Sting of defeat

Getting bees was my wife’s idea. We had some spotty pollination on fruit trees and veggies one year, so Michele signed us up with the Loudoun Beekeepers Association in Virginia for a winter class.

We learned how to build a hive, install bees, and take care of them through honey season and winter. We were assigned a mentor, and it was off to the races.

The first couple of years went great, and we had lots of honey and pollination. I used to fill up dozens of red-capped plastic bottles shaped like bears and sell them at U.S. News and World Report, where I worked for a dozen years.

For my wife, it was a part-time job of love. She spent hours working them, cleaning the hives, and mixing the best medicines to keep them healthy and their enemies away. And for that, she often got stung.

“You’re not mean enough,” I’d offer to a disgusted snort.

Disasters were common. Sometimes half or all of our hives would die out or freeze during winter. I’ve lost count of the multiple swarms we’ve suffered. After back-to-back-to-back years of losses and zero honey, we stopped replenishing our hives with boxes of bees every spring.

This year we decided to give it one more try.

We ordered two boxes of bees from the association, and they arrived from the Georgia apiary where they were raised. Each box had about 30,000 bees and one queen in a cage to protect her until the colony got familiar with her scent. Into the Volkswagen Beetle they went, along with a few that had escaped, making the ride a little more exciting than planned.

At home, we suited up with our white beekeeping coats and hoods for the installation near our big veggie and berry garden. It had been a few years since our last installation, so we went a bit too slow with the first box, and they turned angry.

We opened the box and removed the queen cage corked with candy. In a couple of days, while they learn her smell, they will eat through the candy and release her. We placed the cage on top of new honey frames and shook out the 30,000 bees on top of her.

Next, we put on sugar water for food. Typically we use a gallon pickle jar with holes in the lid placed upside down into a holder. Worried about it freezing and exploding, we tried Ziploc bags with little cuts in them placed on top of the frames. Done it a million times. This time it didn’t work, and the juice started to spill through the hive, making the bees even crazier.

So we used the pickle jar and closed the hive. The second hive went much smoother. After a couple of days, it was time to feed them again, and my wife was handling it just fine until I butted in.

I went to the barn to get my spare bee jacket. My leather bee gloves were at the house in the other coat, so I pulled on some cheap brown jersey gloves, still greasy from butchering deer last winter, and headed to the hives.

But something was strange. The bees seemed angry, and at me.

Still, I moved in. Big mistake. This time they came for me and my hands, apparently attracted by the scent of venison. Cotton is no match for stingers, FYI. One nailed me, and while the sting of a honey bee doesn’t last but a minute, the subsequent itching can last a miserable week.

My badassness didn’t scare them away, and they kept coming, though only that one got through.

By the time I went back to the house and returned with the leather gloves, Michele was already done, the bees seemingly thanking her for the food by gently brushing by her. Without missing a beat, she calmly asked, “Is everything good?”

Paul Bedard is a senior columnist and author of Washington Secrets.