“The bees can’t sting through the super suits, but they can through the cotton ones.”
“Wait which one am I wearing?”
I can’t exactly say why I wanted to try out beekeeping, but it’s been a fascination of mine for years. I think the idea of being able to walk into a dangerous situation and be totally protected seemed interesting, like I would need to trick my brain into not being afraid.
What I absolutely didn’t consider was that I might not be totally protected while in said dangerous situation. It felt a bit like being in the plane to skydive and being informed that your chute might not work.
I was in Blue Ridge, TX at Texas Bee Supply for a Beekeeping 101 class. Since I didn’t have a suit of my own I’d been provided a cotton top and a veil for upper body and head protection and was told to wear boots and jeans for my lower half.
Our instructor, the 2013 Collin County Honey Queen and professional beekeeper Shannon LaGrave, was wearing a super suit which is a triple-layered mesh cotton suit that makes you look like the Michelin man but protects from all stings. Shannon has been stung so many times in her life that she says she’s basically immune. She was once stung seven times in the face and it didn’t even swell up.
But she was wearing the super suit for this adventure. And I wasn’t.
The only thing keeping me from freaking out was the fact that none of the other class members seemed worried. Maybe they were hiding it as well as I was. Or maybe I was just being a baby. Almost everyone else in the class already had their own hives and were taking the class to learn how to improve their skills (some, admittedly, had already lost hives due to past mistakes). Others in the class were bee-curious and were interested in having hives of their own.
I was just there for the danger.
I was also there because I’m obsessed with honey and honey products and I have a lot of curiosity about how they are made. Honey is like coffee and wine1. Some people can taste wine from different parts of the world and tell how the different soils affect the taste of the wine. Honey is the same way, the taste of the honey is affected by the environment around it. In fact, it changes tastes based on the time of year too. Because bees get pollen from the wildflowers around them, the flavor of the honey tastes like those flowers. For example, in Texas it’s apparently best to harvest honey around July 4 because the wildflowers that grow in later summer make the honey taste bitter or smell terrible.
This was one of the many fascinating things I learned in Beekeeping 101. Though I mostly was there for the experience of opening up a hive box and seeing the inside of a beehive, I had to sit through several hours of class to earn that right. I thought I’d be very bored, and, to be honest, once we got into the discussion of the different pests and parasites that can destroy beehives and all the different methods you can use to protect your hives I started to dose off a little bit. I also have the attention span of a golden retriever so this happens in any setting where I have to pay attention for several hours.
Other interesting things I learned:
Each hive may try to hatch multiple queens, but the queen that crawls out of her pod first will go to the other queen pods, knock on the outside, and if she hears another one inside will proceed to kill it. #YASSQUEEN #Feminism
There are three types of honeybees: drones, workers, and the queen
Workers are sexually immature females, they are the ones who gather the pollen, protect the hive, and feed the queen. They are the only ones who can sting.
Drones are males. They cannot sting. They are fed by the workers. The only thing they do is mate with the queen. Once they mate with her they die2. Eat, mate, die.
The Queen mates with 15-40 drones and then proceeds to lay eggs throughout the hive. She can control whether the eggs she’s laying are male or female and, if healthy and properly fertilized, she will lay them in a specific pattern.
Each hive box stack houses around 60,000 bees, but those numbers could fluctuate much higher and lower depending on the hive.
Bees can keep the hive cool by air conditioning the hive with their wings.
The main thing I learned through the class is that maintaining a beehive is a ton of hard work, most of it done in a full beekeeper suit in the middle of the summer. It’s hot, sweaty, somewhat dangerous work. And that’s the part I was most interested in trying out.
I’m not saying I wanted to get stung to make this story better, but I am saying that’s the length I’ll go for my Trial & Error readers.
Unfortunately for you, but fortunately for me, I did not get stung. In fact, after a while I started to feel really comfortable with the incessant buzzing around me. I was confident that no bees were going to sneak into my veil and if I got stung through my suit or my jeans I didn’t think it would hurt that bad. So I was able to relax and learn from Shannon as she took out different panels full of bees and passed them around to us.
The panels were shockingly heavy, especially the honey-filled ones. Loyal readers of Trial & Error will remember that I broke my elbow in April, which made the delicate work of holding a heavy panel full of bees a little precarious. I had visions of dropping it and pissing off a couple thousand bees (and about 20 bee lovers around me). So I didn’t hold any panels very long.
We studied a couple of different hive boxes. Shannon told us that these were very calm hives, as opposed to several of her personal hives which are made up of Africanized bees which are very aggressive. These are also known as “killer bees.” According to Wikipedia, “They can chase a person a quarter of a mile (400 m); they have killed some 1,000 humans, with victims receiving 10 times more stings than from European honey bees.”
This is something you learn very quickly about bee enthusiasts, they are built different. There’s something broken in their brain that prevents them from being afraid of things that scare normal people.
The guy who hooked me up with a free class is Brian Cummings, the regional manager at Texas Bee Supply. Via email he seemed like a nice guy and in person he was quiet, but helpful. What I did not realize until we were out in the bee yard was that he’s a complete psychopath.
As Shannon was working with the hive box, taking different panels out, and even shaking some (as seen in the gif above) Brian came out of the office to take some photos. While Shannon was in the super suit and everyone else was at the very least wearing the cotton top, veil, and gloves, this man walked out amongst the bees wearing only the veil and a short-sleeve shirt and pants. Not even gloves. When someone pointed out how insane it was he said he just likes to do it that way.
“Yes, and you get stung all the time,” said Shannon.
Brian just shrugged. I’m telling you, not normal.
We were fortunate that it was a cooler day in early June because we didn’t start getting hot until the end of the time in the bee yard. I can’t imagine what it’s like in the middle of the summer. So, needless to say, after about an hour of fun in the yard I was ready to get the hot suit off. But one thing worried me. When I took my phone out of my back pocket to take some photos while out in the yard, a bee was latched onto the phone. It had clearly crawled into my pocket and grabbed onto the phone while in there. This meant there was a distinct possibility that there could be even more hidden in my other pockets.
Needless to say, I was very careful removing my gear. I checked my pockets and patted myself down a ton before heading inside. Once inside I felt great. I’d accomplished a goal of mine and experienced something truly unique. Right when I was about to sit down for the last hour of class I felt something in my shirt on top my left shoulder.
I tried not to freak out. I flicked my shirt, trying to get whatever it was to fall out. Someone noticed and said, “You got a passenger with you?” To which I chuckled and replied cooly, “That or it’s just a string in my shirt and I’m just overreacting.”
You know, because I’m Bee Guy and I have no fear.
Then I felt it again. I flicked my shirt harder and ran my hand down the inside of it. I still thought it could just be a string when I felt something fall down my shirt and onto the ground. It was a bee. And it was alive. And it had been in my shirt. I quickly stepped on it. No one saw me do it. Bees die all the time and you end up killing some every time you look into your hive. It’s part of the game. Still though, I didn’t want anyone to see me kill one out of fear.
Because I’m Bee Guy and I have no fear.
I bought a jar of Desert Creek cinnamon creamed honey and a big container of regular honey before heading home. Desert Creek is the company started and owned by Blake Shook, who began beekeeping at 12 years old. They make many honey-based products, including creamed honeys which have a thicker consistency than regular honey and are incredible on crackers or in tea. Texas Bee Supply is their company that supplies everything other beekeepers need to tend to their own hives.
Most of the other people in the class weren’t interested in beekeeping on an industrial scale like Blake, instead they have a few hives and want to care for them as a hobby and to make their own honey for themselves and friends.
If you’re bee-curious and want to learn more about what it takes to start and care for hives, you can sign up for classes here.
I hope this one has been a fun read. The last few Trial & Errors I’ve done were more on the practical side. This one returned us to one of the most important elements of Trial & Error: putting me in physical danger for your entertainment.
For the first time in several months I don’t actually have next month’s planned out yet so if you’ve got any cool ideas send them my way.
If you enjoyed this, please share it with friends and make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already!
except I hate wine
According to Wikipedia: “Should a drone succeed in mating, the first thing that happens is all of the drone's blood in his body rushes to his endophallus which causes him to lose control over his entire body.” Anyway…