. Okay. Okay! 60/40, you win.

Feed me!

My teeth hurt on Thursday afternoon as I stirred the cauldron, waiting for 40 CUPS of sugar to dissolve in 20 cups of water. Bubble, bubble, toil and... well, you know. Filling and hauling two big jugs of simple syrup out to the hives was more of a workout than one might expect, especially after a full day of teaching. (For those of you into math and/or weightlifting, it works out to about 3.75 gallons, roughly 40 pounds. Next time I'm getting the wheelbarrow.) This afternoon, when I lifted the lids of the three hives, I couldn't help but smile beneath my veil. Thank you, my busy little friends, for the bountiful honey you've given us to enjoy. It was the least I could do to help them build their stores for the winter, after my mentor and a few other community beekeepers and I harvested nearly 80 pounds earlier this season. (Don't worry, mom, I've got a jar set aside for you.)

Though I've been helping with the hives for about a year now, today was my first time feeding them solo. I'd done a feeding a few weeks ago with Kevin, and everything had gone smoothly, but you never know. (No, I am not allergic to bee stings, but my friend Suzanne was telling me the other week that she suddenly developed an allergy, of the throat-closing variety(!), after 60+ years of no bee sting reactions.) With my insurance card in my pants pocket, and my pants dorkily tucked into my socks, I gathered my tools -- two jugs of syrup, scissors, ziploc baggies, hive tool -- and attempted to light the smoker. After five minutes and three attempts, I threw up my (gloved) hands and gave up on the smoker. Bees don't like the smell of sweat, apparently, and the longer I sat in my beekeeping gear in the 80F sunshine, the more torrential the river of sweat that ran down my back. Sweat = a higher likelihood of getting stung. Forget it, no smoker....

I was glad to have a full belly and a few mimosas in me -- thanks for brunch, mom and dad! -- just in case things went awry and I ended up in the emergency room. Hospital food. [Shudder.] Nothing like champagne cocktails to steel the nerves. Moving efficiently but not knocking things around -- bees don't like abrupt movements or their home being bumped (rushed movements, loud noises, or banging of equipment = a higher likelihood of getting stung -- I opened each hive and deposited the solution that should last them about a week, then carefully replaced the inner and outer lids. Lots of bees were out foraging, and many more were crawling over the remnants of last week's near empty baggies. A number of them landed on me, and I cursed my failure to pick off the excess propolis still stuck to my gloves from last time. Stay calm....

Twenty minutes after I had arrived, I was locking up the beekeeping shed and peeling off my gear. A quick bike ride home and a nap later, I'm happy to report my first independent bee feeding was a success! Now to start working on my next project: a fun recipe to use my thank-you pound of West End Community Garden honey. Maybe a honey ale?

Local honey is the bees knees

Today marked my first ever opportunity to participate in a honey harvest! I can think of few things that would cause me to happily bike through the hellacious traffic that is DC rush hour, but local honey is one of them. Some small part of me felt bad smoking the bees earlier today and stealing their food. But just a small part.

Amazed that I hadn't been run off the road during my commute from Chinatown to Foggy Bottom in 5pm traffic, I arrived to find Toni and Kevin -- my beekeeping teacher and mentor, respectively -- just getting the smoker going and pulling on safety gear at the West End Community Garden. We got right to work, checking the frames for honey and estimating how many boxes we could safely take so that the bees would have enough remaining stores to get them through the cold months. (It was strange to be thinking of winter as I stood there sweating in my veil, long sleeved shirt, long pans, and socks in the late afternoon sun.) Each box we harvested had to be bee-free, so Toni applied her special menthol-and-almond-extract-soaked hive lid to each of the chosen hive boxes. This cleared out about 90 percent of the little buzzers, leaving us to gently brush any remaining bees off the individual frames. It's funny that bees don't like the almond odor -- I thought it smelled delicious! -- but it totally worked. I think we only had 5 or 6 hangers on by the time we got to the processing stage.

You will notice that there are no photos of us working with the hives -- I know some of you would love to see me in my orange pants tucked into grey stripey socks and my oh-so-fashionable bee veil. No time for photo ops, people, there was much to be done in the short time: we had to get four hives checked, bees evacuated, and boxes into the back of Toni's car.

Here we are set up for honey extraction at the Boys and Girls Club in Georgetown where, for the price of a few bottles of our honey, the staff kindly let us use one of their classrooms. We got right to work, using some crazy tools to upcap the honey frames: two of us worked with a "scratchers" (glorified metal picks) while the third person attempted to use the "cold knife" (which we later determined was more useful as a spatula):

Here are Toni, Kevin, and Tom trying to figure out how best to balance the 9 frames we would be spinning at a time.

I spent most of my time working with Annie at the upcapping station, using the scratchers to scrape off the outer layer of wax so the honey would be able to flow freely in the frame spinner.

Here's our team pouring our beautiful, freshly spun honey through a strainer.

Straining removes the little bits of dead bees, honeycomb, and other detritus. Not that I am a total purist -- I actually quite enjoyed chomping on some of the honey-coated comb when we sampled some from a blown out hive frame -- but a nice, clear bottle of honey is pretty special.

80 pounds of strained honey later, we were done!

Now it's time for a quick dinner and change of clothes before heading out for a night of salsa dancing. I wonder if I still smell like propolis....

Hive beetles, beware

So I may mutter unkind words as I swerve around cars double parked in the Q Street bike lane -- ahem, bike lane, not parking spot! And I have been known to let certain gentleman callers know about my propensity for headbutting lest they get any funny ideas about putting a hand somewhere inappropriate on a first date. But overall, I'm a lover, not a hater. I love people, and plants, and animals. Even bugs, so long as they are not cockroaches. (Ick.) And yet there are some critters that have been getting a little too comfy in the beehives I've been helping to tend this year.... I'll give you a hint: it's not the bees that have gotten into my bonnet.

My beekeeping mentor, Kevin, suggested this past fall that we keep an eye on the hive beetle numbers, and squish any of these pernicious pests that we came across while inspecting hives. We also periodically refilled the hive beetle traps with baby oil. (Weird, right? But it works. Drowning in baby oil, what a way to go.) The beetle numbers dropped somewhat, but after finding one hive significantly weakened this spring, Kevin decided we needed to take more aggressive steps. Enter nematodes -- my kindergarten students would be SO excited, but these are different than the nematodes we found in class -- and diatomaceous earth.

I am learning so much about organic pest management this year, I tell you. A key piece of managing pests is understanding their life cycle. (Wow, that sounded very professional. Don't be fooled: I'm still a total novice at this.) Anyway, I learned from Kevin that hive beetle pupae -- the stage after those little jerks hatch -- need soil to burrow into so they can grow into adults, and messing with the soil underneath the hive, where pupae drop down after feasting on honey and bee brood, is the best place to take them out of commission. First, we cleared all debris from around the hives. Then we sloshed a solution with millions of microscopic assassins -- yep, the beneficial nematodes -- all around the base of the hives. Any hive beetle pupae foolish enough to drop down out of THESE hives would die a horrible death. (I won't describe it here in great detail lest I give my readers nightmares, but the short version is that the nematodes enter the pupae, release toxic bacteria, and the pupae turn to goo inside of about 48 hours, at which point the nematodes eat the goo and lay eggs in the corpse. Okay, that was maybe a little detailed. Sorry. Read the comics or something before bed tonight.)

Of course, in order to even get to the soil, the loathsome beetle pupae need to make it past the diatumaceous earth we scattered around the hive. What's that? You haven't ever heard of diatumaceous earth? Basically, it's ground up, fossilized phytoplankton. But the important thing to know about it is that, according to one fairly graphic source I discovered, "When sprinkled on a bug that has an exoskeleton" -- or, like the hive beetle pupae, without a skeleton -- "it compromises their waxy coating so that their innards into teeny tiny bug jerky." Take THAT, hive beetles. And if you make it through, well, we've got some nematodes dying to meet you....

And you thought The Sopranos was violent? Try beekeeping.

Propolaxis

Have you ever smelled the distinct aroma of propolis -- that sticky stuff that bees make to seal gaps in the hive? It's quite intoxicating: earthy, and a bit sweet. And yesterday, I smelled it for the first time. Ahhhh.

For two months last winter, with Ollie creaking beneath the weight of a pile of textbooks, I biked uphill through the frigid darkness to attend my urban beekeeping class at UDC. After full days of teaching, for two evenings a week I immersed myself in learning about all things apis: types of native honeybees, bee life cycles and behavior, components of home hives, safety equipment, considerations for hive placement, pernicious pests and diseases that commonly attack hives, the mysterious hive collapse phenomenon (I didn't sleep much after class that week), and all kinds of other technical information. By the end of the course, I had a basic academic understanding of how to keep bees. Soon afterwards, in the early spring, I bought a veil and a smoker, a hive tool and gloves. I was ready. Well, sort of. I'd had a chance, at one point during the class, to hold an empty frame; what I hadn't had was any hands-on experience working with an actual bee hive.

That all changed yesterday. Decked out in pants and a long-sleeve shirt on a sunny afternoon, I showed up at the community garden abutting one of my schools to find Kevin -- an experienced beekeeper to whom I have recently apprenticed myself -- waiting for me with a loaner veil and hive tools. As he got into his gear, I was tasked with getting the smoker going. (I think he was rather impressed at my fire-starting skills. I stuffed newspaper, twigs, sticks, and finally dried pine needles into the lit smoker to get it really billowing.) After donning some gloves and checking our equipment, it was time to calmly make our way to check and feed the three hives. Kevin talked me through how best to approach the hives, and warned against making loud noises or unnecessary vibrations. They also don't like being checked on too often. Or quick movements. Many sentences ended with, "They hate that, and you're more likely to get stung." Noted.

After examining a couple of them jointly, I used my hive tool to remove the lids and then a couple of frames all by myself, with my mentor patiently talking me through each step. Bees were humming and crawling all over the place, including me, and particularly near my inadvertently exposed wrists, but they seemed mellow enough after a couple puffs from the smoker. I was mesmerized. Slowly, slowly, I pried the first frame loose from the clots of propolis, lifted it straight up, then tilted it first on one side and then the other to check for nectar/honey development. Everything looked the way it should, in terms of store laying, it seemed. We squished a few hive beetles, then tucked in the supplemental feeding bags: gallon ziplocs half filled with a 2:1 sugar water solution. (This helps to make sure the bees stockpile enough honey to get them through the long winter.)

Calmly and slowly -- but not too slowly lest the bees get annoyed -- I replaced each frame, tapped it back in place, and then returned the inner and outer lids before Kevin secured everything with cement blocks to keep the wind from blowing the tops off. (I doubt with that much putty-like propolis that those lids were going anywhere, but I trust my mentor implicitly on these sorts of things.) I can't wait to help winterize the hives in a few weeks!