It is funny how often people shudder and sort of curl up in terror when they hear that I’m a beekeeper. They just can’t understand how anyone would voluntarily put themselves in the position to be stung by a hive full of flying insects. It wasn’t so long ago that I would have had the same reaction; I hated getting stung, anybody who says you get used to it is either lying or has nerve damage. However, the thing with beekeeping is that humans have been doing it for millennia and we’ve figured out some great techniques through the years to mitigate risk. I’ve never been stung while working with my bees and even when they are at their angriest I rarely have had them try.
My father was a beekeeper when I was a teenager and I can remember the wide berth we all gave the area in which he kept his hives. In northern Minnesota, bears were a constant threat to the bees’ survival, consequently the apiary was surrounded by multiple strands of high-voltage electric fence which made the area sort of foreboding and fortress-like to begin with. As you walk towards a group of active hives you notice that the air traffic around your head starts to increase exponentially. Much like the airspace around a major metropolitan airport, a beehive is a flurry of activity: bees are gathering pollen and nectar and bringing them back to the hive; bees are also collecting water to cool and humidify the hive. There are guard bees looking out for thieves and bees allotted the task of bringing out the dead (even if they are not quite dead yet). Bees who have found a food source have means to communicate the location of said food source to their hive mates. This is one of the ways they have adapted to more efficiently gather food for the hive. These bees on a mission form a sort of nectar super-flyway, until the food source has been expended. It’s when I’ve walked into the path of one of these super-flyways that I’ve gotten stung the most. It happens like this: bee flies out of hive to find food, big lumbering mammal walks by like an idiot, bee smacks into face of big lumbering mammal, big lumbering mammal instinctively grabs and slaps at face screaming in terror, bee instinctively stings big lumbering mammal whilst getting squashed, big lumbering mammal’s face swells up and hurts for several days. Even in death, the bee wins.
What can we do to avoid this? Stay the hell away from beehives, you say? Yes, of course, but there are other things. As a beekeeper, the easiest thing you can do to avoid flyway stings happens when you are setting up your apiary: locate your bees away from heavily trafficked areas and surround your beehives with some sort of fencing.
The first recommendation might seem obvious, but a lot of people assume that if they want bees in their garden, they need to have the hives in the garden. Not true. Bees can fly many miles in search of food and often they exclude the zone immediately surrounding their hives because that’s where they tend to deposit waste—you wouldn’t eat where you poop either.
The second recommendation could perhaps use some clarification. When you surround your hives with some sort of fencing you are telling people to stay out, providing a wind break, maybe keeping particular animals out of the area (bears, goats, raccoons), but just as importantly a semi-solid fence will divert the bees upwards, moving the flight-path higher and above the heads of most passers-by.
It’s a simple solution that usually helps cut down on bee-human collisions. No one likes to get stung and no beekeeper likes unnecessarily killing their bees.
No comments:
Post a Comment