We’re making a similar deal with our turkeys, only without the egg part. It would be the same with any other animal we raise for food. We provide food, shelter, and, we hope, some modicum of happiness. They take advantage of these amenities, and then ultimately give us back the life we gave them in the first place, sometimes providing eggs or milk along the way.

Big Bee, trying to stay cool

The animals, though, have no say in the matter. If they don’t like the deal, there’s not much they can do. It’s like one of those elections in totalitarian countries – we’re the only choice they have. They can’t really make a break for it, since they’re poorly equipped for life in the wild, and when the time comes for making the ultimate sacrifice, there’s no negotiating. There’s no appeal to a civil court system or board of arbitration. However good a deal it is, it’s a deal we enforce by fiat, despotically.

Totalitarian, indeed.

Bees, though, are different. They can survive perfectly well without our intervention. In fact, if it turns out that the captive breeding of bees (which has only happened in the last fifty-some years), has some role in colony collapse disorder, we will be able to say that they survived much better without us. There’s nothing we do for bees that they can’t do for themselves.

They can also take off, and head from greener pastures, any time they feel like it. Successful beekeeping is all about providing a more hospitable home than your bees could find in a hollow tree. They need to decide to stay.

It’s lucky, then, that they don’t know what those two little boxes on top of their hive are for.

A hive frame. The white cells on top are honey. The darker cells below are brood. The fuzzy spot is on the camera lens.

One of our hives, Big Bee, is doing so well that we added two honey supers a couple of days ago. (Little Bee seems to be fine, but it’s a bit behind.) We’d added the second hive body about a few weeks before, and when we checked it last week the frames were almost all drawn out with comb, and the center seven or eight were quite full with brood and capped honey.

That’s the point at which you’re supposed to give them a new area in which to store their honey, and the two shallow boxes on top of the hive serve that purpose. The bees naturally fill the upper combs with honey and the lower combs with brood, so we can expect that the two honey supers will have almost nothing but honey in them.

Better than a hollow tree, we hope

Many beekeepers use a queen excluder – a screen that workers fit through but the queen doesn’t – between the top hive body and the bottom super to make sure no eggs are laid upstairs. Our local veteran beekeepers work successfully without one, though, so that’s the route we’re going.

Because there aren’t many plants that bloom in July, it’s late for optimal honey flow. We’re not sure how long it’ll take the bees to fill out the supers, and we’re resisting the urge to check on them every few days.

Right now, I suspect the bees are thinking their accommodations are pretty luxurious. We’ve given them two completely empty boxes in which to store their honey – that’s like giving a packrat a shed. When we wait for them to fill those boxes and then take them away, though, I wouldn’t blame them for hightailing it to the nearest hollow tree.

No related posts. Yet.

She said it for years, until they finally got around to doing some remodeling. Then, they opted to for the less dramatic but much safer option of simply having it carted away. I happened to be on the phone with my mother when the guys arrived to do it. “I have to go,” she said. “They’re coming to take the vanity.”

The two-toed sloth, borrowed from photographer Roy Toft at National Geographic

“While they’re at it,” I said, “could you ask them to take the sloth and the gluttony?”

Cue the rimshot!

We’re all afflicted with our fair share of the Seven Deadlies, and sloth and gluttony are my assigned lot.

Not that I’m immune from vanity – or wrath, or greed, or envy. It’s just that none of those forms a fundamental part of my character. As for lust, at my age I wouldn’t mind ramping it up a bit, but I don’t think it ever should have made the list in the first place. I mean, really, if you’re making a list of the top seven sins of all time, is lust even in the running? Where’s meanness? Ignorance? I’d even take pomposity over lust.

But there’s no question that sloth and gluttony should make the list, and it’s those two that will be my undoing. There’s nothing I like better than to sit around and eat.

This has been a particular problem lately because there’s a lot of stuff that’s supposed to happen around here in the spring.

Already, we’ve hauled, shoveled, and spread three yards of compost and two yards of mulch. We’ve taken down two trees and planted one. We’ve cut, split, and stacked an ungodly amount of wood. We’ve built three raised beds and filled them with strawberries and asparagus. We’ve transplanted a whole patch of our neighbors’ raspberries, and gotten our lettuce, kale, collards, arugula, and sugar snap peas into the ground. We’ve cleaned out the chicken coop and put in new litter and straw. We’ve raked enough leaves to fill a swimming pool.

By “we,” I mean Kevin.

Oh, sure, I’ve helped. More than a little, even. But the bulk of the work has been done by my husband. Sloth and gluttony are not his sins.

I have some excuse. It happens that I had a lot of freelance work just as we hit the busy season, but I’m not so good at getting that done, either. There were lots of times when Kevin was out in the yard, slaving away, and I was inside, “writing.” Writing is an activity that lends itself to the exercise of both sloth and gluttony. Because your computer is on your lap, it’s very easy to do time-consuming things that aren’t, strictly speaking, writing. You can read the New York Times or check your Twitter. You can e-mail your friends or play ken-ken. And, naturally, you can’t be expected to do any of this without a snack.

I like to think of this as working, but it bears a striking resemblance to sitting around and eating.

Last night was the last straw. Kevin decided to go fishing late in the evening, and he asked me if I wanted to come. We’d gone the night before, with nothing but one schoolie striper (Kevin’s) to show for it, and I had had one measly nibble all night. So, last night, I decided to stay home and “work.”

Kevin left the house at about 8:15. An hour later – one hour later – he called me to tell me he was coming home because he’d caught his limit, which is two striped bass 28 inches or longer. He was home inside half an hour.

Anyone who fishes will understand what a remarkable night of fishing this was. Kevin had to drive the boat to the marina (about three miles away), put it in the water single-handedly, park the truck, motor out to our favorite fishing spot, catch two gigantic fish, motor back, get the truck, take the boat out of the water single-handedly, and drive back home. He did this in an hour and a half. Door to door. It takes almost that long to go the fish market. That’s how good the fishing was.

And I missed it.

And I didn’t miss it because I had to work. I missed it because it was warm in the house and cold on the boat. I missed it because I was a little bit sleepy. I missed it because a book and another glass of wine sounded better than fishing. I missed it because I am slothful and gluttonous.

I’ve been making a lifelong effort to be less slothful and gluttonous, and it clearly hasn’t been entirely successful. As of last week, though, I have an advantage I’ve never had before – two hives teeming with role models.

We opened our hives for the first time on Thursday, and were amazed at the progress the bees had made in a mere five days. They had freed their queen from her cage so she could start the business of populating the colony. They had drawn out comb on most of the frames, and were busy loading them with pollen and nectar. They had cleaned out debris and dead bees.

The bees are everything I’m not.

The bees are everything I’m not. Focused, industrious, selfless. They begin their day as soon as the sun warms their hive, and don’t hang around for a second cup of coffee. They know what’s required of them, and they spend the entire day doing it, without dawdling or catching up on Facebook.

When they fly out to forage for pollen and nectar – get this – they bring it back to the hive and put it away, to be eaten later. They don’t eat it in the car on the way home, or leave it on the kitchen counter for a couple of days. They create different meals for different members of the hive – larvae, drones, the queen – and make sure dinner’s on the table every night. They keep portion size under control.

They keep their house spotlessly clean, turn in all their stories on time, and still find time to go fishing with their husbands.

There’s lots yet to do this spring. We have to get the rest of the garden in. We have to finish building the wood-fired oven. There are bushes to prune, and yet more leaves to be raked. We need to bait the lobster pots and take them out to the bay. We should force another set of shiitake logs. And there’s fishing to be done. Not only are the stripers running, there are bluefish out there, and we just found out the scup are in, too. Then there are the bees themselves. They’ll need feeding for a while, and then we’ll have to try and keep them disease-free and amply housed.

If I can manage to tackle all my jobs and temptations with even a fraction of the bees’ industry and restraint, it’ll be an excellent spring. I’ll get lots of work done, keep the house in good order, and lose a few pounds. But my role models take me only so far. If I have to live in a monarchy where the men don’t do any work and your jobs are assigned to you in a set rotation from the moment of your birth, I’m going back to sloth and gluttony.

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When you first install a package of bees, the colony is very vulnerable. You begin with ten or twelve thousand bees with a queen in a cage. The queen has already been mated, and is ready to lay eggs. It takes a few days for the bees to release the queen from the cage (by eating through the candy that blocks the entrance), and then it takes a few more for the queen to begin laying.

Headed out to forage

From there, it’s twenty-one days before the first new bees emerge. That means there’s a good month when bees are dying but not being born, and the population of the hive steadily decreases. Since there’s a great deal of work to be done – comb to be drawn, pollen and nectar to be gathered, brood cells to be capped – it’s a bad time to have dwindling numbers.

Kevin and I worry. We worry that the bees won’t like their hives, or that they won’t take to their queen, or that they won’t find sufficient food, or that they’ll simply fly away.

We also wonder. We wonder whether the queen has been released from her cage, whether the hive is coming together as a colony, whether there’s sufficient comb for eggs, pollen, and nectar.

We’re planning to open the hive for the first time tomorrow, to see if the queen is out. We’ll lift out at least one frame (to remove the queen cage), and we’ll get some idea whether everything’s going smoothly. In the meantime, we find ourselves spending a great deal of time standing by the hives, watching.

Headed in with pollen

We’re reassured by activity, and try to make sense of just what the bees are doing. They fly up, and then out to forage. They seem to be evicting the drones (the male bees, who don’t do any of the hive’s work and whose upkeep is a drain on the colony). We were delighted to see that they’re coming back to the hive loaded up with pollen.

We’re determined not to make the amateur’s mistake of going into the hive too often, but we see how it happens. You want to know. You want to watch. You want to see how a colony forms, check the brood pattern on the frame, gauge how much honey they’re making.

We think a lot of our experiments have been interesting. Chickens are interesting. Mushrooms are interesting. Lobsters are interesting. Even tomato plants are interesting Bees, though, bees are fascinating.

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The bee packages in the truck -- two for us, two for our friend Linda

Yesterday, we picked up our bees.

Thanks in large part to the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, Cape Cod is crawling with amateur apiarists, and our hives were two of hundreds that came en masse to the Association, to be picked up by members. To help those of us who’d never installed bees before, BCBA veteran and accomplished apiarist Claire Desilets demonstrated her technique, honed over decades of beekeeping, for getting a nascent colony of bees out of the package and into the hive.

Basically, you dump ‘em in.

I had a strong suspicion that getting bees into the hive was one of those things that looks easy when pros do it but prove to be really, really hard when I do it. I’ve encountered a lot of those things since I left the city, so I wasn’t sanguine as we left Claire’s house with our bees.

Amazingly, it was as easy as Claire made it look. You make room in the hive by taking out a couple of frames, spray the bees with sugar syrup to keep them busy while you work, open the package and dump them into the hive. The queen is in a separate cage with a piece of candy that has to be eaten through before she can escape, and you attach her to one of the frames you took out (Claire uses a rubber band, but there are other ways). You put the frames back in the hive, cover it, and add a pail of sugar syrup to feed them while they establish themselves. And you’re done.

We have two hives, which we’ve named Big Bee and Little Bee. This came about because we were afraid our identical hives were too close together for the bees to reliably tell them apart. Although bees are very good at finding there way home, they will occasionally go to the wrong hive if it’s very close and it looks just the same.

Big Bee (left) and Little Bee

It was too late to paint them. Bees hate the smell, so painting has to be done well in advance. Claire told us that, if the hives faced in slightly different directions, that would help because one of the ways bees orient themselves is by the position of the sun. We adjusted them so that one pointed just south of southeast and one pointed just east of southeast.

But Kevin wasn’t content. He wanted to give the bees a visual clue, and his clue of choice was bee stickers. We bought one large bee sticker for one hive and several small bee stickers for the other, and Kevin stuck them on. Hence, Big Bee and Little Bee.

(Putting us to shame in the beekeeping sophistication department is Kate at Living the Frugal Life. She painted her two hives in lovely pastel shades and named them Izhevsk and Foligno, for her Russian and Italian bees, respectively.)

We installed Little Bee first, and the only hitch was that we forgot a tool to get the cork out of the queen cage. (It’s put there so the workers won’t eat the candy and release the queen while they’re in transit.) The whole process took about five minutes.

We videotaped our installation of Big Bee, and I’m posting it here, unedited, so you can see just how straightforward a process it is. It’s a boring video, though, because nothing goes wrong.  (Plus there’s that part where I have to leave to get the tool we forgot.)

After we installed them, we stood there, just watching, as they familiarized themselves with their new home. Kevin saw one of the hives evict two drones. We imagined what they must be doing inside – drawing out comb, eating through the candy in the queen cage, assigning guard duty. We watched them come and go and circle, willing them to live and thrive.

We’re beekeepers.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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