Today was an epic day at the hive. The ladies are finally starting to really draw out comb on the plastic foundation, though strangely they seem uninterested in the one foundationless frame I slipped between two drawn out frames full of nectar. I suspect the progress is largely due to Jim telling me I was mistaken in leaving the mite board in all summer, and my finally taking it out – I thought I was being a conscientious beekeeper by constantly keeping an eye on it, but in fact I was just making it harder for the ladies to cool off the hive in the endless heat wave we’ve had here this summer. Oops!

Jim also told me a fascinating fact about beehive ventilation: when it’s hot, apparently the ladies line up on the floor of the hive in rows. If you pull the entire hive up from the base, all supers at once, you can catch them at it and see that some rows fan to the front, some fan to the back. And some hives are right-handed in how they direct the air flow, and some are left-handed. The best part is that hives are consistently right-handed or left-handed from season to season. I hypothesize that this is somehow genetic and determined by the queen, and would be fascinated to test to see if it changes when hives are re-queened.

We have a growing population of beekeepers in NYC. What do you say, folks? Can I grab a few tall, strong friends and do an annual or biannual survey of your hives to see which way they fan, and if it changes when you requeen? It’s for science!

Back to my hive:

Brilliant day for the bees. As you can see above, over the past week they must’ve found a source of some intensely orange, neon-bright pollen that they’re storing in frames near the edge of the second super that they never really bothered to fully draw out before. I have to wonder what kind of plant this stuff is coming from, since it looks totally alien. One lady landed on my watch and shook some yellower pollen onto it while trying to check the time, so I surmise that they have multiple sources.

We’ve become so calm with them, calm as they are with us – forget jackets and closed toe shoes, pants tucked careful into socks. Selena and I do hive inspections in shorts or skirts, sandals, tank tops. We unzipped our veils from the jackets and wear them loosely over our heads. I still haven’t been stung by my hive. They land on my arms and legs, crawl mischievously along the sole of my foot when I slowly take a step, but they don’t attack. Selena lifts her skirts to brush bees off her legs before we go inside, but no one seems to mind. We have a relaxed understanding, and a comfort level I’d never expected to achieve.

The bad news is that I found a single bee wandering on the ground with one wing bent in what might’ve been K wing, or might’ve just been the raggedness that comes with age. Since I found a single bee that looked similar earlier in the summer (and none since), I gathered this one into a tupper to be on the safe side. She’s interred in my freezer at the moment, and at some point this week I’m going to dissect her and examine her trachea for mites with my goddaughter’s microscope. Worst comes to worst, we’ll treat for mites. Even if there are some, it doesn’t seem to be a huge systemic problem, given the tons of healthy bees I see in the hive nowadays, and only two iffy ones all summer.

And back to the good news – the queen lives! We saw Her Majesty (Esther? Vashti? Shekhina?) wandering around a frame in the second super, looking big and healthy as can be. I’ve been worried all summer that I wouldn’t be able to find her quickly even if she was on a frame I picked up, but in fact she jumped right out at me. I’ve noticed that drones also stand out for me nowadays – it turns out that if you spend enough time staring at bees, even slight variations in size (drones) or more-than-slight ones (the queen) trigger the eyes immediately as something strange and worth noticing. Like when you’re at a party and you notice THAT PERSON across the room, no matter the crowd of faces and limbs around them. Your eyes adjust to the default, and the unusual jumps out.

We also saw a few baby bees chewing their way out of their cells into this glorious world of pollen and sunlight for the very first time, today. Tiny fuzzy bee heads peeking imperfectly from ragged holes in the capped comb, struggling towards the light. The other bees on the frame approach, seeming to want to help, though I don’t know if they actually do. It’s a miracle. Welcome to the world, ladies! It’s not so bad – warm and bright, with a cool breeze up on the rooftop today, and you can hang out on the front of the hive drinking mint juleps and sweet tea with your sisters as dusk approaches.

When I checked in on my hive two weeks ago, everything looked great. They’d just barely started to draw out the comb in the second super, and I saw a healthy brood pattern downstairs. They seemed to have plenty of space to expand, so I fed them more sugar syrup and went out of town for a short trip.

When I checked in yesterday, there was no brood. No larva. Nothing. The top super was almost fully drawn out, and full of nectar (or perhaps sugar syrup from the feeder) being condensed. I couldn’t find my queen anywhere, nor any signs of her existence.

Maybe a swarm, I thought? But I doubt it. I didn’t see any swarm cells – just a single open queen cell high up on one frame, and even there I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. I’ve never heard of a swarm leaving just one maybe queen cell behind, though maybe it does happen. Even so, there were plenty of bees around! It didn’t look like a shortage at all.

So, maybe she was accidentally crushed during an earlier inspection? I don’t know. Given the total lack of brood, I suspect she was dead or gone before I looked in two weeks ago, unfortunately. I just didn’t catch it until now, because of my ill-timed vacation.

As Roger and Jim have both told me, beekeeping is always a crapshoot, and that’s what makes it so humbling.

Luckily, someone in our local group has a spare queen that she’s giving me to install today. I’ll order a new queen for her as a replacement, so I still have the expense, but at least I’m getting a queen in there as quickly as humanly possible.

And on the plus side, I tasted some of the capped honey in the second super, and it’s definitely honey. There may be some condensed syrup in there, but they’ve surely been gathering nectar, too! Amazing. I cut off a bit of it into a small container and have been wandering around with it in my bag for the past day, occasionally sticking my finger in and licking it with wonderment.

Sometime between Thursday and today, the bees released the queen from her cage on their own, eating through the candy plug entirely. They even built some burr comb (wax comb that is out of place) on the side of the cage, and filled it up with condensed sugar syrup! I took the empty queen cage home with me as a souvenir.

Yes, I did stick my tongue into the burr comb to taste the sugar syrup. Wouldn’t you?

The bees have done a great job of building up lots of new comb over the past week. I’m seriously impressed. In a week or two, I’m going to go back in to check for evidence that the queen is laying eggs properly, but for now, this is the good news I’d hoped to see.

(Both photos in this post are better when seen large! Click on each to get to the large version.)

This is what a package of 3 lbs of bees looks like:

We brought everything up to the roof of the shul with the assistance of Anderson, who lives there and takes care of the property. He kindly agreed to take some photos of us after we got into our jackets and veils, and offered to keep the poultry waterer filled for the bees.

So there we were up on the roof, we three ladies of beekeeping.

We all wore jackets/veils, but we went barehanded. No gloves for us! The theory is that going gloveless gives you greater dexterity, which means you’re less likely to accidentally squish bees, which means they’re less likely to want to sting you in the first place.

Alyson and I had BEEKEEPER HUGS! up there in the Brooklyn sky.

Next, you can see the basic set-up. We had a single medium super hive ready, up on a pair of cinderblocks. The white and red thing in the upper left of the next photo is the poultry waterer, so they don’t bother neighbors when they get thirsty. To the right, the brown thing is the hive-top feeder for sugar syrup before they can gather their own nectar, and in front of that is a cardboard nuc box, then holding the package of bees.

As we set it up, we used the spritz bottle seen below to spray sugar syrup on all the frames that went inside the hive, so that when we dumped the bees in they’d be happy and inclined to stay put. In the process, we spilled sugar syrup all over our hands. Ack! We rinsed it off with the hose, but still.

We had a really hard time keeping the smoker lit. I’ve used a bee smoker before, but never lit one on my own, and it takes some getting used to. I got the hang of it by the second time I visited the hive, at least.

Alyson took over the photography when Anderson left us to our business.

Here, you can see me standing next to the package, about to open it up. I got white hightop sneakers to keep at the shul, and I pulled my socks up over my jeans so bees couldn’t climb up into my pants. The red strap under the hive is a ratchet strap to hold the hive together in the wind.

Photography paused during the actual hive installation, unfortunately.

We set up the hive with only 8 of the 10 frames in it. We sprayed the sides of the bee package (lightly and gently!) with sugar syrup to keep everyone happy, then smoked it a bit as well to cut their lines of communication. The smoking was probably unnecessary, but I made a point of going very gently with cool smoke, at least. More importantly, I smoked the munchkin’s knee where she’d been stung earlier, in case there was any alarm pheromone left there.

To get the bees out, we used pliers to pull off the side and bottom bits of wood from one of the sides, then held the mesh up and literally shook the bees into the space left by the missing 2 frames. It took some gentle shaking and whacking, but ultimately most of them fell in. And then there were bees in the sky and bees on the ground, bees licking spilled sugar syrup off the rooftop and bees licking spilled sugar syrup off our hands.

Alyson got a bit scared at a certain point, and we told her to just walk away and go inside if she had to. She did back away for a bit, but then she calmed down more again. I am inspired by her courage.

We pulled the can of sugar syrup out of the package box so we could get at the queen. We held her tiny cage in our bare hands and shook the bees off of it. (Literally. Thwip, bees flying through the air!) I showed the queen and her long queenly butt to the fascinated child, and then to Selena. Her cage did not come with a nail attached by a string, alas, so I used a staple from the wood we’d ripped off the box to pry the cork out of her cage, leaving only a piece of soft candy blocking her exit.

I slipped the queen cage into the hive, held by pressure between two frames, and carefully added in the last 2 frames.

We put the feeder on top, and filled it up with sugar syrup. Matchsticks in the feeder and the waterer so the bees won’t drown. Alyson helped me put the top of the hive in place over that.

I fit an entrance reducer into the hive entrance to help encourage the bees to hang out and nothing else to go in while the colony is still weak, and closed it up with the ratchet strap. Doused the smoker, cleaned everything up.

There were still a bunch of bees hanging out in the package, so I just set it near the entrance of the hive. This is normal, I’m told, and they found their way in eventually. Luckily, the chilly night air didn’t even kill most of them first.

At some point Selena’s phone rang, and she picked up and said: “Can I call you back later? Right now I’m covered in bees!”

We took a few more iphone photos at the end, before brushing the bees off. They’re not the most flattering photos ever, but oh so worth it anyway.

Her:

Me:

Then we all brushed bees off of each other with the bee brush, and went inside to take off our jackets and put away the rest of the equipment.

I’m going to order some extra hive tools, because we really kept passing mine back and forth. And we might experiment with different veils when we order a few more for guests.

Ultimately, I wasn’t stung at all, and I really calmed down about the amazing sensation of bees gently meandering along my bare skin. Selena was stung three times – once on her hand, while shaking the package, and twice through her thin sweatpants, when she crouched and squished the bees that had landed there. She didn’t seem to mind at all.

When we got back down to the basement, we found that one stray had followed us down. Selena cupped her hands around it and carried it out to the car so she could slip it into the little bug jar with the magnifying glass lid I’d bought for Alyson the day before. Oh man, someday Alyson will appreciate just how badass a mom she’s got.

We were giddy with triumph. This was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, in a way that I can’t do justice to here. We installed those bees so damn hard. We installed the hell outta them! There were ten thousand and THREE victorious ladies up there on that rooftop!

I initially wanted a nuc, because it’d mean a greater chance of actually getting honey this year, but now I’m really glad that I got a package. What fun to really ride this ride on our own from the very start!

Before getting to the stories and photos, I just want to sum up what I’ve already posted on my law blog:

In 2005, I got it into my head that I wanted to take up beekeeping, which was illegal in NYC at the time. I reached out to Roger Repohl, who very kindly invited me to come up and help him out with the hives he keeps in the backyard of his church.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to keep bees illicitly, so I set about trying to change the law.

I can’t help but feel giddily proud of this. Just Food ran the campaign since 2008, but it was winter 2005-6 back when I first ran into then City Council Member David Yassky and asked him to work on legalizing beekeeping. He laughed at first, but when I explained the issue in term of urban agriculture and sustainable food and environmental issues, he took it seriously and started doing his own research. With the combined efforts of a huge group activists, he ultimately introduced legislation to fix that glitch in the health code, which led to the amendment of NYC Health Code Article 161.

What a wonderful taste of successful activism!

Since then, I’ve had a wonderful time getting to know the folks over at the Gotham City Honey Co-op and the NYC Beekeeping Meetup Group. They have free classes, discounted group equipment orders, and a lot of support.

According to the newly amended NYC Health Code Article 161, beekeepers in the city now have to file a notice with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene with their contact information and the location of the hive. Via the NYC Beekeepers Association, here is the form you need to file in order to keep bees legally in NYC.

As for me, I’m now the resident beekeeper up on the roof at East Midwood Jewish Center.