I’ll level with you. After The Bear Incident, I’d gone Hamlet as to whether I was going to continue down Apiarist Road. (…or not to bee?)

I mean, so far in my beekeeping career I’ve frozen two hives to death and served three to the local ursine population as honey-crusted protein snacks.

I’m pretty sure that’s enough to qualify me as a Hymenopteric bioterrorist.

Unfortunately, I’m also a frequent scuba diver into the “Sunken Cost Fallacy” abyss, often blindly refusing to admit defeat and throwing good money after bad out of sheer stubbornness.

And so, last Saturday, I got into the car and headed up to the Northwoods Apiary in Westfield, VT for yet another attempt at beekeeping.

It’s about an hour northwest of our farm, along a bunch of back roads. (I.e. General Vermont driving.)

Until eventually I came up on a pickup truck parked alongside the road and thought, odd…is there traffic up here?

And the answer was yes. 10 or 12 cars were stopped ahead of me…but they were actually in line to pick up bees too.

I did eventually get to the front of the line, hand over my receipt, and pick up my nuc of new bees. And I’ll tell you that the white cardboard “hive” they came in was a vast improvement over how I received my last ones…

It was well after dark by the time I got home, so I didn’t install them into the brood box straight away. Also there were about 40 or 50 “old” bees still left hanging around the hive that the bear tore apart, and I really didn’t want to cause a bunch of bee-on-bee violence in the middle of the night. So I dropped the temp hive on top of the real one, pulled the tape off the front aperture of the box, and beat feet back into the house before they could come out a swingin’ & a stingin’.

I fully installed the frames the following afternoon, though. And there was still quite a bit of confusion and general orneriness.

But by Monday things had generally calmed down and there were just a series of orientation flights happening around the entrance to the hive.

For those unaware, “orientation flights” are little figure-8s that bees make just outside their hive. They do it to establish where their home is in relation to the angle of the sun/other landmarks. More often than not it’s newly hatched bees that exhibit the behavior, as they’re getting their bearings for the first time and are nervous to go too far from home.
But in this case it was the whole hive doing it at once, since I’d essentially picked up their home and relocated it 35 miles away. (Which, in bee scale, is the rough equivalent of a one way trip to Mars.)

And with that, I’m officially a bear feeder beekeeper again. I know some of you are asking “why aren’t you putting up an electric fence around your hives? It will protect them from the bear and other predators!”

There are two reasons for that:

1. Bears remember. And they’re more than willing to ride a little lightning if it means there’s delicious honey on the other side of that shocky-shock.
2. I have a daughter with autism. One that we’re currently teaching how to help us around the garden. The same garden in which these bee hives are kept, for now. And that’s a painful lesson that I’d rather not impart if I can avoid it.

That said, I do think that an electric fence is in our future if I can keep these bees alive long enough. They’re just expensive, particularly so since I need ours to be solar powered.
But, once I throw even more money at this venture, I’ll probably set it up in the original Bee Sanctuary area that I created last year, which will keep it away from Daphne’s usual pathways and play spots.

But for the time being, we’re going with what we have.

Here’s hoping things end better for these girls.

j.s.