I am in the backyard, not of my house, but of my neighbor’s house, because they have a bigger backyard, and they have allowed me to put my beehive here. My yard is too small for a beehive. I just harvested honey for the very first time this past Saturday morning.

I want to talk a little bit about how I got into beekeeping and what it is like. It is wonderful, is what it is like. It started unexpectedly. I did not intend to become a beekeeper. I was walking around the block one afternoon, and I came upon a place where a neighbor was having some trees taken down, and one of the trees turned out to have a colony of bees living in it. The workmen had chopped down the tree and were trying to attack the bees in every way they could, and even setting the tree on fire, trying to drive the bees away.

I went home and I phoned a member of our parish, Gheorghe, who is from Romania, because I knew he was a beekeeper. I said, “What can we do in this situation? Can we relocate these bees, perhaps?”

The next morning, before dawn, at five in the morning, Gheorghe and I came together to the house where this felled tree was lying by the side of the road, and we captured the bees. We sprinkled them with water so they could not fly away, and then Gheorghe just picked them up in great big handfuls and put them in a plastic bucket, put the lid on the bucket, and carried it off to where his beehives were. He had an empty hive.

After that, he kept telling me, “You should be a beekeeper, you were born to be a beekeeper, you love the bees, you understand the bees,” and so forth and so on, so when the county began teaching its annual beekeeping class, Beginning Beekeeping, he said, “Now, it is starting on Tuesday night, and this is where you send your check.”

I kind of got my arm twisted into it, I went along step by step, and the next thing I knew, I had ordered a package of bees. Gheorghe had a hive—he had made several hives—and he gave me one.

That is kind of the easy part. You have probably seen hives, usually painted white, or at least a light color—bees like light colors, dislike dark colors. It is like an empty box, like a cube, but the top and the bottom of the box are missing, and instead, slotted into it, like picture frames, standing in a box, are frames of honeycomb.

Each of these simple, square frames, the beekeeper fills with a sheet, like a sheet of paper, of beeswax that has been imprinted with a honeycomb pattern. You let loose the bees, and immediately they start drawing out the honeycomb pattern into comb—it is called drawing. They start drawing the comb.

When they get really established, they are so organized. If you look at a frame from a beehive that is thriving, a beehive in good condition, you will see that in the bottom part of the frame, in sort of a mound shape, is all the little baby bees. The queen bee is laying thousands of eggs every day, and the bees that are at various stages of development are in sort of a hill-shaped place at the bottom of the frame. Then, in a rainbow above them, is pollen, grouped by color. So there is this rainbow stretching over the baby bees of different colors of pollen, and then finally in the upper corners, that is where they store honey.

The honey is what they live off of. They are like ants, being responsible all summer long, or grasshoppers. The bees, likewise, store nectar from flowers all summer long, and then they live on it through the winter. That is how they get through the winter.

The temperature for bees has to remain constantly at 92 degrees. All winter long, they do not leave the hive. They huddle together in a cluster, and they make it warmer by beating their wings rapidly to warm the air, and they continually circulate. The ones on the outside move to the inside, the ones on the inside move to the outside, and they stay in this tight cluster, so they stay warm enough, and if they have the honey close enough to where they are clustered, they can eat the honey and survive the winter.

We lose a lot of bee colonies. Here in the state of Maryland, they have been, for quite a while, and although the situation is improving a little, there were no wild honeybees. The only honeybees that survived were the ones that were being taken care of by beekeepers. But now we are occasionally seeing wild honeybees coming back, thank goodness.

What takes them away, very often, is starvation, if the winter is especially severe, or they have not saved enough honey. There are a lot of diseases. There are diseases that attack the baby bees and the eggs. The adult bees are pretty much free from disease, but what attacks the adult bees are various mites, like ticks. There is actually a varroa mite that sucks the bee’s blood. There is a tracheal mite, which just seems so unfair—a little, tiny mite that goes into their airways, goes down their throat and lodges in their airways and multiplies there and eventually the bee suffocates. How tiny this is, and how unfair that is.

What we do not have in Maryland yet is colony collapse disorder, which there has been some talk about in the news—CCD. The experienced beekeepers say, “You know what? It’s always something. There is always some new, mysterious something that is afflicting the honeybees, and you wait a few years and it goes away.”

The beekeepers I have talked to are not particularly alarmed about CCD, but it is a problem in some other states, and especially for commercial beekeepers who loan their bees out to fertilize crops. I think 40% of our food involves the use of honeybees to help fertilize the crops, and if all the honey bees died out, we would be in quite a fix.

Some people say it is commercial beekeeping that is causing CCD. The bees are only fed one kind of crop, one kind of food, instead of the variety they would get in nature. They are carried around from place to place on a truck, which is very disturbing to bees. They do not like to be shaken. They do not like vibration; they want to be still, so riding on trucks is probably also very stressful for them. It may be that some human-caused problems are actually contributing to CCD.

The other thing we do not have a problem with in Maryland is the Africanized honeybee, also known as the killer bee. This is not a bee whose venom is particularly poisonous. This is a kind of bee that is particularly aggressive in defending its nest—I should perhaps say, not aggressive, just defensive. Humans keep trying to break into their house and steal their honey, and naturally, they will try to defend the honey and to defend the baby bees. That is what bears are after. Honey just gets in their way; it is the baby bees they want to eat.

So it is right that bees should defend their home turf. The Africanized honeybees are just a lot more defensive, and more aggressive, and they will follow you as you run away from their hive, and they will keep attacking. It is possible that if you just laid down and did not try to get away, they could possibly sting you until you died, but it is not that the sting itself is more poisonous.

Thank goodness, this is not a problem in Maryland. These Africanized bees thrive in very hot climates, and they are coming north from South America over the last 50 years. They may never get up into places where it actually drops before freezing in the wintertime. We will just have to see about that.

Gheorghe gave me a hive, and then I ordered bees. They actually send them in the mail. You order by the pound; three pounds of bees is about $60, and then it is another few dollars to get a queen. In my case, we did not get them through the mail, but a member of the local beekeepers’ association drove down to Georgia and got everyone’s orders at once and drove back up again with them.

Into this empty hive I dumped and shook my bees. The queen is not the queen that these bees know. In fact, these bees have never been introduced to each other because they got shoveled into a package, so it takes them a little while to get acquainted with each other and to accept the fragrance, the pheromone, of the queen bee. Since they do not recognize her, there is a chance they would attack her, as if she were an intruding queen.

At first, the bees are loose, circulating around in the hive. The queen is still inside a little cage with a couple of attendants. She does not feed herself. Her attendants feed her and groom her. In between her and the rest of the colony, there is a little hole in this inner cage, and it is plugged with sugar candy. The queen and her attendants nibble away from the inside, and the bees in the colony nibble away from the outside, and by the time they break through that sugar, they have gotten used to her fragrance, used to her pheromones, so they will not attack her; they accept her as a member of the colony.

Did I luck out, or was it providence? I do not know, but I have exceptionally gentle bees. The first time I went to the beekeeping classes, I was clothed from head to toe in white, because I know they do not like black, they do not like dark colors. I had my smoker and the puncture-proof gloves, and the whole thing, and I noticed that the old hands, like the guy who is the state apiary inspector, never use protective gear. He said he just puffs a couple of times with the smoker. He says it is like knocking on the door. It just lets them know, “This is me, I’m the guy with the smoke,” and I saw that they do not attack him.

I found that to be very true with my bees. I can take the hive all apart, I can pull frames, swap them from one hive body to the next hive body, and they just ignore me; they do not pay any attention. Definitely, when it comes time to re-queen in a couple of years, I want to make my own queen from this particular colony, because they are so gentle and so good-natured.

The thing I wondered about was: how do you get the honey out of the honeycomb? You know what the honeycomb looks like; you can picture a honeycomb. Each of these little cells in a honeycomb the bees fill with nectar. And then they evaporate the water out of it by fanning their little wings across the open cell of nectar. And when the cell is full of honey, then they put a cap of wax on it.

The bees make wax. It extrudes from glands on their abdomen, and they chew it and mash it, and they make it into the shape of the honeycomb. Honeycomb, I have been told, is the world’s strongest structure. Nobody teaches them to do it; they just know. They are just born knowing how to make honeycomb.

They fill up each of these little, tiny cells with honey. In the course of a bee’s entire lifetime—which might be from three weeks to six months over the winter; if they are born in the fall they will live six months, but it could be as short as three weeks—she (they are all female, all the workers) will make about half a teaspoon of honey. So it is very labor-intensive.

A healthy, thriving beehive colony at full strength is maybe 70,000-80,000 bees. When I ordered my three pounds of bees, that was about 10,000 bees, and they very quickly expanded and filled up the hive.

Picture these frames, like a picture frame. Where the glass would be, that is where the honeycomb is. How do you get the honey out of that? What we did on this past Saturday was to bring the entire super with the honey-filled frames—we did not bring the whole hive; we just brought the part that we had sat apart to be our honey; we leave the bees with their own honey so they can make it through the next winter—we brought the super down to my basement.

Gheorghe helped me. He knew how to do it; he had done it before. Using an electric heated knife, he sliced off, from the surface of the honeycomb, all the caps—cappings, they call them. Then I took those cappings and melted them, and I can make, maybe, one candle. It is not very much wax. It takes the bees a lot more time to make wax and make honeycomb than it does to make honey. It is a lot harder for them to make the honeycomb. I saved the cappings, but there are not a lot of them. There are not going to be very many candles coming out of this.

Once it is sliced off, of course, the honey begins to slowly leak out from the honeycomb. You have an extractor—these are hand-cranked or electric. We rented, from our bee association, an electric extractor. It is sort of like a washing machine drum. It is a cylinder. You can slot into it, four of the frames at a time: either two or four, because you want it to be balanced.

We put into it the four frames and turn it on, and it begins to circulate very, very quickly, and by centrifugal force, the honey is flung out of the cells onto the walls of this extractor, this washing machine drum, and falls down the walls and gathers in the bottom.

After we had done about four of these frames—we do one side of the frame, stop it, turn them all around, do the other side of the frame—we had about a gallon of honey, so we drew that off, and then put in four more frames: another gallon of honey. There are ten frames in every super, so we had two more for the last go-round. We ended up with about 2-1/2 gallons of honey from one super.

I put on my super too late. You can put on two or three. Some bees are very industrious; they can fill even more supers, but I was behind the ball. I wasn’t ahead of things this year, so I only got the one super of honey this time. I got about 2-1/2 gallons of honey, and after I had drained the cappings, there is about another quart of honey that was still residing with the leftover cappings. That was my first successful honey harvest, and it took about a year and a quarter. I ordered the bees in April of 2009, and my first harvest was at the end of July in 2010.

That first year, as they are growing and expanding and getting all the honey they can, you do not do a harvest that year. You let the bees keep all the honey they can make so that they will make it through that first winter. But apart from this once-a-year harvest, there is really not much work to raising and caring for honey bees. They are just like a perfectly-attuned machine. Everything they need, they can do it.

What they do need humans for is when there are threats to their environment, like the mites that can attack them. There have been diseases that kill the baby bees—European foul-brood, American foul-brood. It might be that we have to step in and prevent that or cure that.

There are various things that will invade the hive. Wax moths love to get in there and eat up all the wax, and that can destroy an entire colony in very short order. If the colony is strong and healthy, they can usually drive away the wax moths. At the last beekeeper association meeting, they were talking about a new intruder in the hive: the small hive beetle. The bees do not seem to be able to kill these, but they will herd them. Like German Shepherds, they will herd the hive beetles from place to place, and try to gather them all together.

They say if you just take something like a jewel box from a CD, put a little peanut butter inside of it, and stick it in the hive, you can come back and find that the hive beetles have all gone inside the CD case to get away from the bees, or have been driven into the CD case by the bees herding them, and then you can just take the CD case out, flush it out or freeze it or something to get rid of the hive beetles.

That is the story of my first successful harvest as a beekeeper. I have really enjoyed this. I love these bees. They are so sweet, and as I was saying, I found it is very feasible to come out, as I am right now, next to the hive. I do not have any veil or gear or gloves or anything else on. I was holding the microphone close to the entrance so that we could hear a little bit of that humming earlier, and the bees are just flying in and out ignoring my hand, ignoring me, ignoring the microphone. It does not matter to them. I guess they are confident enough: they know I am not here to hurt them, so they are comfortable with this.

I remember the first time I saw the teacher of the bee class with a frame full of bees, covered with bees. He said, “If the bees are in the way and you need to look at something, just push them out of the way,” and he took his finger and just pushed it right into the midst of the bees, and pushed them out of the way. By golly, it worked; they paid no attention to him. That is really great, I just love that about them.

That is a summary of what I am doing. The thing that I think is most fascinating about bees is that—and we all know this, but the more details you learn, the more amazing it is—it is as if a colony of bees is a single organism, and that each individual bee has their part to play, but they all instinctively, somehow, contribute to the life of the colony. It is kind of like how all the cells in our body work together to make a body for us. They all have their role to play, and as new cells are made, they know exactly what they are supposed to do, and in this joint effort, this collaboration called me, all those cells are doing their work.

It is like that in the beehive, that every bee has exactly her job to do and does it, and sacrifices herself for the hive. There is one queen. There are several, maybe a few hundred drones, which are the male bees, who have no job, nothing to do except fertilize a queen once in their life, and only once, because they die right afterward. The other drones just hang out in the hive being, cared for and fed by the bees who do all the work, who are all female. Female bees do not reproduce; only the queen reproduces.

A worker bee, when she is born, first is a babysitter. First, her job is to take care of the baby bees and to feed them and help them along, help them get born out of the cell. After that she begins to learn about foraging. She begins to learn about gathering pollen and gathering nectar and will go on short flights outside the hive.

As she gets bigger and stronger, she can fly further, and she can carry more. She may also become a defender bee. She may be one whose job is specifically to stay in the hive and be ready to come out and fight if anybody attacks the hive or tries to steal from it.

At the end, they die working. Eventually the worker bees’ wings just give out. Their wings are so fragile, they become so tattered, that they will just drop, carrying a load of nectar, coming back to the hive; they just do not make it all the way home. I was watching one of them just a few minutes ago, kind of struggling in the grass a couple of yards away from the hive, but to a bee, a couple of yards is like miles and miles. They work until their wings give out; they work until they die.

There is so much that humans can admire, and have throughout history admired, about bees, about their cooperation and their selflessness and their desire to give themselves for the life of the colony being what matters rather than their own individual lives. It is an example that is held up to us in Scripture and in many other places, and one that we can continue to learn from.