Emmett Lost Half of Them the First Winter

Emmett came through my back door with a jar of honey and set it on the counter.

I said something about him finally getting a crop.

He said it wasn’t his. It was Dwight’s, from the club. Emmett went into last winter with two colonies and came out with one, and the one that lived was in no shape to give him anything.

He’s 63. He’d wanted bees for about thirty years, the way some men want a boat.

Eighteen months in, he still hasn’t tasted a spoonful of his own honey. He ordered two more colonies for spring anyway.

He thought he was buying a hobby. Something to putter at on a Saturday.

What he actually bought was livestock.

That’s the thing I’d want somebody to say out loud before I ordered anything. Bees aren’t a garden. You can ignore a garden for two weeks in June and it looks rough and forgives you. Ignore a hive for two weeks in June and it swarms, and half your bees leave with the queen while you stand in the yard and watch your money go into a neighbor’s oak.

They also die. Not rarely. Routinely.

And it’s a season, not a year. Emmett is out at those hives most weekends from April into September. He’d planned on something he could pick up and put down. What he got was a reason he couldn’t drive to his daughter’s in May.

I went looking for the numbers because Emmett kept saying everybody loses hives, and I wanted to know what everybody meant.

There’s a national survey run out of Auburn with Oregon State and the Apiary Inspectors of America. For the twelve months ending April 1 of this year, better than 2,300 beekeepers reported in.

Across all of them, 39.9% of colonies died.

Split it by who’s keeping them and it gets worse for men like Emmett. Backyard beekeepers, meaning under fifty hives, lost 54.8%. The commercial outfits running more than five hundred lost 38.7%. Both figures carry wide ranges, and the backyard one runs from the mid-forties to the low sixties.

Read that again. The people doing it for a living lost about four in ten. The people doing it in the backyard did worse.

And 39.9% was the good year. The two before it came in at 55.1% and 55.6%, both records.

Here’s the part that reordered the whole thing for me.

There’s a parasite called varroa — a mite about the size of a pinhead that feeds on bees and carries viruses into the colony while it does it. Penn State’s extension people say varroa mites transmit a number of lethal viruses, and that knocking the mites down in the fall is a major factor in whether a colony sees spring.

The threshold is low. Penn State says keep it at or below two mites per hundred bees, checked monthly. Minnesota’s bee lab aims lower. They want no more than a couple of mites in a three-hundred-bee sample, which is a third of that.

Call it two per hundred at the outside. That’s the whole margin.

Now here’s the mechanism, because it explains all those dead hives.

The bees that carry a colony through winter get raised in late summer. Minnesota’s bee lab says it in one line: control mites in late summer to reduce the number of mites that damage the developing winter bees. Miss that window and the hive can look fine in October and be empty in February. The bees that were supposed to live got built wrong.

Emmett treated in November. He’d read that you treat in the fall, and November is the fall, and by then it was already over.

A hive that dies in February usually died in August.

So beekeeping, the actual practice of it, isn’t mostly about honey. It’s mostly about counting mites and acting on a calendar you don’t get to negotiate.

Three things. None of them are secrets. They just don’t make the brochure.

Oklahoma State’s extension sheet puts the first one about as bluntly as an extension sheet can. You may not harvest any honey your first year. Plan on that. If you get some, it’s a bonus, not the plan.

The same sheet says start with two hives, not one. Two gives you a comparison. When one looks wrong you’ve got something to hold it against, and you can move a frame of brood from the strong one to the weak one. With a single hive you’re guessing.

And the boxes are heavy. A full-depth box of honey runs north of sixty pounds by the extension numbers, and one manufacturer puts a loaded deep at eighty to ninety. A shallow is about thirty-five.

That isn’t a warning. It’s a purchasing decision. Buy mediums or shallows on day one and you never have to make that call later with an open hive in front of you.

Emmett says if he could run it again, he’d do it in this order. I added one item, and I’ve marked which.

▸ Find the club before you find a supplier. The extension programs keep directories of the state and county associations. What you want isn’t the dues. It’s one experienced person willing to stand next to you the first four times you open a hive.
▸ Take the winter course. Emmett’s club runs theirs in January. Get the classroom done before the bees show up, not after.
▸ Start with two. That’s extension’s advice, not mine.
▸ Buy mediums or shallows. The equipment you buy in year one is the equipment you’re lifting in year ten.
▸ Settle the sting question with a doctor first. This is the one I’m adding. The allergy specialists put potentially life-threatening reactions to insect venom at about 3% of adults, and stings kill roughly 72 people a year in this country. If you’ve ever had a bad reaction to one, that’s a conversation with an allergist before you order bees. Venom immunotherapy exists, and they put its protection as high as 98%.
▸ Learn to count mites before anything else. Before honey, before queens, before you build a single box. It’s the skill the whole thing rests on.

He kept the receipts, because Emmett keeps everything. Two hives, first year, his numbers.

Fourteen hundred dollars and no honey. He’d tell you it was worth it and he’d mean it. I won’t dress up the first-year math, because it doesn’t look good.

Bees themselves get priced by where you pick them up, and the suppliers don’t publish one national number. So call the outfits near you before you budget anything.

So I asked him the obvious thing. Half of them died, it cost him fourteen hundred dollars, and he’s never tasted his own honey. Why order two more.

He said the hive that lived is his.

Not his property. His. He knows what went wrong in it, what he did about it, and when. He goes out there before breakfast in a t-shirt and stands twenty minutes doing nothing at all.

Then he said something that’s stayed with me. He said it’s the first thing in years that needs him on a schedule he doesn’t set.

Dwight’s jar is still sitting on my counter, unopened. Emmett won’t take it back. He says we’ll open it the day he brings me one of his own.

— Walter