LOCALadk Magazine

20 Summer 2017 LOCALadk Magazine LOCALadk Stings. "How many times have you been stung?" Lots! My hands, my arms, my nose, and once or twice on my feet. The first few times it hurts – but it happens, and you get used to it… at least that's what they say. I've been stung at least 30 times in the four years I've been beekeeping, and one incident left me with 15 stings. But it's all worth it. And although this may sound like bees are aggressive and always want to sting you, as you learn your bees' personalities, (yes, oddly, they do have quite defined personalities), you learn how to avoid getting stung. My first year of beekeeping my bees were very aggressive. But when I purchased different bees I found a breed that was very calm – calm to the point that I could open my hives in just shorts and a t-shirt without a problem. Many apiaries breed bees based on four characteristics: hardiness, aggression, efficiency of honey production, and hygiene. Acquiring your ideal bees in a remote area, such as the Adirondacks, can be quite an experience, as there aren't many apiaries within the Park. To get bees here means shipping them in. Funnily enough, you can ship them via standard United States Postal Service, which was how I acquired my first bees. Upon ordering my package of 10,000 bees and a queen bee, I notified the local post office that I would be receiving them in the mail. At first, the postal worker was almost as excited as I was. However, her reaction switched from excitement to nervousness, when the bees arrived. The postal worker asked me to come into the sorting room to get them myself. And right away I saw why. The package they were shipped in was a simple wooden box of which two sides made completely of mesh. The bees were loud, and if someone wanted, they could have brushed their hand against the bees that were holding onto the mesh. This took me by surprise as well. Picking up this "package" was my first experience handling bees (I had decided I would learn beekeeping from experience, rather than traveling to an apiary and taking a class). I thought that doing my research and learning the first few steps to managing a hive would be all I needed. When I got my bees back to my house and prepared to open the package, I realized it would have been nice to know beforehand what handling a large number of bees might feel like, prior to actually doing it. The mistakes I made were the little things an experienced beekeeper would have warned me about. One of my first mistakes was failing to provide the proper "bee space" for my bees. I failed provide ¾ inch's space between each wax foundation frame, which is the optimum space for bees to build wax comb and maneuver around each other. Bees tend to fill in extra space with unwanted wax comb, or burr comb, which makes hive management messy and wastes precious wax. In my case, the burr comb confined the bees to too small of space, and this caused them to swarm.

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