trust buddha, but lock up your bees

Tom works like a fiend from May to November. We both do. We don’t entertain, go away or have dinner before 9 p.m.

Two days ago, it was a scorcher (almost 35C or about 100F) and Tom was taking boxes of honey off the hives. He came home for dinner, and headed to a yard an hour and a half away to move 15 colonies out and got home at 4 in the morning. He extracted the next day and repeated the night move again.

The hives need constant monitoring and nurturing. They get split in the spring and re-queened if necessary. Depending on the spring, they may need supplementary feeding. Thousands of new frames need to be made and old boxes scraped and cleaned. Electric fences have to be built in each yard to keep the bears out. Summer is lifting heavy boxes in hot weather, extracting honey and bottling. Selling it all is a whole different and time-consuming scenario.

Often throughout the season, the bee yards (15 – 30 colonies at a time) are moved – at night. We do this with buckwheat, apples, cranberries and this year, canola. When the season is over, every colony is medicated as organically as possible for mites. This involves several trips to the hives. If this isn’t done, there’s a good likelihood that the bees will die over winter. Then they’re all wrapped to help insulate and maintain a more constant temperature during the cold months and unpredictable spring weather. Then we start all over again. Did I say Tom loves his bees?

Just recently, some poor beekeeper in Saskatchewan lost 150 of his 3,000 hives. Well, he didn’t LOSE them; someone came along and TOOK them.

As a matter of fact, they didn’t just load up Bill Termeer’s colonies and run. They actually took out the production frames INSIDE the colonies, along with the queen, and all the brood that would have been future bees for gathering honey. THEN, they put in old, dirty, empty frames so Bill wouldn’t discover the theft right away. He’d keep seeing frames in the hives and then a week or so later, when he’d actually go inside the hive and pull out the frames to check the activity, he’d be stunned to find 150 empty, bereft hives.

They didn’t give him any money or even leave clues to where they might have gone. To me, that’s not quite the same as kidnapping, but it comes pretty close.

“Oh, I see you have some nice looking kids. They’re out of diapers, they look healthy and happy, and I want them. Don’t mind me.” . . . SWOOP. “Here, I’ll leave you a couple of dolls.”

Mr. Termeer didn’t have any insurance on his bees. I don’t know a beekeeper who does – I bet it wouldn’t be cheap. He’s left wondering why, if perhaps another beekeeper was in trouble financially, or had his/her bees die off, why there was no dialogue or request for help. Beekeepers are pretty close knit, forthright and sharing with their knowledge. They’ve all known the hot, heavy and sometimes disappointing seasons. The RCMP is going to analyse the pollen to help narrow the location where the replacement frames came from.

We have friends from out of town that sometimes visit us at the Farmers’ Markets and they get to listen to our ‘schpiel’ – our bee banter. Brian says that he loves to hear Tom talking about the bees. “It’s so interesting,” he muses, “and if you can’t trust a BEEKEEPER, who can you trust?”