Bees Make the Best Pets. Jack Mingo

take care of them, and they'd die. In that case, some of the field bees return to the nursery worker job. Here's where it gets interesting: researchers from Arizona State University discovered that going back to larvae-rearing makes their old brains work again like young brains, restoring their mental agility and ability to learn. (Interestingly, many human grandparents have discovered that keeping up with their fleet-footed, quick-witted grandkids has a similar effect.)

      THE ROYAL SENDOFF

      When a new queen is ready to fly off and mate, there's an interesting pageantry in the beehive that looks reminiscent of royal weddings. Suddenly thousands of worker bees pour out of the hive at once. Those that can fly take to the air, flying excitedly in circles above the hive; the young flightless bees congregate on and around the landing board like well-wishers. They are not aggressive, and you could almost interpret their behavior as celebratory (and who knows, it might be). However, this grouping and flying has survived as a behavior because it serves a purpose. It's dangerous to leave the hive, especially for a big, juicy, slow-moving queen, because many birds love eating bees. By coming out in large numbers, there's a variety of tasty looking targets, so the queen has a much better chance of surviving, even if a hundred bees get eaten during that time. If the queen is only one of 10,000 or more crawling and flying around, the odds are only one in a hundred that she'll be one of the unlucky ones.

       The King Is Dead, Long Live the Queen

      “If there's a queen bee, is there a king bee?” People have had strange ideas about bees for eons. In the first century AD, the poet Virgil wrote a guide to beekeeping in which he stated that bees reproduced asexually. This idea that honey and beeswax came from a sexually chaste source, mirroring their belief about the mother of Jesus, was particularly appealing to the Catholic Church. As a result, beehives were commonly kept around missions and convents, and only beeswax candles were considered unadulterated enough to burn on church altars.

      Beehives back then were kept in skeps, one-piece woven baskets covered with hardened mud or dung, which didn't allow much investigation into the inner workings of hive life. At some point somebody noticed that there was a bigger bee of some kind in there. The assumption, based on the society of the time, was that it must be the king that ruled over the hive and told the workers what to do. It wasn't until the 1500s that it was suggested that the king bee was not only female, but also the one that laid all the eggs. Still, the assumption didn't change that she was a virgin queen, ruling over the hive population of male workers. Consider the surprise of male scientists in the 1670s, messing around with a new invention called a microscope, when one of them discovered that all of the workers were females.

      Still, thanks to the “queen” label, most people assume that the queen bee is the leader of the hive. Not true. The hive is essentially a well functioning anarchist community, with bees doing what needs to be done based on their biology and instincts. Decisions are not made by dictate or consensus; they're hardwired into the bees. When something needs to be done, one or more of them does it. The queen is an important member of the hive with a singular job to do, as well as the mother of all the workers, but she is as much the prisoner of the hive as its queen. And her mates, the drones, aren't even princes—they're more like disposable consorts. Very disposable, it turns out.

      . . . beehives were

       commonly kept

       around missions and

       convents, and only

       beeswax candles were

       considered unadulterated

       enough to burn

       on church altars.

      DECONSTRUCTING BEE CONSTRUCTION

      Who knows for whom the doorbell tolls? Actually, a brown-uniformed guy with heavy boxes knows: it tolls for me.

      The boxes on my front porch have come from a beekeeping supply house, Dadant, the country's biggest and oldest. As I move them into the house, they make the sounds of wood rattling together like the top notes of a marimba. I'm expanding my bee yard, adding another hive, and adding some honey supers to the others. But first there's a lot of pounding and painting to do.

      Opening the cardboard boxes, I'm greeted by the sweet smells of pinewood and fresh beeswax. Even devoid of mental associations, they smell wonderful, but throw in a few weeks of anticipation and a few years of memories and I'm nearly knocked over as I begin the process of nailing together the hive boxes, then the ten frames that go inside each one. Those frames each consist of four pieces of pre-cut wood that need to be nailed together into a rectangle. Into that frame, I need to coax a sheet of fragile, thinly pressed beeswax and nail a long narrow strip that theoretically holds the wax in place. Most of the job is not hard, but it is repetitious. It is hard to mess up the frame too badly, but it is easy to wreck the wax sheet. Barely thicker than construction paper, it can crack by accidentally flexing it a little too far while laying it into the frame, or clumsily punching a hole through it with the hammer while pounding in the tiny nails, poking out just a millimeter or two from the wax, that barely hold the thin strip of wood that barely holds the wax in place, hopefully long enough that the bees will cement it into place before it falls out.

      FIRST BEEHIVE

      When I mention my beekeeping, people sometimes ask “how did you get started?” (and sometimes “In the name of God, why?!?”). I wish I had a story that shows that I'd had noble environmental intentions and coherent motivation. But honestly, I got into beekeeping in the same way I've made a lot of big decisions of life, love, career, and philosophy—by stumbling into them in an unfocused, whimsical, and alarmingly superficial manner.

      When I think about it, most of those decisions turned out all right. Either there's method in my madness, or I've been pretty damned lucky. As a case study, here's how I stumbled into beekeeping.

      Ant Farm on Steroids

      Blame the shortcomings of ant farms for my introduction to beekeeping.

      Remember ant farms? My several siblings and I got one as a present one year. At first it was fascinating, elbowing the others to get a better vantage point while watching the ants digging new tunnels through the virgin sand. Not much time passed, though, before the farm collectively became just another ignored and neglected pet. The tipping point came when the soil was thoroughly dug and the farm became a depressing existential hell filled with depressed and moping ants with absolutely no purpose in the world. Worse, their numbers slowly dwindled, as they died off one by one to be buried by the survivors—for reasons not fully explained—in the northeastern corner of the farm. When the farm got down to just one of the social insects listlessly pushing a clump of dirt pointlessly from point A to point B, it was more than a tender heart could bear.

      The ideal would've been to have gotten a queen ant. They lay eggs so the colony wouldn't die out. They also have pheromones that keep an ant farm both motivated and populated. But ant suppliers don't provide queens and when digging up my own ants I never found a queen, so I finally gave up on ant farms.

      Then, a decade after my last ant farm, I found something even better, something like an ant farm on steroids: a fully functioning observation beehive. The best part of it was that these bees looked happy and industrious, and I soon saw the reason: they had a queen. They had eggs and larvae. It was a working, thriving community that looked as if it were purposeful instead of tragic. I wanted one.

      I Got One . . . Sort Of

      It was only a year or two later that I saw a newspaper feature about a local guy who built and sold observation hives. I called him up right away, drove to his house in San Francisco, and bought one. Well, the box anyway.