Ettamarie Peterson with
Cartoons by Lela Dowling
Smart people learn from their mistakes. We all know that, for sure. Beekeepers are usually smart and make their share of mistakes. I am speaking from experience! It is amazing I have survived almost thirty years after thinking of all the dumb things I did. Come to think of it, just today I did another dumb thing! You would think I would remember that combs that don’t have foundation invariably blow out in the extractor. What made me think I could spin those combs that were just wired and not have a giant mess of broken comb to fish out of the tank? Maybe I should put a sign on the machine to remind me to use those combs for cut comb honey! It sells just as fast!
Today’s mess in the extracting room reminded me of one of the first lessons I learned about extracting honey. Being a new beekeeper, I had a lot to learn about how bees love free honey. I set up the borrowed extractor in the back porch. Then, I went to a colony that had lots of honey ready to harvest. When I took the box off the hive, I didn’t cover it, so of course the bees followed their hard work into my back porch. Standing in there with a bunch of bees flying around was bad enough, but then I got one of my brilliant ideas. I opened the door to let them out! Ha! Ha! All their friends outside came in to join them! What was I thinking? It was a good lesson and I never repeated that mistake. Now when I harvest honey, I keep a large plastic container with a lid in my wagon. I pull each honey frame out one at a time and pop it into the container after making sure it has no bees on it. Then I put the lid on before taking the next frame and repeating the procedure. This way I never have to lift a honey super either because I can drag the wagon into my extraction area. I then work with each frame directly from the plastic container.
Another honey related error I made was because I had no idea that the old queen left with the swarm. I got into beekeeping unexpectedly and had no knowledge of what happens before and after a swarm (To tell the truth, I had no knowledge of anything about bees!). My first colony that swarmed was so strong that I decided of course it was ready to make me a box of honey. Right after the swarm I put a queen excluder on top of the brood box and popped a honey super on top of that. When I went back a couple of weeks later expecting to harvest my first honey, I found a honey super full of drone brood! I went to the next beekeepers’ meeting and asked my friends what happened. They were all very polite and refrained from laughing at me. Instead, they explained what probably happened was the new queen hatched out and went up through the excluder being small enough at first. She fattened up and could not get back down so remained a virgin, drone laying queen. Of course, that colony failed because I didn’t know about re-queening either.
Using a one-way escape to clear the bees from my honey sounded great. It would have been a good idea if I had scheduled my time better and gone back twenty-four hours later instead of two days. When I finally got back to the honey super, now totally empty, waiting to be taken away it was completely full of ants! No one told me ants can immediately sense unprotected honey. Let me tell you, it is not an easy job getting ants off frames of honey! At least I didn’t try what my mother did when the ants got into our sugar when we were little children. She poured the sugar in a large pan and put it in the oven thinking the heat would chase the ants out. How wrong her thinking was that day! All the ants just died in the sugar!
One of the funniest things I did as a new beekeeper was trying to be nice to my first colony. I live on a six-acre farm that has plants around that bloom at different times of the year. As I noticed them blooming, I put the hive on a dolly and proudly, bravely moved the bees closer to the flowers. You can’t believe how smart I thought this was! Well, of course, by the end of the Summer the colony had dwindled down to nothing. When I asked the beekeepers at the September meeting why my hive was empty, one of the old timers joked that maybe they went on vacation and forgot to come back! I had not told them how many times I had moved those poor bees! Why didn’t anyone tell me bees have been finding their own flowers for thousands of years? Why didn’t I know about the rule that you should not move a colony more than three feet away or less than three miles?
My excitement at capturing my first swarm was a disaster! I was still teaching, and my husband had retired so he saw the swarm land while I was at school. When I drove in, he told me my bees were in the hedge. I was so excited and eager to get them I rushed right up to them to put them in a box. They took exception to this maneuver and decide to sting me several times! I had been told swarms were docile, so I had not even suited up! My lesson this time was don’t believe everything people tell you about swarms! I also learned how to use the epipen my doctor had prescribed. That was the only time in all these years I have had to use one as I am no longer sensitive to stings and don’t do crazy things around bees.
Speaking of stings, reminds me of the time I had a colony of bees that became very defensive. I could not get close to it without a guard bee or two coming after me. One day they even decided to go after my husband while he was on his tractor a good distance away. I called my good beekeeper mentor and friend Hector Alvarez and told him the problem. He came over ready to help with a super aggressive colony. By this time, it had calmed down and I felt rather foolish having him come to my rescue. He opened the hive and explained my problem. I had let the bees get too crowded and before they swarmed, they were unhappy. Once it swarmed, they changed to better bees. I asked him how he knew it had swarmed. He showed me the queen cells and the new queen. I asked him how he knew it was a new queen and he explained she was running around. He told me virgin queens move quickly and mated queens move slowly. Over the years I have witnessed this behavior.
I learned the hard way how important it is to have a good, sturdy hive stand. Once while in a grocery store, I saw a nice little plastic garden stool that I thought would be just dandy for a beehive. The hive I had in mind was at my mother’s one hundred miles away. I went to visit her almost every week so I could see the bees weekly, too. I didn’t inspect the hive every week and had no idea how fast it was filling up. One day I got a frantic phone call from my mother who was very upset because the cheap hive stand had collapsed under the weight of a lot of honey. The bees were not happy campers, to say the least! I had to get myself back over to her house and rescue the messy situation. This episode was the epitome of the saying, “Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish!”
Another hive stand lesson I learned involved my friend Lela Dowling’s hive (Yes, that Lela Dowling that makes the fantastic cartoons. She and I are old bee buddies.). She reminded me she asked me to keep her hive at my farm for a while because she was moving them a short distance and needed them to forget their old location (She was a lot smarter about moving bees than I described earlier.). Being a good friend, I told her she could bring it over and I would put it up the hill where it would be safe. We put her hive on a small table, the kind that has a single center pole on a large base to balance it. We had to agree this probably wasn’t the sturdiest hive stand. I made it worse by forgetting to turn the nearby water off one afternoon. The next morning, I found Lela’s bees down the hill in mud! I quickly called her because we had a giant mess of muddy bee boxes and upset bees to straighten up. Luckily the bees survived, and she was very forgiving. She allowed how the table was not a good choice and I apologized for washing them down the hill. We are still good friends, even collaborating on this article!
Lela had some beginning beekeeper lessons she learned the hard way, too. She thought she could hide her first beehive from her neighbors by putting the hive in an old gazebo in her backyard. She said, “I truly believed no one would notice one little hive in our backyard amongst all the vegetation, hidden away in a rickety old gazebo. The neighbor behind us heard me out in the yard and asked over the back fence if we had a bee hive in our yard, and I lied and said ‘no’ (I’m such a bad liar!). But then they told me it had swarmed the previous day. Oops! I apologized and promised to remove it.”
One lesson I learned the hard way was that you cannot put an excess of bees in a container to move them even a short distance and expect them to survive, especially in our warmer climate. I stuffed a very large swarm in one of those cardboard swarm catcher boxes. Then I put them in my car and took them to one of my 4-H beekeepers. I almost died of embarrassment when we opened the box to transfer them into her hive. Ninety-nine percent of those bees were dead! It was a sad lesson for both of us. Fortunately, as soon as I got home that day, I got another swarm call, so I had a quick chance to do a better job giving her a swarm.
The bees have taught me to respect their love of making comb in empty spaces. I bet many beekeepers have had the same or similar experiences. I will forget to fill the boxes completely with frames. Then I go back into my hive box and find a beautiful free-formed comb hanging from the inner cover. Of course, it breaks off and falls into the space when I try to lift the lid. This is especially heart-breaking when it is filled with brood. It is possible to put it in an empty frame with rubber bands, but some brood is always destroyed in this process. If it is a piece of comb with honey, it also can be attached the same way, but it is messy. A friend taught me a neat trick to help feed the chunks of honey comb to the bees. You break them into chunks and put them on barbecue skewers, just like making kabobs. Then you place those in the top feeder where the bees can go up to eat their honey. This trick is also good to use if you have taken a colony of bees out of a wall or any other space and must deal with pieces of honey comb too small to rubber band to empty frames.
Lela Dowling also learned a lesson about smokers that won’t cooperate and make smoke when needed. She told me, “I really did leave it in the car while I went into a 7-11 down the street from where I kept my bees after working on the hives and it really did fill the car with smoke. Luckily, there was no chance of setting the car alight, but I did have to really air it out before I could leave.” She was fortunate no one called the fire department, too!
When I give advice to other beekeepers, I almost always tell them, “Believe me because I am speaking from experience! You wouldn’t believe how many dumb things I have done!” As you can imagine I learned from my friend Lela Dowling’s mistakes too!
Note: Lela Dowling and I have been friends ever since meeting at Sonoma County Beekeepers Club (now Association) back in the mid-1990’s. She has put me in some of her bee cartoons over the years much to my delight! I was so pleased when she agreed to add her cartoons to illustrate this article.
