Listening to the Bees

Beekeeping is a skill that can teach you a lot about bees if you are willing to listen. (Juice Flair/Shutterstock)

Entranced, the boy lay on the grass beside the hives. He listened, put his hand close, and watched the bees crawl on his skin. Now 86, he still feels that one of the great blessings of spring is to visit the bees, lie down beside them, and listen.

Bill Thurlow—“Honey Bill”—based in Ottawa, Canada, believes that beekeeping is 20% science and 80% art. A beekeeper has methods and strategies to protect and maintain the health and productivity of their apiary, but Bill also listens to his bees, watches them, learns from them, and wonders at them.

Method and artistry walk hand in hand. The beekeeper needs a deep biological understanding of the life and health of bees, but must also observe, intuit, and perceive. They are two sides of the same coin but, says Honey Bill, the side that needs to be uppermost is the attentive, intuitive, and imaginative one.

“An 11-year-old girl once asked me, ‘Do you make the honey?’” Bill recalls. “I said, ‘The bees make the honey.’ ‘Do you care for the bees?’ she asked. ‘Yes.’ ‘Then, in a way, you do make the honey,’ she said. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s perceptive.’” The beekeeper creates an environment in which the bees can live their mysterious lives and work their magic healthily and safely, and in return Bill harvests golden honey, beeswax, bee pollen, and more. Finally, he simply enjoys: “It’s just amazing. I am always learning from them.”

A Caretaker’s Challenges

With bee populations suffering an increase of mite infestations, disease, and mysterious vanishings, it is more important than ever for beekeepers to combine science and art to maintain the strength of hives and intuit the needs of their bees. Every spring, when Bill opens the hives, he knows that he will have lost a certain percentage. When he first started beekeeping, if he had 100 hives, he would lose between five and 10 every winter. Now, the losses are much greater.

Bees do not hibernate. They are continually active, all winter long. Just as Antarctic penguins do, bees form a tight cluster, with the queen at the center. The oval shape of the bee cluster exposes the minimum surface area to the cold while keeping the interior warm. The bees on the outside of the oval vibrate their bodies to keep the warmth in the center; after about 20 minutes, they move into the center to get something to eat and warm up, and the next layer of bees takes over at the outside edge. Over time, the cluster of bees moves through the hive from one honey store to the next.

Wherever the bees cluster, moisture rises from their bodies and goes to the top of the hive and freezes. When there is a thaw, this moisture drips down on the bees and can kill them. It is up to the beekeeper to find a creative solution to this problem. Bill drills a three-quarter-inch hole into the back of the hive’s brood chamber—something he learned from a fellow beekeeper—so the moisture can constantly escape and not lie in wait for a thaw.

The same hole solves another problem. Around February, the beekeeper faces a dilemma: He wants to go and check the hive to find out if the bees have any food left, but if he opens the hive, even for 30 seconds, he risks breaking the cluster, exposing the bees to the cold, and killing them. “One of the saddest things,” Bill says, “is opening a hive in April and seeing the dead bees and realizing that if you’d gotten to them sooner and given them some food, they would have survived.” Another piece of wisdom was given to Bill: “My friend says to me, ‘Take a piece of comb honey and pin it to that hole, then check a week later. If the comb honey is gone, you know they need feeding.’ So ingenious!” This is the imaginative art of beekeeping.

The Mind and Moods of Bees

One of Bill’s greatest joys, and essential to his art, is listening to the bees. “You can tell, even before you lift the lid off. There’s a buzz, and you can tell if it’s an angry buzz or a happy buzz. Sometimes, it’s just a hum, like in April. They’re so happy, they’re not bothering anyone, it’s warm, they’re out visiting flowers. But other times—” Bill laughs.

Bees get agitated by sudden movements, so it is important to move calmly around them. They are also very cranky if they are crowded, so the hives need to be checked every week to make sure there is enough room. If a hive is full, and the queen continues to lay eggs that hatch, there is no room for more honey. Then the bees will get ready to swarm, says Bill, “and away they go.”

When bees are harvesting buckwheat, Bill says they are “just very ticked off with life in general.” The reason is a new species of buckwheat farmed in Ontario; its flowers only open between roughly 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. But in the warm summer months, the bees are out of the hive and ready to work at 8 a.m. “The bees could have been waiting for hours,” explains Bill. “It’s like catnip and they can’t get in. They’re so annoyed.”

Despite their love of buckwheat, bees have a mind of their own. When a local farmer planted buckwheat, Bill moved some hives to the center of the fields. But he did not collect a single drop of buckwheat honey that season. The bees had already decided where to go for their pollen and nectar; placed so temptingly in the buckwheat fields, they stubbornly ignored them and flew miles to their other source. “Go figure,” chuckles Bill.

Once, Bill’s art clashed with his method. Getting ready for a family vacation, he decided to check his hives. In a hurry, he only put on his veil. As he lifted the top, the entire hive swarmed up and some got under his veil and began to sting. “This is stupid,” he thought, and moved away. Typically, angry bees will stop chasing by about 30 feet, so at that distance he pulled off the veil, not knowing that the entire hive was still with him. He ran to a water pump and stuck his head under, pulling handfuls of bees from his hair. He thought of getting in his car; being in a car with 100 bees would be better than being outside with 5,000 bees. But his three children were in the car, so he had to keep moving. Later, in a bath of ice cubes, he and his wife counted more than 800 bee stings. “I looked like a pincushion. I did not sleep well that night, but I learned my lesson,” he says.

“You’re at the mercy of the beehive,” says Bill. “Why something works this time but not always, who knows. You do it and you think it’s science, but no.” Bill has seen a 6-year-old put her hand in a hive—no stings. “Bees know things,” says Bill. Exactly what they know will always be something of a mystery, but to Bill, it is certain that there is nothing like lying beside a hive and listening to the bees in the spring when they are happy.

By Hazel Atkins

This article was originally featured in Radiant Life Magazine.