Bees Make the Best Pets. Jack Mingo

and asking to buy a couple of frames of bees and a queen. No problem.

      With some effort, I found the name of a beekeeper. I had already arranged to keep the bees in the library of a small counterculture “hippie” school where I taught middle and high school students art, phys ed, history, film, and so on for a very modest wage. One snag: when I called him, he wouldn't sell me just a couple of frames. What he said made sense: “An observation hive is so small that it will be just barely self-sustaining. You'll probably need to add bees to it now and again, trade out old frames and add new ones full of larvae if you lose your queen, and so on.” He suggested I get a whole, standard beehive and use it to keep the observation hive going. “You might even get a little honey out of it,” he added.

      “You might even get a

       little honey out of it,”

       he added.

      20,000 Bees—Postage Paid

      This was getting more complicated than I'd intended. It wasn't like I really wanted to interact with bees. They scared me to death, actually. I'd just wanted to watch them from a vantage point that was safely behind Plexiglas.

      In those pre-internet days, finding out what to do next wasn't that easy. I did what I usually did when confronted with a great unknown: I went to the library and found a book on the subject. Bolstered with book learning and absolutely no direct knowledge, I discovered that I could buy equipment and bees from the only retail establishment foolish enough to issue me a credit card, Sears, Roebuck & Co., back when it was a retail powerhouse. Besides its huge general catalog, it issued a dozen specialized ones, including Farm & Garden.

      I was making $8,400 in 1980 and I'd already spent about $100 on an empty observation hive. A beekeeping starter kit, complete with a build-it-yourself hive body box, smoker, “sting-resistant” canvas gloves, book, and protective veil cost maybe $60, and three pounds of live bees with queen, another $30. This was becoming a very expensive whim, but I was halfway in and I couldn't quit because an empty observation hive would be as depressing as a dead ant farm.

      Luckily, the kit came first. It gave me the chance to put everything together, read the book, try on the frighteningly flimsy gloves and the gap-prone veil. With it came a notification that the bees would arrive in a few weeks when the weather warmed up a bit. “No hurry,” I thought.

      In 1980 a beekeeping

       starter kit, complete

       with a build-it-yourself

       hive body box,

       smoker, “sting-resistant”

       canvas

       gloves, book, and

       protective veil cost

       maybe $60.

      Weeks passed. One morning, at 5:30 a.m., the phone rang, waking me from a sound sleep. The voice, shrill and loud, cut sharply through my drowsy fog. “This is the Berkeley Main Post Office. You have to come right away. There's a box full of bees over here. They're waking up and they're buzzing really loud.”

      “Are they loose?”

      “Not exactly. But the box isn't secure and they could sting somebody. Get over here right away!”

      Going Postal

      I was mystified, but I grabbed my gloves and veil on the way out, just in case. Not that I really knew what I'd do if there were a problem. As instructed, I pulled around to the loading dock and explained why I was there. Looking relieved, the sole worker back there went inside and came out wearing gloves and gingerly holding the outer edges of a small wooden box. It was buzzing. The two largest sides were covered with screen and I could see a mass of bees inside hanging in a large mass. I noted that the screens were doubled in a way that the bees' stingers wouldn't reach, even if he were holding the box from the sides. I relaxed a bit.

      The book laid out the steps for what to do from here. I had memorized them, not wanting to be paging through it later, covered by bees in my “sting-resistant” gloves. The next step was to put them into a cool, dark place until just before twilight. When I got to school I put them in a closet where the bees could rest, except during every class break when curious kids came in to sneak peeks at the buzzing, slowly writhing, mass.

      I was excited. I was scared witless. I tried to imagine the next steps: gently reaching into the center of the mass and extracting the queen cage, a small screened box, removing the cork on one end, hanging it from one of the frames inside the hive, and then shaking and banging the box until all the bees had fallen into the hive. Put on the lid, put some grass in front of the hive opening, and walk away.

      At the appointed time, I put on my gloves and veil and carried the box in both hands at arm's length up to the platform where the hive was already waiting. I was followed by a small group of curious friends and faculty members. They huddled some distance away as I went through the checklist of the next steps. (“Don't forget the cork!”)

      With that kind of sitcom-like setup, you'd expect that everything would go disastrously wrong. Sorry to disappoint: As the sun went down, I followed the directions. Things went like clockwork. I remembered to remove the cork. I opened the box and the bees didn't fly away or sting me silly. I shook and jostled them into the hive and they spread over the frames, seemingly relieved to be home among beeswax again. I closed the lid, placed the dried grass in front of the entrance, and felt competent and brave and alive, like I was somehow home again as well.

      Ignorance Can Kill

      The next day, things were fine. It was a warm, sunny day, and when I went up to the bee platform at lunchtime with some students, the bees were flying experimental flights out of the hive. Things looked good.

      My sense of competence was short-lived, however, and I felt terrible about what happened next. My book-learned beekeeping somehow failed me, or maybe I didn't read far enough into the guidebook.

      Not long after, the weather turned cool and wet again. One of my students hurried down from observing the bees to report that they were acting weird, climbing out of the hive and walking listlessly around on the deck. He reported that some seemed to be dead or dying. I climbed up to the platform and looked on helplessly for a few minutes, trying to understand. I began desperately paging through the disease sections of my reference books, wondering whether this was a sign of something like foul brood or deformed wing virus, or whether they'd been poisoned by the bee-unfriendly buck-eye trees nearby.

      I opened the box and

       the bees didn't fly

       away or sting me silly.

       I closed the lid, placed

       the dried grass in

       front of the entrance,

       and felt competent

       and brave and

       alive . . .

      It took a while, but I finally realized that they were starving. They were starting a colony from scratch and needed a lot of food to build the comb. The book recommended something I had skipped over: that they should be fed until they get