Made by Hand (22 page)

Another newbie pointed to Kirk’s bee smoker, which looked like a little teakettle hooked up to an accordion, and asked him why beekeepers pumped smoke on bees when they were opening the hive boxes.

“The smoke makes them eat honey,” he said. They assume their home is on fire, and so they gorge on honey to store up energy in case they have to escape. It has the desirable side effect of making them drowsy. “It’s like you eating a bunch of turkey. Who wants to fight after a turkey dinner?”

Kirk quickly caught on that a number of us at this meeting knew next to nothing about bees, and what little we did know was in complete opposition to the tenets of Backwards Beekeeping. “We’re totally ass-backwards to everyone else,” Kirk explained. “That’s why it works. Bees are the interface Mother Nature put in to make life work. The reason bees are the way they are is because that’s what works.” The idea of backwards beekeeping is to do as little as possible to interfere with the natural behavior of bees, and, as Kirk says, “just smile at ’em when you come out and see ’em.”

The late Charles Martin Simon originated the backwards-beekeeping philosophy. In 2001 Simon, owner of a stinging-insect removal business in Santa Cruz, California, with more than four decades of beekeeping experience, issued his tenth “Principles of Beekeeping Backwards,” a manifesto for people who wanted to try a more natural style of beekeeping:

This reminded me of what Sandor Ellix Katz wrote in his book
Wild Fermentation,
waving aside beer- and winemaking books that instruct the amateur brewer or winemaker to follow rigorous rules about “chemical sterilization, exacting temperature controls, and controlled cultures.” (See chapter 7 for more on Katz’s advice to “reject the cult of expertise.”)

As Charles Martin Simon once did, Kirk earns a living removing wild bee colonies that have infested fences, trees, and chimneys. But instead of killing the bees, as many pest-control companies do, Kirk saves the bees and resells them to people like me who want to keep them.

Kirk’s been keeping bees since 1970, when he ordered a hive through Montgomery Ward. Someone asked him if it was legal to keep bees in Los Angeles. He replied, “I don’t know what the laws are, but it could be you aren’t supposed to have them.” (I’ve since learned that urban beekeepers don’t want to know the regulations for beekeeping for fear of finding out that they are violating one ordinance or another. I’m following suit.)

Another person asked Kirk about mites, the bane of the modern beekeeper. Mites (members of the Acarina order like another well-loved eight-legged creature, the tick) are pinhead-sized parasites that make a living by attaching their jaws to larger animals and drinking their blood. Several kinds of mites are parasitic on bees. The most infamous is the rust-colored varroa mite, which attaches itself to adult bees as well as to larvae and pupae. As many as a dozen mites at a time will latch onto one bee.

And the problem seems to be getting worse. According to researchers at Ohio State University, bee mites have “all but decimated the casual beekeeper and feral (wild) bees in North America.”

Mites can wreak havoc on a colony by weakening the immune system of adult bees and by spreading a virus that causes wing deformities in undeveloped bees. The mites also hamper the ability of worker bees to make glucose oxidase, the enzyme that preserves honey. Without the enzyme, the honey becomes contaminated with bacteria, which poisons the bees. A mite infestation can lay waste to an otherwise healthy bee colony in a couple of weeks.

Varroa mites (the scientific name is
Varroa destructor
) have become a worldwide problem. Thought to have originated in Russia, they spread through Europe and were first discovered infesting U.S. bees in 1987 in Wisconsin and Florida. A year later, the mites had spread to ten other states.

As you might expect, the first line of defense against bee mites has been chemical pesticides. And, as you might expect, after a couple of years of good results, mites have evolved to resist these chemicals.

“Bees have to live with mites, because they are in the environment,” Kirk told us. Mites of all kinds are everywhere, and we’ll never get rid of them. Tiny (and harmless) face mites are living in the hair follicles in your facial skin right now as you read this, eating sebaceous secretions and dead skin cells.

Instead of poisoning mites, the backwards way of controlling the parasites is to make patties out of vegetable shortening and sugar and feed them to the bees. The grease gets on their bodies, making it hard for mites to recognize the bees as suitable hosts.

After we watched a video of Kirk dismantling a fence to get at a wild-bee colony whose long, droopy hives looked like gray gym socks filled with sand, he passed around a pad of paper. “Everyone who wants bees, write down your e-mail and phone number. We’ll call you soon and give you some bees.”

A couple of days later, he sent an e-mail to everyone in the club that read:

I wasn’t ready. I had no equipment, so I needed to get it fast. Thankfully, Amy Seidenwurm, who founded the club along with Kirk and her husband, Russell Bates, posted a list of equipment to buy:

So on a Saturday in late January 2009, I put Jane in the car, and we drove to Los Angeles Honey, the only beekeeping-supply store in the city. After taking an exit off the San Bernardino Freeway, I drove through a gritty industrial neighborhood of used auto parts warehouses, scrapyards, and metal recycling centers. In the gloomy drizzle the neighborhood looked like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. I saw a group of men on the side of the road with a pickup piled high with old TV sets, barbecue grills, and other cast-off detritus of the consumer age. One of them was handling a thick wad of cash, peeling off a few bills to purchase some items from a man who had a shopping cart loaded with stuff he’d probably scavenged from Dumpsters.

So
this
is where all the stuff bought at Walmart that people no longer want ends up: It gets resold as scrap to street dealers and recycled into new raw materials, which are probably shipped back to China to be melted and repoured into shiny new toys packed in Styrofoam and sold back to us.

I found Los Angeles Honey across the street from a muddy lot filled with teetering towers of old wooden pallets that men on forklifts were moving from place to place. I thought of Bertrand Russell’s definition of work in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness”: “Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

DIY is mostly work of the first kind, but people find it to be pleasant. The guys moving the pallets probably don’t like their job, because they are being told to do it, rather than being self-directed. I liked putting together the components for my self-watering garden containers, but it was
my
idea to do it. If I had a job where I had to go all over town assembling garden containers because my boss told me to, I’m sure I’d start to loathe it.

I parked in front of the beekeeping store, and Jane and I entered the small lobby area. We were the only customers, and I couldn’t see anyone behind the counter separating the lobby from the cavernous warehouse in the back. It was clean and well-lighted inside, a startling contrast to the grimy, haphazard, industrial hubbub outside. The warehouse had metal shelves stacked fastidiously with wooden beehive materials.

Eventually a man appeared from behind one of the shelves at the far end of the warehouse. His orange-and-black-checked shirt, round belly, large-framed eyeglasses, thinning hair, and business-like demeanor gave him a distinctly beelike effect. I handed him my list of supplies. As he began collecting them from the shelves, I asked him a few questions.

His name was Larry, and his father had started the business in 1957, when Los Angeles still had a lot of fruit orchards and people on the periphery of the city still had large enough lots to keep bees without alarming their neighbors. When lots were subdivided and people started living in condos and apartments, the demand for hives plummeted. That’s why, he said, one beekeeping-supply store really is sufficient for all of Los Angeles.

But Larry explained that in the last year business had increased. He figured it was because people wanted to pitch in to increase bee populations devastated by colony collapse disorder, and because they were tired of sitting in front of a computer all day long and wanted to spend more time outside. I told him that he was describing me, and he finally cracked a slight grin. “When you spend a lot of time with bees,” he said, “you get to understand them. And that helps you begin to understand people.”

He stacked my hive boxes (called supers) and other supplies on the countertop. “You have to attach the bottom cover to the bottom super,” he said.

“How do I do that?” I asked him. Without answering, he went to the back, returning with four nails. He showed me where to put the nails, then handed them to me. I dropped the nails into the smoker so I wouldn’t lose them. I also bought a beekeeper’s outfit. I wanted to get one for Jane, too, but they didn’t carry child sizes (I didn’t bother asking for outfits that would fit Carla or Sarina as they’d already told me they didn’t want to get close to the bees). I carried everything to my car, taking two trips to do so, then strapped Jane into her booster seat and drove home with my supplies.

Sometimes things just work out. Getting bees for my hive was one of them.

When we moved from Tarzana to Studio City in the spring of 2009, I noticed that lots of bees were buzzing around the roof of our new home. On closer inspection, it became clear that they were flying in and out of a crack in the outer wall of the second floor. They’d set up a colony between the walls.

When I told my friend Mark, a contractor whom we’d hired to do some remodeling, he told me he’d just finished a job in another part of town that had bees in the walls. They had hired an exterminator. When the poison gas was pumped into a hole in the wall, the thousands of bees in the colony had flapped their wings so vigorously that “it sounded like a 747,” he recalled. “I could feel the wind from ten feet away.” He said he felt sad for three days afterward.

Fortunately, Kirk ran a humane bee-removal service. I e-mailed him in early March 2009, telling him about the infestation and that the housepainter we’d hired didn’t want to start painting until the bees were gone.

Kirk replied:

I shot back:

Kirk:

I really didn’t want to kill the bees. Sean, our housepainter, was a compassionate soul, so he wrapped himself in a makeshift bee-protection suit consisting of a dust mask, duct tape, and overalls. He painted the bee-infested area without getting stung. Now we didn’t have to rush, and Kirk could set up the bee trap without having to partially dismantle the house.

Kirk arrived on a Friday in late March in his pickup truck. He donned his beekeeper’s suit, indelibly stained from years of contact with propolis, the plant-based resin bees use as a glue for maintaining their colonies. Then he climbed a ladder, caulking gun in hand, and patched up the crack the bees were using to fly in and out of the wall space. He sealed up the crack completely, except for a small hole. He plugged this hole with a matchbox-sized gizmo called a bee escape, which allows bees to travel in one direction (in this case, out of the house) but not the other direction (back inside).