By ARIADNE WILL
Special to the Sentinel
Adrienne Wilber’s journey to becoming a beekeeper has been 15 years in the making.
“I read a book when I was a kid that was based on some soldier from World War II who ended up at a house where a lady was keeping bees,” Wilber said in an interview last week. “He felt better when he cared for the bees. It ended up being something that I wanted to do and I finally ended up doing it.”
Since reading about the soldier and the beekeeper as a young girl, Wilber, who grew up in Sitka, headed to the library to read up on beekeeping.
“I ordered them in January and realized that I needed to figure out how to care for all these bees that were going to be showing up,” she said. “I went to the library and checked out a bunch of books about honeybee biology and how to build your own hive.”
Tidbits Wilber has picked up include honeybee communication methods, one of which is termed the “waggle dance” and is used when bees are searching for a new place to build a hive.
“The bee kind of waggles — moves forward and then will back up, will move in a figure eight — and the amount of waggling, the distance travelled, and the orientation of the waggle to the world describes to the other bees the angle of the sun and the distance away to find the new home.”
She has also learned about the possibility for the bees to become aggressive.
“I initially had a spray bottle with sugar syrup in it because if you spray the bees with sugar syrup, they immediately lose focus from you being there and instead start licking one another and the hive to get the sugar,” Wilber said. “As they’ve built more comb, though, the sugar syrup hasn’t been as effective when I’ve gone to check on the hive.”
Now, to prevent the bees from growing agitated – behavior that can lead to stinging and the death of worker bees – Wilber uses her smoker.
“My smoker is a can that has some burning material in it that’s smoking and a little bellows that blows the smoke,” she said. “The idea is to blow the smoke into the entrance of the hive and over the top of the hive. The biological reaction of the bees is that there is a forest fire that is coming to their hive. They can’t move their hive. All they can do is eat as much honey as possible to be fueled up if they need to leave.”
Though Wilber has never been stung and has experienced little aggression from her bees, she tries to keep her bees out of her neighbors’ yards.
“As a beekeeper you don’t want clusters of bees landing on your neighbor’s things and causing problems,” she said.
While a sudden appearance of bees might be cause for surprise for those living in Wilber’s cozy neighborhood near downtown Sitka, Wilber says that she has read that the bees are usually docile enough to be gently scooped into a large box.
“It’s kind of like bears — bees can, by definition, hurt you, but unless you are irritating them they probably won’t bother you,” she said. “What I’ve noticed from hanging out with my bees is that they are overwhelmingly chill. If my bees were to swarm in my yard or the next yard over, I would just put on my bee suit and get a cardboard box and bring them back. They don’t have anything to defend and so they’re pretty non-aggressive.”
This behavior — “swarming” — is a behavior that occurs when the hive decides to split into two.
“The downside to having your hive swarm is that the queen you currently have rallies half the worker bees and flies away,” Wilber said, “so the amount of bees left to get work done is half of what it could be.”
Swarming is one of two seasonal hurdles beekeepers must be prepared to handle.
“The two main goals of beekeepers are to keep bees alive in the winter and to keep them from swarming in the spring and summer,” she said, “but overwintering bees is the greatest challenge to the beekeeper.”
Sitka winters are not as cold as winters in the Midwest or New England, but the onset of cooler weather will still pose a hazard to Wilber’s bees as they prepare for their first winter.
“Just like humans, who can die of hypothermia at degrees that would seem counter-intuitive to what should be cold, the bees can die that same way,” Wilber said. “In the winter, the bees are respirating and flexing their pectoral muscles to generate warmth, but all those tiny bee breaths put moisture in the hive, and if there isn’t a way the moisture can escape, the bees can die.”
Wilber, who has taken precautions, such as the addition of a “bee quilt” – a small box of wood chips at the top of each beehive – hopes that her bees will survive the winter. Nevertheless, she remains pessimistic.
“I keep telling myself that my bees will probably all die,” she said.
Even under that dismal possibility, however, Wilber has learned loads about herself as well as the insects she has adopted.
“One of my favorite things I’ve learned is that humans have this perception of the beehive as a perfect society, but I read that the average bee will work very diligently in short bursts, and then will spend a long time wandering aimlessly around the hive,” Wilber said. “If the bees can successfully build their dynasties while spending half their time wandering aimlessly, I will probably do fine.”
