A few years ago, I developed a fleeting, sensational zest for gardening. I was living in Tempe, a Sydney suburb famed for her proximity to roaring arterial roads, where flyovers rattle the glassware within cabinets bought from the IKEA just down the street. Not a likely location for a Gardening Australia-style idyll. Yet that’s exactly what I found myself conjuring. Mowing the lawn and turning the compost in my Blundstones, I concocted plans for a garden to rival even the Vietnamese lady’s across the road, an impressive tangle of dragon fruit cacti and elephant’s ears.
I recalled my mother’s gardening plans for the family home. Those that came to be, like lilly pilly plantings and frog pond diggings, and those that never eventuated, like the chicken shed. On weekends I’d help Mum mulch tree cuttings, beat back lantana or split logs in our bushy yard on Scotland Island. Weekdays post-school were spent planted in front of the television, watching that little box until Mum got home from work – usually mid-way through an episode of The Nanny. But on Saturday, we’d roll our sleeves up. Despite complaining throughout, I remember those green-thumbed moments fondly.
Years later, I felt a taste of that same contentment as I was carried away by my garden ambitions. I envisioned a pastoral paradise sprawled across my modest yard, around the corner from a ghostly Kingsford Smith Airport during the pandemic. Through my palpable, misguided satisfaction, I imagined all manner of veggies clambering up the back fence, thrusting fierce from what I didn’t realise was contaminated soil. Along with those flowering delights, busy pollinators buzzed happily, from zucchini stamen to tomato blossom, before disappearing into the air, as far as their wings could take them, their flight allowing a vicarious freedom that lockdown laws denied.
I knew: I had to get some bees.
Mum’s chickens might not have ever made it off the ground, but surely hosting a bunch of teeny-tiny bees couldn’t be that hard. Besides, my friend from high school, Elyse, was a beekeeper, so she could show me the ropes. How complicated could it be?
I even fancied I’d look cute in my special suit, wielding my weird pre-industrial-revolution smoky thing. I’d take little jars of honey with gingham fabric on the lids to dinner parties with friends – maybe I’d sell it on the side of the road like a sweet, enterprising kid with a lemonade stand. Mum would’ve loved all that.
The notion was tantalising, definitely more excitement than I was accustomed to in my tired routine of Zoom calls and walks around my restricted radius. In a fit of titillated whim, I messaged Elyse, who was thrilled and very encouraging of my plan. ‘You’d be great at it,’ she said, ‘And a lot of the time, the bees will just be a box in your backyard you’ll hardly notice.’
Within a week, we were at the beekeeping supply store in Hornsby, and I was dropping around $1K beekeeping supplies. With that, the point of no return had passed, before I even had time to think about it properly. I’d used the last of my share of Mum’s estate on my apiary setup, having recently made a similar impulse purchase on a dodgy used car, which I’d imagined might also bring me some relief from the lockdowns we were going in and out of.
While there was some truth to Elyse’s optimistic remarks, and I still appreciate her supportive, enthusiastic energy, the idea that beekeeping is easy was… a tad misleading. I had to learn fast, through mistake after mistake, strange event after strange event, bee sting after bee sting.
I learned that you don’t really own bees – you keep them. Yet the term ‘beekeeping’ is perhaps a misnomer for the reality, which is more akin to custodianship. A bee colony chooses to settle in a little box that a beekeeper provides. They must then ensure that the conditions are just right so that this colony both survives and chooses to remain in that little box. If they don’t like the situation, the bees will leave, either by the whole colony ‘absconding’ or half of them relocating via swarm.
By swarm, I mean around 30,000 bees (half the colony) all decide to leave the hive en masse and never return. The first time this happened to me, I was waking up slowly when my housemate Lily knocked on my bedroom door. ‘Henry, I think your bees are swarming…’ she squeaked politely through the door.
With my half-finished coffee I wandered outside to see that she was right. Everywhere you looked, there were bees. No section of air larger than an apple was empty. Up, down, all around – bees. I sat on our garden’s stone steps and watched in futility. It was a singular, breathtaking sight. But I wasn’t in the position to appreciate it at that point. A neighbour jumped up onto the side of my fence, ‘Hey, your bees are swarming!’ she said.
I looked up slowly, exhausted from dealing with the situation before I’d even started. ‘Thanks, I know.’ I muttered. And I got my phone out to message Elyse. After amassing (or ‘bearding’) in another neighbour’s bottlebrush tree, eventually the bees decided to mysteriously resettle in their hive, what seemed like a tiny space now that I (and our whole street) had seen what the full scope of their gyrating mass looked like.
The bees were showing me: they were their own boss, and I was playing by their rules, firstly by puzzling out what exactly their rules were, a learning curve that would be steep to say the least. They didn’t care for my romantic daydreams or bragging to friends. The reality of beekeeping was up to them, and I would need to follow their lead if I wanted to keep the endeavour up.
By ensuring the colony is happy and healthy, the beekeeper will be able to harvest honey from the surpluses produced. If the nectar flows aren’t sufficient in the area or the season, the beekeeper may also need to feed the bees. The same can be said of pollen and water sources, which must be provided if there is a deficit. I put out a birdbath with water for them, but the thing just filled with mosquito larvae and the bees never touched it. I think they preferred the dank, leaf-choked water that built up in our gutters, where we’d sometimes catch birds bathing also.
The beekeeper will need to check the colony for pests and diseases, treating accordingly. They will need to expand the size of the hive to accommodate the growth of the colony, from one little box to several with the coming of spring – or risk that ever-menacing, though undeniably majestic, swarm. And they’ll need to reduce the number of boxes as the bee population decreases again in autumn, before leaving the colony alone completely over winter, so that they can keep themselves insulated and warm.
The beekeeper isn’t the owner, but a participant in a complex ongoing system, a collaborator with a superorganism that can survive for over a hundred years, indefinitely, long after the beekeeper has moved on or passed away. A beekeeper chooses to engage with a colony of bees – wild animals – and these animals choose to allow the keeper to do so.
You give yourself to the bees, they give you their honey (and indeed their lives) and you then give this honey to others. Through her part in this generous circuit, a bee pollinates plants – the little matchmaker facilitating a botanic romance. In doing so, she’ll make little more than a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey through her entire lifetime, which lasts between four and six weeks.
This life is a sacrifice to the colony, no matter what role a bee plays. We all know that those same female workers making those teaspoon fractions of honey are equipped with stingers that will kill them if ever they use them. Yet every manifestation of bee-life is sacrificial, a fact that gets more bizarre the more angles you look at it from.
The stingless males or ‘drones’ have one purpose in life: mating. This isn’t a glamorous role, however. As winter rolls in and food sources dry up, these sex machines are dispatched for the good of the colony. Their wings are chewed off by the female workers before they are booted into the cold unknown to inevitably perish. I’d regularly find scatterings of them struggling on the garden path, begging for a rescue that would be pointless.
Before this annual massacre, the luckier drones fly every day to hover up to 60 metres above ground and join what is called a ‘drone congregation area’. Here, the troop awaits a ‘virgin queen’. When one arrives, the horny boys attempt to have sex with the queen and, if successful, are disembowelled as their penises stick into her. The numbers for all of this vary between sources, but up to 20 males will enjoy this fate with one no-longer-a-virgin queen.
Our queen may perform her gruesomely erotic flight multiple times on this special day. Once she’s done, she returns to the hive with her belly full of bee sperm. This she stores for up to five years, to fertilise as many as 3000 eggs a day.
If you think that she’s the winner in this apparent matriarchy, you’re wrong. Because the colony will sacrifice her, too, if and when they aren’t happy with her performance giving birth, day in, day out. Should her egg-laying numbers drop or become inconsistent, the colony will make a new queen (or several), who’ll fight the old one to the death so that another might take the throne – savagely wounded perhaps, but victorious. And the cycle continues.
Sometimes, however, there are no survivors, or the winner will be so maimed, that her continuity and that of the hive are left in dire jeopardy. In such a scenario, one can purchase a new queen from a dealer, something I had to do after the queen mysteriously disappeared from my hive; I can only guess that my old queen must’ve battled it out at some point without my noticing. In any case, a day after making the order online, I received a small package in the mail labelled ‘CAUTION: LIVE BEES’. Having cautiously opened this package, I found a small wooden cage with a flyscreen-covered hole for ventilation, through which I could see my new, mated queen, accompanied by two or three nurse bees to ensure her care, comfort and safety en route. I’d googled what to do from here and what would take place. It all felt so outlandish, so alien.
The task at hand was to insert the whole cage into the queenless hive. It was crucial not to open the cage myself; the bees would do that over the course of the next few days. This they would achieve by chewing away the hard-candy cork covering the little entry hole of the cage, in place to slow the process of releasing the queen, allowing her time to communicate with the colony and allowing the bees time to adjust to her pheromones, meaning that by the end of this gradual, cooperative chewing away, she would be accepted and proclaimed the new queen, thereby approved to commence the outstanding task of laying thousands of eggs for the colony, every – single – day. If the cage broke or some other factor allowed the queen into the hive or the workers into the cage too early, she would not be accepted. ‘Off with her head!’ they’d scream, or some buzzed, bee equivalent – and she would promptly be smothered to death. It’d be back to www.hornsby-beekeeping.com/products/queen/ for me if that happened. Thankfully, I found the cage empty a few weeks later, candy cork chewed through and hexagonal cells throughout the hive now exhibiting eggs, like barely visible Tic Tacs. Success! And the peasants rejoiced.
Beyond egglaying standards or lack thereof, a beekeeper might also choose to replace their queen if the temperament of the colony is overly aggressive. In some cases, hives may be so hostile – whether from stress, trauma, genetics or a combination of all these factors – that it is not possible or practical for a beekeeper to work with them any longer. A beekeeper may be stung, even through a suit, and there comes a point where this can be dangerous to their health; multiple stings, especially to the head, can cause anaphylaxis, whether one is typically allergic to bee stings or not. And with every female besides the queen dying following a sting, if even the most efficient beekeeper is being attacked upon every inspection, dethroning the queen to make way for another can be the best option for all involved. Upon killing the old queen and inserting a new one, the entire temperament or character of the superorganism will change, as though by magic. You might go so far as to say the culture of their society is altered.
While my bees were marketed as ‘gentle’, even they could be testy if they felt disrespected. Generally, they’d display this malcontent by headbutting me, strangely attuned as bees are to finding human faces. They’d launch themselves repeatedly at my head, not to sting but to warn, as if to say, ‘Fuck off, please.’ The bees were particularly prone to this assertive behaviour when I first got them.
After several botched hive inspections, I realised I needed a level of guidance that YouTube tutorials couldn’t provide. And while Elyse was great for encouragement, I felt bad writing to her all the time with anxious paragraphs of questions. I joined the Inner West Amateur Beekeepers Association and wrote to them asking for advice. Soon, I was contacted by Steve, an ex-cop and the current chair of the Inner West ABA. Following more than a little begging, Steve agreed to come over and do a hive inspection with me.
While we had the hive open, I mentioned that I thought they could be a bit aggro. ‘Whadda ya mean?’ he said, ‘I can show you what real aggro bees look like if you want. These are lovely and calm.’ His voice was like that of an anthropomorphic teddy bear, floating as serenely as the curious insects they referred to, who watched us as we worked. This was not what I’d expected from someone who’d had a career in the police force.
Even the gentlest, most lovely-calm colony can be agitated into aggression, something they express in communication with each other and as a warning to whoever they’re annoyed with. Steve had me listen for the way their buzzing changed the longer we lingered in the hive, from a subtle hum to a loud and angry roar. He also drew my attention to the change in aroma as the bees released their stress pheromone, which he said smelled like squashed bananas. It was by noticing these nuances and responding that I finally found my regular inspections wouldn’t leave me lotioning stings and full of dismay, but relaxed and satisfied.
He pointed out to me that I needed to take some honey. I’d felt guilty taking any up ‘til that point, like I was being an extra loving bee-Mum by leaving them so much. Steve taught me the phrase honey bound: ‘They’ll swarm if you don’t take any,’ he warned, which I realised must’ve been why they swarmed on me originally.
You often see honey marketed for its single-blossom quality – manuka, redbox, ironbark, clover. I might’ve been biased, but I always thought my honey was the most delicious, however motley. It was complex, rich and deep in flavour, like fresh medjool dates. I put this down to the wealth of options my bees had to forage.
Leaden soil and besmogged air notwithstanding, Tempe’s garden culture is a healthy one. And down the hill in one direction were green spaces like the so-called Cooks River or a bountiful flower nursery. I liked to catch my bees around the neighbourhood on various trees and in all sorts of bushes, a voyeuristic activity that had me notice the rhythm of the local ecosystem, the bees following her pulse like a nurse to their patient. One week, it’d be the bottle brush in flower next door (their favourite!), then the following, the lemon myrtle out front. When that inflorescence died back, the purple buds of rosemary bushes down the street would emerge, or those of the feral, otherworldly passionfruit vine climbing our side fence, along with its inviting though inedible, orange fruits. While I couldn’t leave the area much through this time, I watched her constantly in movement and evolution. The bees had me experience Tempe in a way that was fresh and deepened, far more intimately than I ever did before. After years in Europe and a return that was tumultuous, I felt like – finally – I was home, embedded in a community, anchored to a place. While away, I’d appreciated the change of those foreign landscapes, as deciduous trees shed their leaves, lakes iced over and snowfall layered the land in a soft, white blanket; I felt like Australia barely changed year round and that this somehow devalued our country by comparison. The bees taught me that I was foolish in this reduction. Yes, the changes might be subtler to the untrained eye. But I began to see that, in fact, the environment was changing all the time, not just in temperature but in physical expression, in activity and, if you looked carefully, in appearance.
The culmination of this process, and the bee’s reward for their part in it, is honey; it’s no secret that this is the key reward for the beekeeper as well. On their most industrious season, I took kilos of the stuff, even after leaving the majority for the bees, more than they could ever need or get through over winter. There are special contraptions like centrifugal machines that can help to extract this honey from the waxy comb. I preferred to simply cut the lot from the frames with a big kitchen knife into a soup pot, before using a potato masher to crush all this up. The sound was like something from an ASMR highlight reel, bubbly pops and squelching, as the liquid broke free under the pressure of my mashing. I’d then strain this slurry through several layers of cheesecloth into buckets, before pouring the pure, raw honey into jars. As well as the main event, after rendering the byproduct down, I could make homemade candles that smelled as intoxicating as the inside of a beehive. From start to finish, the process was cottagecore incarnate. It left the entire kitchen and myself covered in honey, hands thick with sticky liquid, licking my fingers clean like a giddy Winnie the Pooh – not wanting to waste a drop. I tasted in that elixir every hedgerow and flower bed and nature strip in the neighbourhood, combined through primal romance into a sacred, viscous bond.
While honey is seemingly everlasting, my tenure in beekeeping was not. After several years in lockdown, we were eventually freed; our old regimes returned as though they never left. I was thrown back into more demanding work habits, and new callings pulled my focus away from the little boxes in my back garden. The tenants of our sharehouse were being evicted, I was due to start a doctorate midyear and, most importantly, I no longer had the time or energy to take care of the bees as they deserved.
After wrestling with the idea for months, I realised that beekeeping belonged to another life, one either behind me or a long way in front, when I’m retired like silken-voiced Steve, with the time and energy to invest. I’d started beekeeping as a means of escaping my tired domesticity, as though beekeeping could transport me to a rural vista or simulate a life that could’ve existed hundreds of years before the word ‘RAT test’ was ever uttered. Now, the bees were tethering me to the home, as I stayed in on sunny days to check my hives or spent hours frantically researching the many opposing theories around beekeeping problems I was having. The bees reminded me of that time when I was cloistered by a 5km radius and it felt like they kept me stuck there.
Two years since I’d sent that naive message to Elyse, I’d had as much of it all as I could take. I was up at 5 AM to help Greg from Facebook marketplace (another retiree) load his 4WD with approximately 120,000 European honeybees. What started as a ‘nuc’ (essentially a starter-pack or young colony) of around 10,000 bees was now two full hives, and I was saying goodbye to them all.
A few nights before Greg came over, I had a dream. I was back at my family home on Scotland Island, Mum was still alive and I was gorgeously happy. The big gum tree that stood proudly in the centre of our garden was split open, not by an axe but by nature, lightning strike or wind damage perhaps. At the centre of this great eucalypt yoni, a colony of bees had settled, constructing a hive bigger than both of mine stacked on top of each other, replete with towers of full, golden comb. So bursting was their hive, that little jewels smaller than the palm of my hand had fallen out and onto the earth like ripe fruits. I picked one up and sucked out the delicious ooze. Then I picked up others and found they had been there so long that they’d petrified into precious, amberlike fossils, but in perfect spheres, intricately patterned just as coral you might find washed up on a beach is.
The dreamy utopia I had witnessed seemed not so dissimilar from my projections of the idyllically named ‘Pheasant’s Nest’, for where my bees were bound, in the back of Greg’s Toyota. A few hours after he’d driven off into the sunrise, I asked him how the bees were going. He sent me a photo of my lilac-painted hives – now standing in serene-looking bush somewhere in the foothills of the Southern Highlands – captioned: They’re settling in nicely.
That photo was proof: this period of my life was over. Yet it was definitely not a waste of time. I could no longer keep the bees, but they would go on being bees without me; what a beautiful thing to consider.
