Who’s your candidate for greatest American writer of all time? It’s a tough call, and I think there’s a case to be made for Herman Melville or Edith Wharton. Other people think there’s a case to be made for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Steinbeck. Still others say Kerouac, but that’s bananas.

For my money it’s Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is usually on the short list of candidates for the Great American Novel, but one of my all-time favorite Twain scenes comes from the also-ran, Tom Sawyer. It’s where Tom has to whitewash the fence.

He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged.

Tom first tries to talk Jim into helping him, but Miss Polly intervenes and puts the kibosh on that effort. Next, he checks his pockets to see what he could use to bribe one of his friends to do some of the work. He comes up with “bits of toys, marbles, and trash,” and abandons that strategy. But then, “At this dark and hopeless moment an inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a great, magnificent inspiration.”

Tom pretends that the task of whitewashing is so compelling, so absorbing, that he doesn’t even notice his friend Ben sauntering by, eating an apple and impersonating a steamboat. When Ben comes right up alongside Tom to get his attention, Tom manages to convince him that whitewashing a fence is the sine qua non of boyhood entertainment, and refuses to let Ben help. Only when Ben promises his apple as payment does Tom hand over the brush “with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart.”

By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with – and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar – but no dog – the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I think Mark Twain is the greatest American writer because he wrote one scene that I think about every time I have a tedious, time-consuming job to do, but neither would it be accurate to say that it doesn’t factor in.

Hive frames, unassembled

In this case, the tedious, time-consuming job is beehive assembly.

Our beehives came this week, via UPS, in a shipment of five boxes that arrived over two days and weighed a total of 275 pounds. I knew the hives would come unassembled, and I knew assembling them would be a big job but, as I surveyed the huge piles of parts of frames, deeps, and supers, all gladness left me and a deep melancholy settled down upon my spirit.

Each hive consists of five boxes: three deeps and two supers. The deeps are the large boxes on the bottom, where most of the hive activity happens. The supers are shallower boxes that sit on top of the deeps, and the bees use them to store honey. Each box comes as four sides with dovetailed edges. For the parts to become a hive, the edges have to be glued, the boxes hammered together, and the joints nailed.

That’s the easy part. Between Kevin, me, and the nail gun, we assembled the boxes in about an hour. The hard part is the frames.

Kevin assembling the boxes

A hive is like a file box, with frames hanging from the sides like file folders. Each frame has a sheet of foundation – a sort of starter honeycomb – inserted in it like a picture in a picture frame. Two of the deeps don’t get frames (they’re spares that make working the hives easier), but every other box has ten frames.

That’s 80 frames, total. Each frame has four sides, one sheet of foundation, one bar that holds the foundation to the top, and four pins that hold the foundation to the sides. That’s ten parts per frame, 800 parts in all.

To assemble a frame, you glue the sides to the top, and then glue the bottom to the sides. You nail the joints to make sure the thing doesn’t come apart from apian wear-and-tear. Then you work the foundation into the slot in the bottom, and attach it to the top by nailing a wooden bar over the bent wires that stick out of the foundation at right angles. Then you insert these diabolical little bobby-pin-like pins through holes in the sides of the frame and position them so that the foundation is in between the two prongs of the pin.

Our first frame, with nail-gun damage

So far, we’ve only assembled one It took us about ten minutes, but that included time to bemoan the fact that the puff of air from the nail gun blew a hole in the foundation – twice – as we were putting the last couple of nails in. I think we’ll get better at frame assembly, but it’s still going to be tedious, time-consuming job.

Luckily, the bees don’t come until the beginning of May, so we have time.

I’m thinking we could learn a thing or two from the wood-fired oven workshop we attended last fall. We showed up in a stranger’s backyard, hauled the stones, shoveled the sand, and worked the clay required to build the oven, and paid hard, cold cash for the privilege.. It was straight out of Tom Sawyer, but I didn’t mind because we learned a lot about building a wood-fired oven (and because the stranger was Brewster potter Diane Heart, whose pottery we like and whose company we enjoy).

I’m figuring some of you out there are thinking about keeping bees yourselves, and it would be worth quite a bit to learn how to assemble a hive. Between now and the beginning of May, we’re happy to teach you – for a nominal fee, or even a dead rat on a string.

Two weeks ago, we went to our first night of Bee School. What we learned about bee habits and feeding had us wondering whether, with our wooded property, we were a good candidate for a bee hive. After a site visit from Andy (one of the instructors) and a canvas of our holly tree population (bees love holly), we determined that we shouldn’t get a hive – we should get two.

Two hives means twice the chance for a successful colony. It means being able to compare hive behavior and habits. It’s means twice as much honey. The only downside is the money.

I have provided insect housing before, but this is the first time it has cost me. I’ve certainly paid to get rid of them, but never to put them up in the first place. They’ve come, of their own accord, to live in my pipes, or my collard greens, or my corn flakes.

Bees, though, aren’t content with stale cereal or household crevices. They need a hive, and hives are expensive. With the boxes, the frames, and the accoutrements, you’re looking at $250. per hive, easy. And that’s without the bees! You wouldn’t think it would cost so much to house something, which, left to its own devices, lives in a hollow tree.

A bee brush

Since we were looking at a bill approaching $500., I started scrutinizing the list of equipment, looking for anything we might be able to do without. There wasn’t much. The list was put together by the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, and they tried to keep it to the bare minimum necessary for a new beekeeper to get started. Still …

“Do you think we need the bee brush?” I asked Kevin. A bee brush is a soft-bristled brush that you use to remove bees from a honey-filled frame so you can put it, bee-less, into the extractor.

“Of course we need a bee brush,” he said. “What are you going to brush them off with, your bare hands?”

An ice scraper brush

“We could use the brush from the ice scraper we keep in the car.” I asked. “It looks just like it.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “The scraper brush is a hard brush.” He picked up the sample bee brush to show me. “A bee brush is a soft brush.” He brushed it on my hand to demonstrate.

“We could use it gently,” I suggested.

“It’s $3.95!” he exclaimed, with more than a little exasperation.

I gave in on the bee brush, but I’m sticking to my guns on the bee suit.

A bee suit

A bee suit is a full-body, white zip-up number that, with hat and gloves, is supposed to keep bees out. The full suit wasn’t on the BCBA list, but several people suggested that we get at least one, and preferably two. A quick Internet search revealed prices in the $100 – $200 range.

“It looks like a Tyvek suit,” I told Kevin, who was marginally more receptive to this suggestion.

“Tyvek suits cost six dollars,” I went on.

“They’ll be really hot in the summer, and I’m not sure I want to tend bees while I’m sweating in a Tyvek suit.” He was still skeptical. “Maybe bees can smell discomfort the way wolves smell fear.”

“I don’t think the heat will be that bad,” I said. “I’m at least willing to try it.”

A Tyvek suit

“You are SO getting stung,” Kevin told me.

“I’m getting stung?” I exclaimed. “Why should I get stung? You’re the one who’s going to get stung.”

“You’re going to get stung because you insist on cutting corners on the equipment,” Kevin said, irritated. “Why do you think I’m going to get stung?”

“You’re going to get stung because you’re careless?”

“Careless!?”

“Honey, you’re covered with cuts and bruises you get from doing ordinary household chores. A few months back, you put a nail through your finger with a nail gun. Your nickname is Crash.”

He had to concede that there was something in that. My husband isn’t known for following, or even reading, instructions.

“Bees are different,” he said.

“And why are bees different?”

“Bees can sting,” he explains. And that, presumably, makes them scarier than nail guns, or chop saws, or boats. Oddly, I think we’ve found the one thing that scares Kevin more than it scares me.

We haven’t gotten the bee suit, yet. We won’t need it until April, when our bees come. And then we’ll see who gets stung first, the cheapskate or the daredevil. My money’s on the daredevil.

Many years ago, when I lived in California, my friend Greg came to visit. I knew, at the time, that Greg played a mean game of ping pong, but I didn’t know he was interested in competitive table tennis. I didn’t know there was competitive table tennis. But we headed over to Berkeley for a tournament and the scales fell from my eyes.

A semi-final doubles match at the 2009 World Table Tennis Championships (photo borrowed from Kiyoshi Ota/Getty Images). Note shoes, shorts, and focus.

The tournament was in a huge, open room, set up with ping-pong tables as far as the eye could see. They were spaced father apart than I would have thought necessary, but that was because the players, as I later learned, stood a good six feet back from the table.

That wasn’t the only way in which this kind of game did not resemble the rec-room ping pong I’d occasionally dabbled in. For starters, there was the concentration. The players were every bit as focused as Serena Williams or Rafael Nadal.

“Didn’t anyone tell them this isn’t real tennis?” I whispered to Greg. He kicked me and told me to be quiet.

They had super-duper paddles that, judging by their cost, must have been made from titanium. They had special shorts that allowed them freedom of movement. They had ping-pong shoes that gave them the right kind of grip. Many of them looked like serious athletes.

I found it fascinating. And it wasn’t just the game, although I found myself drawn in. It was the idea that there was an entire table-tennis subculture that I knew nothing about. I’d probably passed some of these players on the street, having no idea that they had secret lives as competitive ping-pong players.

A glimpse into someone else’s subculture, previously unknown, is a reminder of all the things you might be doing with your leisure time if you didn’t squander it all on Facebook.

Since we’ve been here, I’ve discovered that there are groups – some loosely organized, some formal enough to be incorporated – that have coalesced around every activity we’ve undertaken. There are not only gardeners, there are shellfishers and bird-watchers and mushroom foragers.

And beekeepers. Monday was our first night of Bee School, a class intended to help rank novices learn how – or whether – to keep bees. It’s put on by the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, which has a fifty-year history and a robust membership. Beekeeping is very popular on Cape Cod, and more of our fellow citizens than I would have suspected have hives in their backyards. Who knew?

We’d been planning to get a hive in the spring, but our first class gave us pause. In order to thrive, the instructor pointed out, bees need an abundant supply of nectar. At some level, of course, I knew that, but I’d never stopped to consider the implications for our situation. We live in the woods, and are nectar-challenged. I looked at Kevin in alarm. “We’re nectar- challenged,” I said.

He scoffed. “We have 120 rhododendrons.”

It’s true, we have 120 rhododendrons. I’d forgotten about them because they flowered months ago. Out of sight, out of mind. But they’re only in bloom for six weeks. What are the bees going to live on the rest of the year?

After class, we explained our situation to Andy, one of the professional apiarists teaching the class. “ Will the rhododendrons be sufficient?” we asked.

“Rhododendrons are no good for bees,” he told us. “They don’t have nectar.” He saw my look of disappointment. “What else you got?” he asked.

We have exactly what he’d already said was, from the bees’ perspective, a barren wasteland – oak and scrub pine. And nasty prickery vines.

One of our holly trees, probably 50 feet tall

“No linden trees? Or black locusts?” he asked.

I couldn’t say for sure, but I didn’t think so.

“How about holly?”

Bingo! Andy told us that holly was almost as good as linden, with nectar-rich flowers. And holly, we’ve got in abundance. Not only that, it turns out we live about two miles from a decommissioned holly farm, which still has many acres of mature trees. Since two miles is well within a bee’s foraging radius, things were looking up.

“Do you think we should do it?” I asked Kevin. The initial investment is in the neighborhood of $400. so, although we’re both very interested in bees, I didn’t want to try it if we were doomed to fail.

Kevin shrugged. “Sure.” He’s more sanguine about these things than I am.

“It might be worth it just for the endless stream of bad puns,” I suggested.

“Might bee,” said Kevin.

Ugh.

Next week, at our second class, we’ll be picking our equipment and signing up to get a colony delivered in the spring. Success isn’t guaranteed. But, as Andy pointed out, very little in life is. If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.

Part of what characterizes a subculture, whether it’s table tennis or beekeeping, is enthusiasm. You just gotta beelieve.