Monterey — Late last month, I received a condensed primer on the myriad intricacies of beekeeping when Michael Marcus and Tasja Keetman led me on a long-overdue tour of their apiary and surrounding environs—rife with bountiful bright blooms to bolster the presence of these essential pollinators across the landscape. If, prior to this visit, I had been a bit perplexed as to why vegans eschew honey, it took little time before the big picture emerged: Over the course of its lifetime, a single honeybee makes one-quarter teaspoon of honey; on the flip side, each must consume eight pounds of honey to make one pound of beeswax. Come winter, in the absence of blooms from which to forage pollen and nectar, honey bees survive the harshest season of the year on honey stored. In the ensuing weeks, I have been less and less inclined to reach for the jar of amber colored sweetness lurking in my pantry—a shift that arose out of sheer reverence, really.
“[Honey is] a very special gift,” Keetman told The Edge, so precious that she and Marcus bottle but two jars each season; one to keep, the other to give away.
“Without the honey, the bees are doomed,” said Marcus, as a means of explaining why the byproduct of his bees—a number that figures into the tens if not hundreds of thousands—is not primarily intended for human consumption.
The humble honey bee (Apis Mellifera, Latin for “bee” and “honey-bearing”), is aptly named for the species’ production of honey—sustenance needed to ensure the bees’ survival through the winter. In the northeast, this is especially imperative. The social world of honeybees is divided into three castes: workers, drones, and queens. In summer, a female worker bee’s life spans a scant six weeks (while a queen can live for several years).
Keetman and Marcus practice biodynamic beekeeping, a sustainable way to keep happy, healthy honeybees. It all began a decade ago when their backyard garden became overgrown, and the pair attempted to resurrect it; a dear friend, who happened to be a beekeeper, offered to pass along his old equipment (which, while unusual, proved a trusted source). After introducing the bees, their organic vegetable garden—much of which is harvested for use at their restaurant, Bizen (on Railroad Street in Great Barrington)—took off. This, coupled with a handful of workshops with master beekeeper Gunther Hauk (co-founder, in 1996, of the Pfeiffer Center for Biodynamic Studies in Chestnut Ridge, N.Y. and founder, in 2006, of Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary in Virginia), and their landscape was literally buzzing with activity.
In all things, the couple strives to maintain anthroposophical connections, which stem from the teachings of Rudolph Steiner who sought natural means of optimizing physical and mental health and well being. In short, these methods allow beekeepers to remain in tune with their bees by indicating, for example, the best days on which to inspect colonies or gather honey (if applicable).
The day of our convening is a fruit day (as evidenced by the waning crescent moon), and we walk through field after field of flowers—including abundant, tight clusters of tiny white buckwheat blooms, pale yellow wild radish, and stunning purple of hairy vetch—filled with the audible thrum of honeybees hard at work.
“We’re feeding the bees with flowers,” says Marcus, “and the health of the queen is everything.” Still, the hive always prepares for succession. A healthy, fertile queen is capable of laying eggs almost constantly—to the tune of more than 3,000 per day—each deposited directly into the hexagonal cell of the comb. After just three days, larvae emerge and are fed royal jelly, akin to “mother’s milk,” for two and a half days before honey is introduced; during this inaugural phase, a baby bee is visited every three seconds to be fed and cared for (which brings new appreciation to the oft-quoted phrase, busy as a bee!). As bees begin to fly out, they carry with them the scent of the queen and the scent of the hive—both of which will ultimately guide them home.
The acrid smell of smoke floats through the already hot and heavy July air as Keetman prepares to check in on the first hive—housed in a Langstroth Hive, which, while not entirely bee-centric, make manipulation for beekeepers easier (due to its stacked engineering, not unlike the Top Bar Hive, the oldest hive design in the world). This is in contrast to the Warré Hive, built to simulate the hollow of a dead tree where wild bees are inclined to build from the top down. Each hive is home to about 10,000 bees, and each has a name—among them Ambrosia and Bavaria, the latter representing one of Marcus and Keetman’s original hives, about eight years old.
Since the addition of bees, the surrounding landscape has sprung to life. A pair of 20-year-old pear trees that never produced are now heavily laden with fruit; ditto for raspberries canes, running the width of the garden, heavy with berries warm from the sun. Kale, kabocha squash, plus myriad others—from zucchini to tomatoes—all flourish with little maintenance to the point of thriving.
“Everybody’s working together,” says Keetman of the symbiosis she and Marcus are cultivating on their land—in large part thanks to the efforts of the bees. Come November, out of sheer necessity, a mass expulsion of the male drones occurs; they consume too much and contribute too little to be supported through winter. This leaves the female workers and queen to sustain themselves through nature’s harshest season, “when every microgram of honey counts.” In order to survive, the bees cluster and rotate—keeping the queen at their center—all this while vibrating in order to maintain a temperature of 98 degrees within the hive.
“They are constantly generating ambient heat that will help the whole hive survive,” says Marcus, adding that if they don’t have all the elements for survival—from food to warmth—“they will die, and the hive will perish—and that happens a lot in the Northeast because we have such a cold winter.”
At the tail end of my tour, I was indeed “kissed” by a bee; in light of all my new knowledge, I was surprisingly bummed out. As Keetman gently pulled the stinger from my cheek, she confirmed that in stinging the bee died. Even upon my departure, another highly unusual sight—even for those well-versed in honeybees—emerged, as evidenced by the mini swarm of bees visibly congregating in the tree above my parked car. Swarming usually happens in spring and early summer—after the queen’s increased laying following the winter solstice—and happens when a honey bee colony outgrows its home and the workers signal its time to move; in short, this process causes a single colony to split into two or more distinct colonies which ultimately hastens reproduction.–
“After all the blooms, they completely explode and expand [in number], and that’s their time—when the queen and hive decide to make virgin queens (a queen bee that has not yet mated with a drone). And then they swarm,” says Keetman.
“The queen prepares for the succession of her progeny,” says Marcus (pointing to the highly-evolved, female-centric species). “This is a queen with her entourage escaped.”
“This is a tiny, tiny swarm,” explains Keetman, “and we are going to capture her tonight—and give her a nice little home…so they have an easier time.”
“We are looking for bees all the time,” says Marcus. “This is very unusual to see; you’ll never see this again.”
