Escape to the Hive: Keeping Bees to Keep Myself

by KASEY BUTCHER SANTANA

Tiny hands reach out to grasp my fingertip. Their touch is like a whisper, light but vital. Gently, I lift the bee from my toddler’s wrist. Her screaming subsides, fear vanishing into wonder in an instant. You expect the bee to sting you, not the toddler.

I had anticipated and prepared for the pain of birthing a baby, at least as much as I could. I did not expect what came afterward: the nagging pain of someone pulling my hair, hitting me, or standing on my body for the next two years. The constant touching and demands. And I have a relatively easygoing child. I could cuddle Veronica forever, but mothering is all-consuming. I try to cherish these intense early years, knowing they will be fleeting, but I sometimes wonder if I will still know myself on the other side.

Four months after Veronica’s birth and shortly after we brought four alpacas home to our little farm, but before we moved six baby chickens into the basement, I decided it was the perfect time to take up a new hobby—beekeeping. When already feeling a little overwhelmed, why not add thirty thousand flying, stinging insects? As I rocked Veronica to sleep during the winter, I read about bees obsessively. When I was not thinking about the baby, I was thinking about bees. As I walked with my grumpy, tired child strapped to me during the witching hour, I kept my eye out for wildflowers, water, and other resources, getting a sense of what might be available for the bees in the three-mile radius from their hive. Keeping bees, like mothering a child, is an immersive experience; it takes anticipating needs, reading subtle cues, and sometimes, enduring a little sting.

Now, when I feel most at wit’s end with a toddler, I visit the bees during naptime. When I first worked with bees, I trembled in my bee suit and thick gloves. The bees are wholly involved in their natural processes; my presence is an intrusion. As they flew all around me, I felt like I didn’t belong there. I moved pieces of their home around like some invading giant who might accidentally squash them or steal their hard-earned supplies. Eventually, I was less clumsy, able to inspect the hive with confidence that meant I was less likely to do damage. Now, slowly, methodically, I examine each frame in the hive. Their work consumes all of my attention for an hour.

I try to have a reason for going into the hives—made from pine boxes, open on either end and housing eight or ten flat frames on which the bees build their comb—rather than disrupt their work and risk damaging their comb or tiny bodies for no purpose. These boxes stand between a bottom board and an insulating lid, so to inspect the hive, I have to gently unstack the boxes. The bees create a glue called propolis out of tree resin and use it to seal the hive, filling in the cracks between the boxes or adjusting the width of the upper entrance for winter. Physically opening the hive involves breaking in like a burglar, using a metal hive tool to pry the boxes apart. Bees are hygienic creatures, but their version of hygiene is sticky, a texture we humans associate with a mess. After a hive inspection, my gloves, suit, phone, and baby monitor might all have traces of wax and propolis stuck to them. I carry the sweet, woody smell of all that stickiness around with me for the rest of the day.

The first thing I notice upon opening the hive is not the texture, but the smell. A healthy beehive smells sweet, full of honey, wax, and wood. Once, a pollen patty that I purchased from a local beekeeping shop dripped onto the bottom board of the hive and caused a patch of mold to grow. Immediately, I knew there was a problem because I could smell it. The sweetness of the hive is that reliable.

Once the lid is off, hundreds of little eyes look up at me from heart-shaped faces. I smile and whisper, “Hello, girls.” I feel deep affection for my bees, but my care for them is removed and scientific. Instead of directly tending to the bees, I monitor how they care for themselves—checking supplies and population, looking for pests and parasites. My work is not exactly welcome, so after a pause, they fly out of the hive, surrounding me with buzzing. When a bee gets particularly upset, she flies around my head as though she is looking for a gap in the zipper where my veil attaches to the jumpsuit, buzzing all along with a warning frequency and tone. As she bops me on the head with her whole body, I feel a surprisingly large thud for such a small creature. I have learned to ignore this passionate guard bee as long as I wear protective gear. Other bees are not perturbed and simply go about their tasks within the hive.

An estimated 45 percent of colonies did not survive the winter of 2020–21, so it felt miraculous when my bees were still coming out to fly on warm March days in 2022. They had made it and that meant I had more work to do. Often, when a colony survives the winter, its instinct is to reproduce itself by casting off a swarm in which half of the bees fly away with their queen in search of a new home, leaving behind a new queen and some workers. To prevent my bees from swarming, I split the one colony into two, simulating a swarm by moving their queen and half of the bees into a new hive, leaving the original hive with the eggs they need to make a new queen. 

Many details of how and why a colony raises a new queen are still a mystery, but the process takes approximately sixteen days. In an emergency situation, like I had placed them in by removing their queen, the workers choose several eggs to become queens, building the cell out from its usual hexagon into a peanut-like queen cup. They have to make their choices within three days of when the eggs were laid, however, because once the egg has hatched into a larva, its destiny to become a worker is already sealed. Usually, the workers build several queen cups at once, and whoever hatches first visits each of the other pupating potential queens and stings them to death. If two virgin queens emerge at the same time, they fight to determine who will be the queen of the colony.

When I observed that the new queen had hatched, nine of the dozen queen cells were open and empty. A showdown had occurred. One cell was capped, but shrunken, as though the pupating queen inside stopped developing. And two were torn open with a queen pupa inside. One was still struggling, her tiny legs flexing in the limited space. I used my hive tool to cut the queen cells off, freeing the half-baked queen. This was a dilemma I had never faced before. What was I supposed to do? Many keepers would say to pinch the little queen. There was no way she would survive and even if she did, the bees would kill her.

I watched her moving slowly. Her pale body looked like a virgin queen should, long in the abdomen with a hairless thorax, but she had not yet developed the darker color of a fully developed queen. There was so much promise here. The queen is the biological mother of all of the other bees, but worker bees do the actual mothering, grooming, and feeding the queen, and taking care of the baby bees in the nest. Their devotion to the queen, and each other, keeps the colony alive, but without the queen, even their hard work cannot sustain them. Whereas she can live for up to four years, the workers live only six weeks, so without the queen constantly laying eggs, the colony would vanish. Without the workers, the queen would starve. The lemongrass-like pheromone the queen emits sends the signal, carried on the bodies of workers throughout the hive, that everything is okay. This queen, however, was not meant to be. I placed her gently in the shade beside the hive, unable to bring myself to kill her.

The goal for today’s hive inspection is to look for eggs, a clear indication that the new queen successfully returned from a mating flight and is at work raising the next round of worker bees. It is on the early side of the window in which I could start seeing eggs, so I temper my expectations. If the new queen—who I have named Queen Hippolyta I, after Wonder Woman’s mother—has mated, her abdomen will have grown larger. She should stand out among the worker bees. They often form a circle around her, gently nudging her to determine if she needs anything. On the very first frame I pull from the hive, I see eggs and exhale, just realizing that I was holding my breath. Then, on the next frame, I see her—Queen Hippolyta—large, with a black thorax and an almost rose gold abdomen, surrounded by the bees who raised her. Entranced, I watch her sashay across the frame. Then I set it gently back into the hive, pulling it out again once I have my camera ready. But she has vanished into the thousands of worker bees attending to the hive.

Perhaps it is the excitement, but as I inspect my second hive, I keep dropping things. I get to watch Queen Leslie Knope II lay eggs, tucking her large abdomen into perfect hexagonal cells, but then I drop frames twice, sending a cloud of startled bees into the air around me. When bees are alarmed, they emit a pheromone that, to the human nose, smells like the artificial banana fragrance associated with popsicles and sunscreen. As I smell bananas, I know that it is time to leave. I have both done damage and experienced wonder, but in the hour I spent inspecting my hives, I have been wholly engrossed with the bees’ work, not worrying about my mothering. My body seems beside the point, tucked away in a jumpsuit and veil. I take a couple of stings to my thick gloves, but I feel nothing, no fear, no stress. All I feel is calm.

Putting the hive back together is not as simple as stacking it all back up. Resistance, then a crunch, the sound and sensation of a bee getting squished between two hive boxes make my heart drop. Gently, then more firmly, I use my finger to brush the bees off the boxes. A tea towel draped over the box urges the bees down into the hive and off the edges, but once I remove the towel, it is a race to finish the stack before the bees come back out.

Of all the potential ways I can accidentally kill bees, creating a zombee makes me feel the worst. Their waists are tiny, like a thread, and if they get hit there in just the wrong way, their head and thorax can separate from their abdomen. Seemingly unaware of what happened, their top half keeps walking around for a while. Nearby bees attend to their maimed sister for a moment before running off, but there is nothing they can do for her. She is not in pain, but she is the walking dead.

The bees can sting me. It rarely happens, because I wear protective gear, but when it does, I do not get upset. A sting is nothing compared to being turned into a zombee. Getting an occasional sting is just the cost of watching a queen lay eggs; of seeing fuzzy baby bees hatch; of feeling the light touch of a honeybee walking on my finger; of smelling the heavy honey in the summer; and of listening for their buzzing in the dead of winter, my ear pressed to the side of the hive. The activity of the colony is a constant churn of life and death compressed into weeks, babies emerging to meet their end as tired workers six weeks later. The hive is a whole civilization in four pine boxes.

When I become engrossed by the bees so entirely, separated from my thoughts and ambitions, being asked for nothing, it enables me to go back inside to my family and be consumed once more. Nothing will make me okay with having my hair pulled, but contact with the bees narrows my focus down to this tiny, essential species, pushing everything else aside, and allows me to be fully present again with the little person in my care, who, fortunately, loves the bees too.

Recently, Veronica received her first beesting while trying to pick up a bee from a flowerpot. Then, a yellowjacket stung her at the playground. (Yellowjackets are assholes.) Although she still expresses interest in the bees, the memory of those recent stings causes her to panic when a honeybee lands on her. After I lift that bee from my daughter’s wrist, she and I look at her together. The bee stands on my fingertip, resting and grooming herself. She runs her front hands repeatedly over her antennae, her tiny head rotating side to side. The fuzz on her thorax has mostly worn away, which tells me that she is an elderly forager. I enjoy a few minutes of quiet, watching the bee, until my daughter throws herself onto me, causing the bee to fly away. We then walk to our pumpkin patch, observing the bees working. Our honeybees forage alongside giant carpenter bees and drowsy little squash bees, all of them buzzing around clumsily, bumping into each other as they gather pollen and nectar. Quiet, urgent, the sign of a healthy garden, the bees have me holding my breath as we watch them. My child clings to my back as I balance on my heels, stooped over the pumpkins. I almost fall over into the prickly vines, but amidst the chaos, I feel calm.