Wildfires and Honey Bees

 I woke up Monday morning to sirens, smoke and a litany of texts from concerned family and friends.  The first text I read was from my housemate telling me Santa Rosa, the city where I live, was on fire.  The city itself.  Within minutes I was dressed and throwing belonging into my car, searching the blackened skyline for flames, and trying to find out if I was in immediate danger.  All across Sonoma county people had been doing the same since the middle of the night, sometimes with only minutes of warning to flee.  The story is the same, grab your pets, grab you photos and get out.

Forty minutes later, I was drinking coffee in a sort of dazed stupor at Wildflower Bakery while evacuees streamed through, sharing stories of rescuing horses, moving goats, or what to do about the kids, the dog, and the cats currently stuffed into the suburban out front.  I didn’t have any pets to try and save.  I’m a beekeeper.  My little charges don’t move in a flash.  I can’t ask them to hop in the car with some treats and a leash.  

My hives are located in a safe area in southern Sonoma County, but I can think of a handful of hives that friends and clients have had to abandon, hoping that their home and their hives stay standing.  It’s still going on, as I write.  A friend just sent a text telling me how she spoke to her hive, telling them what was going on before being forced to evacuate her property.  It’s all we can do, really.  Tell our girls to hang in there.

Hives saved by firefighters at the property of Robert Coury (www.RobertCoury.com) in Napa County. His home and the bees were saved as of yesterday, but the fires continue and conditions remain unstable. To see more photo documentation visit his Instagram account: @spiritsearch.

Since the fires broke out I’ve been thinking a lot about the life forms, human and otherwise, that are left so helpless and exposed during this time.  Thinking about wild animals fleeing their already confined habitats, easily finding themselves in neighborhoods and backyards, no evacuation centers for them to rely on.  

I have been thinking about how hard it is to keep bees alive.  About the myriad of issues they face due to climate change and human impact: habitat loss, pesticides, cognitive issues from lack of diversity in food, reduced nectar flow from drought and heat, record breaking temperatures, disease and smoke.  This August, wildfire smoke from further north and a major heat blast forced many bees in the region to consume large amounts of their honey stores.  Now the fires are here, the smoke thick and the bees hunkering down to try and survive another major blow.

So what happens when forest fire becomes a reality for bees?  When the sky fills with smoke, bees fill their bellies with honey and vigorously fan their wings to try and push the toxic air out of the hive.  They stop flying and retreat inward.  Counter to popular belief they are not preparing to abscond. 

Since ancient times, beekeepers and honey hunters have used smoke to suppress colonies and “calm them down”.  Bees' response to smoke is to consume honey.  The consumption of honey is also an indication of swarming in the spring, and a correlation between honey consumption and swarming/absconding has been drawn without really understanding the nature of a hive.  Bees preparing to swarm in early spring must first prepare the queen for flight.  The queen is much larger and heavier than her sons and daughters.  When preparing to swarm, attendants put the queen on a diet for a few weeks to help her shape up for flight.  In a forest fire, the queen is too heavy to be able to fly (Tautz, "The Buzz About Bees") .  Without a queen, the colony dies.  

 A recent study in South Africa indicates that wild bees don't flee from forest fires, but instead, try to ride them out.  They do this by building a protective “fire-wall” of propolis over the opening to the hive, and retreat deep within.  While this study is specific to wild bees in Table Mountain National Park, South Africa, the findings point to inherent species-wide behaviors in response to fire.  To see photos click here.

“Once the fire has passed, the landscape is filled with powdery grey sand and the blackened skeletons of the larger shrubs. It is this devastation of their environment which the bees encounter after the fire has passed where neither nectar nor pollen is available to them. This is when the imbibed honey is essential to tide them over this dearth period which is about 2 to 3 weeks long before the fire-loving ephemerals sprout from underground bulbs or rhizomes and flower in profusion, having been relieved of competition from other plants.” (from The Natural Beekeeping Trust).

As backyard beekeepers, our hives are much more at risk to fire than the types of wild colonies described above.  For one, our man made hives do not offer the insulation and protection a thick tree or stony outcropping might provide. Second, years of breeding for “desirable” traits has led to a loss in semi-domestic bees’ ability to build sufficient propolis seals, let alone a true propolis fire-wall.  

A beautiful example of a well propolized entrance to a skep hive I visited in England.

What then, can we do to support our colonies in a time of raging fire, habitat loss and smoke damage?  

• If you can safely return to your property, offer your bees a clean water source, such as a bird bath. You may find many displaced birds visit your watering hole as well!

• Do not go into your hives while the smoke is still strong in the air

• Consider late fall feeding for bees that have or are in the midst of consuming large amounts of their winter honey stores.

• Offer your bees a healing and supportive tea to help boost and support their immune system. Try Gunther Hauk's recipe or this recipe from The Natural Beekeeping Trust.

• Rebuild for the bee as you help rebuild your community and your home. Plant for pollinators.

• Do not take honey. Period.

• Talk to them. People have been doing it for centuries. Tell them what happened. Tell them about the land, the community, your experience. They may not understand our words, but they understand our mood, intentions and above all, our love.

Honey bees are an indicator species.  They are the barometer for the ever-increasing volatility of our climate.  They are the clarion call toward a massive restructuring of how we steward, respond, and relate to our planet.  In the wake of this week’s devastation, they remind me that I am a human animal.  I am not above or separate from the many animals struggling to survive in a compromised ecosystem.  We are living creatures with sensitive nervous systems, responsible for the delicate balance of life we so often forget we are a part of.  

Be safe. Be kind. Be aware. Take action. 

Honey Bees as Heart Healers

We women of the bee work in cycles of six.  Six-sided, six threads, six sisters, six revolutions.  Six years.  On this day, six year ago, I found out I was pregnant.  It’s a old story really, one that’s been told before, in different words by different women, but it’s also my story with the bees, and therefore, it has a place here. I found out I was pregnant because of a dream. Not my own; that of a friend.  On this morning, six years ago I woke feeling dizzy and out of sorts. I phoned up a friend, who gently informed me that she had a powerful dream.  “There’s nothing wrong with you honey," she said. "You’re pregnant.”  The spirit of my daughter had come to her in a dream the previous night asking her to tell me about her and remind me to trust. 

In that moment, standing dumbstruck on a busy sidewalk, I felt the most euphoric wash of warmth spread over me, and I understood unconditional love for the first time.  I knew she was right.  I was pregnant. It was the happiest moment of my life.  

Three months later, I lost the baby.  She left on a spring day when a late April storm brought fat, lazy snowflakes drifting down on the roses lining the hospital courtyard.  I spent two days in that hospital, on the maternity wing, loosing my baby while listening to other babies being born between bouts of sleep and an emergency surgery.  I dreamed then, during surgery, of myself giving birth while the spirit of my lost daughter acted as midwife.  We were in ancient Greece, surrounded by women and the scent of beeswax and crushed herbs.  I was in an order of priestesses that worked with the principals of parthenogenesis. I heard again to trust. It was year later, when I found out these priestesshoods actually existed and that many were associated with the Melissae, or honey bee priestesses.

A recovery bed was prepared for me in the guest room of my parent’s home.  A bed which shared a wall with a colony of honey bees.  You see, the summer prior, I had gone to The Sacred Trust in England to study with a British shamanic tradition called The Path of Pollen.  My introduction to bees was not in fact through beekeeping, but rather through a very old tradition that sees the women of its ways as Melissae, Greek for Honey Bees.  While I was in the UK, a wild colony of bees moved into a hole in the exterior wall of my parents home.  They built honey comb and raised their young in the space between my recovery bed, and the outside world.  The bees kept me company through the darkest hour of my life.

Miscarriage is common.  It’s a story that countless women carry in their bodies and memory, but it's not a thing we talk about very often.  We are told it’s common, that we’re probably still fertile and to try again.  What isn’t included is that for some women, it can include postpartum depression and PTSD, not to mention the unyielding torrent of grief.

I buried what was left of my pregnancy in the garden, beneath an new, empty beehive I built myself.  I prayed to the spirit of my baby to bring me bees so that I could be a mother to something.  Three days later, I received a call about a swarm.  It was my first.  The swarm was hanging in the shape of a heart from a blossoming apple tree.  Honey bees swarm are an act of reproduction, a great issuing forth of fertile optimism.  It happens in the spring, once hives have made it through the long dark winter and new forage abounds.  The colony prepares the hive mother (queen bee) for flight and waits for an optimal spring day to rise from the hive is a swirling cloud of wings.  A third to half of the hive will leave with the initial spring swarm and fly to a nearby perch, such as a tree, where they will hang in a cluster until a new home is collectively agreed upon.  The remaining bees inside the hive will raise a new virgin queen and life will proliferate.  It is a truly magical event to witness.

Six years ago I became a beekeeper.  A bee mother, in as far as one can mother a highly intelligent super organism that’s been thriving for thousands of years without human intervention.  A bee guardian perhaps.  Or rather, I fell in love.  For me, they became the anchor through which I slogged through PTSD and heartbreak.  They kept me tethered to life, when on some level, I just wanted to bleed out.  They taught me about the honey and the sting.  They were patient with me.  They forced me to be present, and sharply brought me back to my body if I drifted.  They permeated my dreams.  The hummed the song of life, fertility, forgiveness and order. The bees made sure I kept feeling.  

The grief story is a human story, and a story we all share.  As author and teacher Sobonfu Somé says, “We need to begin to see grief not as foreign entity and not as an alien to be held down or caged up, but as a natural process.”  So here I am, still grieving someone I never met.  Here I am with tears of the empty womb, for the lost ones, for the motherless ones and the childless ones.  Here I am, sitting at the precipice of another swarm season and wondering at the strange synchronicity of life.  Wondering about what makes you a mother and when does it count to call yourself one?  Is it when your baby is born?  Is it when you conceive? Is it when bring a child into your home?  Is it when you say yes to raising and caring for another life form?  

We bee women work in cycles of six, and today marks six years.  Today things are more piercing than usual.  Today the memory is close, and the journey of healing is arching out behind me in its multitude of colors.  Since that day, when I discovered I held the most precious spirit within my womb, I have started a business dedicated natural beekeeping, initiated dream workshops centred around the honey bee, worked intimately with women and their womb-stories, traveled multiple times back to England to train with The Path of Pollen and found home in a new city.  In one week, I will embark on my sixth trip to England to study once more at The Sacred Trust.  

Moving into my sixth year as an apiculturist, I am acutely aware of the gift bee-centric beekeeping can be to the beekeeper.  Bees can be a bridge between ourselves and the natural world.  A way to address the collective grief of nature-deficit disorder by engaging with a species vital to the weave of life on this planet.  A way to serve. Beekeeping has been utilised to treat PTSD in veterans and assist in nature-based therapy for inmates in prison.  It offers a reason to watch the seasons, to connect to the cycles of life and flowering plants.  Without meaning to, we become aware of the fertility of the earth, the places we need to tend and coax into thriving, the places that offer prolific life-sustaining nectar.  We hear the hum of a healthy hive, and we are soothed, even if we don’t understand why. 

So often, my question is how do we serve the colony?  How do we become bee-centric, and not human-centric?  How do we see through the lens of the bee.  But bee guardianship is a relationship, a two way street, an agreement.  Every once in a while, I take a moment to remember the grace of what the honey bee offers us, because, she is after all, central to the fecundity of all life.

My daughter’s hive lived for four years, dying during the summer I moved away.  Now, a tree is planted on the site of that old womb/tomb.  I became a bee guardian because my womb needed to heal.  Because my heart needed to know about the other side of grief.  Because even in sorrow, the bees bring me immeasurable peace.  Because every day that I grieve my childlessness and dream of a new womb-story, I am also reminded that there is an ineffable joy in the love between a bee and a flower.  From that love the earth remains a fertile mother, showering her children in meadows.

The Big Bad Varroa Ally

This morning I sat in a garden teaming with the birds and the bees.  Humming birds noisily darted between creeping vines of nasturtiums, red raspberries hung plump and inviting from semi-orderly thickets, honeybees swooned in the fuzzy clumps of borage, and zucchini’s performed their summer competition for Most Alarmingly Large Vegetable.  I was at Wildflour Bakery, a jewel of fresh baked bread and Goat Rock Roast Coffee a lazy drive down Bodega Highway.  While it does have it’s downside (read: Optionitis for those who dare to choose only one loaf), it’s a not-so-secret favorite secret spot in my new home of Sebastopol, California.

I nestled myself into a garden bench with a Butternut Squash and Gouda scone and proceeded to read a most unpleasant article, but thought provoking article.  

The article was titled "The Colony-Killing Mistake Backyard Beekeepers Are Making”.  Let’s start there.  I steer away from articles that promote fear and shame on the outset.  This type of headline is mean to make you worry before you even click on the link.  However, a natural beekeeper once told me that she does her damnedest to stay abreast of the conversation.  She reads new research, seeks varying opinions and strives to be as educated as possible, so that when she faces a room of conventional beekeepers and states that she doesn’t use treatments and her hives are thriving, she can back the guffaws and protests of the impossible with observation and research-based knowledge. 

My morning read didn't have a lot of meaty substance to it, but the thing got me thinking.  It was one of the many articles I’ve seen admonishing backyard beekeepers for refusing to treat their hives with chemicals, organic or other.   It speaks to the dangers of allowing mite populations to flourish, infecting other colonies for miles around and putting the species at risk.  It speak to a desire that every backyard beekeeper at the least, consider chemical treatments.  Miticides are, as we know, the tried and true, scientifically studied method for saving the bees.  

    In a video by the Rucher Ecole, treatment-free beekeeper David Heaf states “putting chemicals in the hive doesn’t just contaminate your hive products.  The honeybee is susceptible to some of the miticides....It’s just trade-off against the damage to the bee and the damage to the mite….But worse still, because some of these actors are kinds of antiseptic, they seriously disrupt the microbiological environment in the hive.  Bees hugely depend on the other organisms, the microorganisms in the hive, for a healthy ecology of their hive, for the health of their young and the health of themselves."

    Despite such encouragement toward treatment-free beekeeping, I used to struggle with what to do.  I used to ring my fingers over whether or not I should get on board and just treat my bees.  I used to ask myself if not treating my bees was a form of torture.  I asked this because a highly regarded local beekeeping authority from my home town of Nevada City, CA told me it WAS a form of torture.   He told me the people from Marin and Sonoma who practice Natural Beekeeping were “The Taliban of Beekeepers”.  Needless to say, I never went back to another one of his classes.

I began to seek out other kinds of beekeepers.  I found people like Corwin Bell, Heidi Herrmann, Gunther Hauk, Michael Thiele and Jacqueline Freeman.  I went looking for those “terrorist” beekeepers the man in Nevada City so aggressively disliked.  I found places like The Melissa Garden in Healdsberg, CA and The Natural Beekeeping Trust in England.  I started to find my kindred spirits of the bee world.  Bee Guardians who have raised bees without chemicals or antibiotics.  People who had, against all mainstream belief, manage to raise healthy, lasting colonies.  Honey bees that even co-exists with varroa.

    What are they doing different?  Why do their bees thrive, despite the odds?  While each natural beekeeper’s practices are different, I began to notice certain commonalities (generalizing here): they allow swarming, breed strong genetics, talk to their hives, adopt alternative hive styles, harvest much less honey (if any), plant for pollinators, rid their gardens (and neighborhoods) of pesticide use, don’t feed bees sugar, and keep their bees in one place.  In short, they listen to nature.  They listen to the bees. 

What I find again and again, is the health of the colony or apiary is directly related to the health of its environment.  Humans and bees are not so very different.  Our health suffers in emotionally, physically, mentally or spiritually stressful environments.  The very foundations of conventional beekeeping practices are part of what is harming our bees.  I’m not a scientist, I don’t have proof.  I am one of the billions of lifeforms, who’s shared birthright is this planet, who can feel the places we are out of balance and seeks to right that balance by listening to the Earth.

If that’s a little to loose for you, try this: pesticides actually do kill (they are design to) and if you want healthy bees start by eradicating pesticide use from your seeds, your garden, your neighborhood, your country, your planet.

Returning to my morning garden moment, as if on point, in my caffeine-induced, bee-advocate reverie, I heard a British woman exclaim, “There are just so many bees here!  I love the bees!  Isn’t there a kind of pesticide that’s hurting them?”  Without thinking, I shouted through a patch of sunflowers, “Neonics! I mean, yes, there is.  Sorry! Didn’t meant to interrupt.  I’m a beekeeper.  They’re called neonicotinoids.”  She looked at me blankly, after which, I thoroughly retreated back into my unassuming bench, and read on. 

There was one more particularly crunch paragraph in the article that caught my eye.  "Bees face other challenges beyond mites, including poor nutrition, disease and pesticides. Even veteran beekeepers say it takes more effort to keep their bees alive these days.”

I had a little chuckle to myself.  Yup, other challenges.  It comes back to our very Western way of thinking: treat the symptom not the cause.  Varroa is a symptom of a much larger dis-ease in our pollinator communities.  What if, instead of looking at Varroa as a monster, we looked to Varroa as an ally?  The dark shadow-self that comes forward when we need to look at something we have been unwilling to see?  An aspect of the entire ecosystem that has it’s place in the larger story.  Some piece of our own wholeness that has gone out of balance and “appears” as a demon (ok ok, a mite), but is really just a way our inherent wisdom is communicating with us.  I know I’m making metaphors between the human psyche and beekeeping.  Just be cool with it. I’m a beginner.  I know a whole lot about bees and will probably never stop being a beginner.  This is the way of learning the natural world.      

The truth is, when it comes to beekeeping, colonies that come from treated parent colonies are going to have a really hard time making it through without treatments.  These are bees that come from packages and nucs sourced from large-scale conventional beekeeping operations after the hives have traveled to the California almond pollination event in early spring.  They are often not coming from a healthy environment, have been fed sugar, and are of weaker genetics than naturally raised or feral hives.  As a beekeeper helping other backyard beekeepers get started, this question of source is ever-pressing.  How do I help bees coming from treated colonies make the transition to treatment-free beekeeping?  I wish we could all set up apiaries and naturally breed our own strong colonies, but alas, there are still too few beekeepers trying things the old old old school way.  I will keep asking this question, because I believe in backyard beekeeping, and I believe it can do much more good than harm.

In the mean time, grow your gardens without pesticides, plant for pollinators, educated yourself, and sit next to your hive.  Grab a cup of tea and sit there a long time.  Sit there until the Mad Woman of the House goes quiet inside.  Sit there until the life-hum whispers a sweet honeyed language into your heart.  Sit there until you are bored.  Sit there until you realize, without noticing, a great calm has descended upon you.  Sit and talk to your bees, for I promise, with absolutely zero science to back me up, they will most certainly talk to you.