The Beekeeper’s Daughter

By: Ariele Sieling 

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of BEEKeeping Your First Three Years

This is how memories are made!

The decrepit house loomed in front of us, paint peeling from the weathered clapboard. The collapsing porch roof nearly blocked the front door and broken glass littered the grass. Dad and I gazed up at it, dressed in white and carrying a toolbox, buckets, duct tape, and a homemade bee vacuum.

The owner planned to demolish the house in a few weeks. He had noticed a bee colony living in one wall. Being the conscientious sort, he wanted it removed and protected before the house was destroyed, and was willing to pay us to do it.

Bees entered and exited from several holes in one wall. Dad pulled out his stethoscope.

“We need to estimate out how big the colony is,” he explained, “so we know how much of the siding to remove and can estimate how long it will take. I’m guessing two or three hours.”

“Sounds easy enough,” I said. While I had helped my dad catch swarms and harvest honey, this was the first time I’d assisted in removing bees from a building.

I watched as Dad moved the stethoscope around the wall, reaching up higher and higher until he was standing on his tiptoes.

“It will be easier to work from the inside than from a ladder,” he said, so I followed him into the house.

Dad walked through the front door with me at his heels. We stepped over heaps of twenty-year-old mag­azines and around stacks of mattresses. Broken eight track tapes, shattered dishware, and all sorts of filthy and damaged household goods filled the house. We ascended the treacherous staircase slowly and found the bee-filled wall. Dad listened for a few more minutes with the stetho­scope, and then said, “I think there are two colonies here. We had better get moving or this will take all day.”

Working on a pre-demolition house was good – it meant we didn’t have to fix anything after we finished collecting the colony. We cut into the wall upstairs and tossed the lath and plaster into the corner. Sure enough, there were two colonies.

Inside the wall swarmed with bees. They didn’t like us opening their hive, revealing their brood to the world. The guard bees began to dive bomb us. I put on my veil.

Dad handed me the vacuum and a pair of gloves. “It’s all yours. Get as many of the bees as you can, and I’ll go downstairs and open up the downstairs colony.”

I nodded, and turned back to the wall. I hoisted the vacuum onto my back and got to work. The vacuum roared in my ears as I moved the tube around the wall, trying to suck up the bees that rushed here and there in a panicked rhythm. One landed on my gloved hand.

“Dad!” I yelled as I felt the first stinger pierce the leather of the supposedly protective gloves. “Got my first sting!” It hurt a lot. I winced and shook my hand around in the air, as if that would do any good.

Dad ran up the stairs. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you feel swelling anywhere else in your body? How’s your throat? Have some water.” Dad worried when I got stung because my mom and brother are both allergic and carry Epipens. Not to mention that the nearest hospital is 30 miles away.

“I’m fine,” I said, and quit waving my hand around. “What’re you up to?”

“Two stings,” he replied. “Well, 82 if you count every­thing this year.”

I laughed. About an hour later, I stuck my head out the window. “Second sting!” I yelled. He didn’t run upstairs this time, just shouted back, “I’m up to three!”

A short time later I yelled, “Three!”

“Four!” he called back.

When I got to five, Dad was still at four stings, and from that point forward, I was winning the ‘who got stung more times’ contest. I learned that stings lose their impact after the third sting. You hardly notice them. There is a sharp pinch, like when you get your blood drawn, and then nothing. No swelling and almost no itchiness. They can have other side effects though. If you eat one, it tastes like banana, for example. And my dad told me that one of his instructors got stung so many times in one day, that as he was driving home, he saw a pink rabbit running beside his truck.

I topped out the day at 11 stings, and Dad with eight. We worked for eight hours vacuuming bees out of that decrepit old house with no lunch and only one gallon of water. Then, we carefully fit the combs into the supers with bee-sized spacers and drove the bees home.

In the course of my 27 years, I have done plenty of bee projects with my dad. I had my first hive when I was 10, and of course it died, because very few 10-year-olds are willing to put in the work needed to keep it alive. Swarm catching was one of my favourite activities; my dad caught swarms everywhere from people’s backyards to 30 feet up in trees, and sometimes showed off by sticking his hands into the swarm.

Every year the whole family helped Dad extract the honey from the hives. We spent the day in the honey room, getting sticky, dirty, and sweaty as we uncapped the frames, spun them in the extractor, and strained the honey into jars.

I didn’t often go with him to catch colonies, howev­er. This was only my second job – the first being much easier as a swarm had simply started building comb on an old fence post.

So I wasn’t jumping into beekeeping head first per se – it was more like wading in up to my ankles and then stepping off a ledge.

But for whatever reason, I keep going back. I guess that’s just what happens when you’re a beekeeper’s daughter.