A Tale of Two Hives

It was the best of beehives, it was the worst of beehives. When Christine and I five years ago bought the property that was to become Potrero Nuevo Farm, the previous owners showed us where a wild beehive was located inside the wall of a large equipment shed. The bees had already lived there happily for many years with the previous owners and continued to thrive for several years after we bought the property. During the first of our now 5 years here the hive had swarmed a number of times and we always marveled at and wondered about the community of bees that lived inside the wall. We longed to see their home and harvest their honey, but that would have required removing the plywood sheathing and destroying the hive so we just had to imagine their busy activity and get our honey elsewhere. Then, two years ago, Todd Parsons, a beekeeper from Palo Alto, asked to place hives here, which we eagerly agreed to. Todd’s seven hives of bees pollinate our orchard of apple, Asian pear, cherry, quince and plum trees and love the wealth of other trees at the farm including eucalyptus, willow and ¼ acre of lavender managed by Adrienne Victoria for her lavender oil business. And we get some of their honey!

A year ago, the bees in the shed wall got very aggressive and started chasing us when we were nearby. The best of hives had become the worst of hives – the bees became so aggressive that we started to fear going into the shed to get equipment. The final straw came when they attacked our Farm Manager Suzie Trexler so badly that she had to go to the hospital and now keeps an epi-pen in the farm office just in case. We decided that the hive had to go. Todd didn’t have the equipment to remove the now-angry bees so we contacted another beekeeper friend, Robert MacKimmie, who runs City Bees in San Francisco. Robert sawed a large hole in the plywood wall and removed the bees and got them into new hives, which are now quite successfully happy at the Crystal Springs Reservoir. Robert explained that the once-calm wild hive probably had African bees settle into the wall and create a brood of aggressive bees there.

So, the wild hive was gone and we had a big hole in the barn wall where they had once made a nice and peaceful home. Then, three weeks ago one of Todd’s hives swarmed and Christine happened to be walking towards the hive when this occurred and wasn’t sure what to do. A swarm of bees is exceptionally calm since they are not defending a home, but, rather, seeking a new one and so Christine crossed her fingers that they were in a calm state and stood still as they flew by - she was for a moment engulfed in a cloud of thousands of bees, not one of which bothered her. A group of bees landed on a nearby bush (see pictures) and Todd easily shook them off the branch into a new wooden hive box and took them off the property to settle into a new home. However, we later discovered a second group had settled in the cavity in the barn where the wild hive once was. Occasionally, as in this case, a swarm contains multiple virgin queens and the swarm splits into multiple groups. We would normally have kept the second group, but for fear of a repeat occurrence of angry bees in our equipment shed and potentially to spare Suzie another trip to the hospital, we decided to remove them. So, we called Robert again – ironically it was a year and two days from the day he removed the first wild hive – to remove this new colony of bees.

The bees were all huddled in the open space where the plywood had been removed a year prior and we thought perhaps they were just preparing to swarm again to a preferred site, but when Robert inspected the ball of bees, he realized that in a short three weeks time since they had arrived, they had already started building comb in the open space. He had a homemade gadget where a small house vacuum was attached to a five-gallon water container so he could suck the bees out of the space into the bottle. The honeycomb that had been made in those few weeks looked like bird wings in the walls – there were about seven “wings” from the top of the cavity in the wall to the bottom, overlaying each other with slight space between each section of comb for the bees to move around. Robert would suck up some bees on top of a wing of comb, then carefully cut away the comb from the wall and vacuum up the bees from the backside of the wing. This continued, wing after wing of honeycomb, until the entire space was emptied. Some of the comb had pollen in the cells and looked like a patchwork quilt, every cell a slightly different color from pollen collected from a multitude of plants. Some comb was filled with honey. And other comb cells had bee larvae in them, the cells capped over to protect the larvae. Robert gently removed the comb with the brood larvae and placed them in a wooden beehive box – the larvae were still viable and would hatch in their new hive. All the bees that had been sucked up into the 5-gallon water bottle were then shaken off into the same wooden hive that Robert would take to a new home. He estimated that there were about 10,000 bees!! There’s a good chance that hive will soon be on the roof of the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose as part of the hotel chain’s worldwide program to place hives in their hotels’ rooftop gardens.

And so, the combs with the bee larvae were now safely placed in new bee boxes to be birthed at a new location. And the 10,000 bees were in that box, too, along with the queen so the colony will thrive. And the honey filled comb was now ours to process. Large amounts of comb are often put into machines with centrifuges to spin around to remove the honey. Since there was so little comb, removing the honey by hand made more sense. And removing by hand should be read quite literally. I broke the comb into palm-sized pieces and squeezed them into a metal sieve above a collection bowl. With every squeeze, honey squished out of the comb and through my fingers to drip into the sieve that would filter out the waxy comb so only pure honey could drip through. I enjoyed squeeze after squeeze and watched the short three weeks of bee handiwork transform into a full quart of fresh, fragrant honey all made from pollen collected at our farm. A locavore foodies dream comes true!

While we were saddened to have to remove the two wild hives, we’re comforted that the bees survived the process and have been placed in new homes elsewhere. The angry hive from a year ago is in a location with almost no humans nearby to be bothered by it, the happy hive from this year will soon be on a hotel rooftop and Todd’s managed hives are still active and happy here near our fruit tree orchard. High on my list of to-do projects is to put new plywood over the hole in our equipment shed wall so a swarm doesn’t take up residence there again, but should Todd’s hives swarm again, we’re sure they’ll find a new home nearby. So, now we’re back to the best of hives, and so concludes a tale of two hives with many happy endings.