Yep! It’s true. About 90,000 of them, including 3 queens. Their domain lies within a 6 mile radius of the place. Highly demanding, they lord over every living thing on the planet.  And if they don’t like you–they’ll sting!

Of course you knew I meant bees, right? I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m a third generation beekeeper. My grandfather (on my mother’s side), wrangled 40 hives, and was known as the honey man of Hungary. Actually, there were four brothers in his family and each of them had 40 hives, so they probably could jockey for one of the famous brother enterprises (sort of like Four Brothers Spaghetti sauce, though bee charming might be closer to Ringling Bros. if you ask me!).

There are hilarious stories of beekeeping, with the biggest irony being that my mother had to help her father, but she was horribly allergic to bee stings. She told me once a bee stung her on the back of the neck, and her eyes swelled shut for days.

Fast forward several decade later and I have 3 hives parked on our brownstone roof, plus I help others set up hives in the middle of this crazy city. Renegade beekeeping? You betchya!

I’ve reposted  this from other writings of mine, about our first setup!

I won’t go into the painful–err–interesting bits of finally getting our bees, but the jist of it went something like this:

* Called ten different states, listened to eight different accents tell me they “were sold out of bees for the season.”

* Called more states to find out that their delivery of bees would be later than our climate could manage, or that they wouldn’t take anything but check, or they couldn’t deliver them properly.

* Called more people who, in within the span of the hour when I said I would call right back, had managed to sell out of bees…

* FINALLY located someone who could meet our credit-card-paying-need-it-asap criteria.

*Held breath as bees were delivered 3 days, then had to cart them from post office (by the way you could NOT scare people faster than drag a nuc hive box though the postal window of a packed city postal facility).

*Managed to lug them onto our city roof! Yay–were half-way there!

Next up–hiving. My landlady’s coworker, Dwaine, was a willing participant. It helps that he lives two doors down from us, and is curious about learning this stuff. We are also filming a documentary about city bees, so Nadia, a documentary film-maker, was there shooting also.

~~I should note that bees are usually sent in two ways: as package bees, where new bees (newbies?) are sent with a young/new queen in a smaller package or as a nuc (nucleus), which is an established family of bees with their own queen and their own frames with started honey and babies on the frames. We got the nuc, shipped with five of their own frames in a nuc box

Here are some pics from the day:

Here is lovely Nadia, and her camera. Although she was just shooting, we made sure she wore a bee suit!

Up first–the open nuc hive, which is set close to the permanent hive, at left…

Closeup of the nuc hive–they were packed pretty tight!

Here I am holding the first frame…yes, it’s really me!

Dwaine poses by by the finished hive. We are using an entrance feeder (the glass jar, upside down at the outside right), for the day and will remove it. In it is sugar water, which we are giving them after their long trip.