The Past, Romantic but not Romanticized
Half a century ago, my grandfather, who was the first beekeeper in our family, decided to give the beehives he had to each of his adult children who still lived in or near the house he had built. At first, my uncle (inspecting a beehive, on the photo below) was the one who took this new hobby to heart and took care of both his own and my dad’s beehives. Soon thereafter, my dad (in a hat, next to little me and my cousin) started attending seminars and decided that the best way to learn beekeeping skills was by practicing them on his own.
For us, the children, one of summertime’s unforgettable experiences was when the fragrance in my grandfather’s kitchen would shift from that of fresh tomatoes and herbs to the thick sweetness of freshly uncapped beeswax and dripping honey, extracted with the centrifuge that my dad, a metalworking vocational teacher, had skillfully welded from sheet metal and hand-powered with rotating lever and reused gears. The delight of biting for the first time into the chewy sweetness of honey mixed with wax was among the first things I wished for my children to experience when we all visited Bulgaria.
The desire to recreate for my children and myself such experiences — and a sense of rural home in urbanized Northern Virginia — was what led me to start some eight years ago beekeeping and transforming the back yard by planting a small fruit orchard and a garden.
As expensive a hobby beekeeping has turned out to be – with the special equipment necessary, and the hard manual and time-consuming labor it requires – the satisfaction of extracting our own locally sourced and remarkably fragrant honey, produced by the expert pollinators in our backyard has become a symbol of pride for our small neurodivergent family.
But honey, as delicious as it is, hasn’t been the only gift that continuing the family tradition of beekeeping has brought. The numerous insights I have gained while sweating in the summer heat, surrounded by thousands of buzzing bees, the knowledge sharing with my 91-year-old dad over weekly Skype calls, the acts of honey jar diplomacy I have had to perform in overcoming occasional crises in our diverse neighborhood, and the enduring encouragement my children have provided in support of this quirky hobby have been immensely educational and rewarding.
Sweaty Suits and Hyperlocal Sweetness
The population of a typical honeybee colony fluctuates throughout the year, expanding to approximately 60,000 to 80,000 female worker bees and a few dozen male drones. During their lifespan, which typically lasts around 6 weeks, worker bees perform a range of important tasks within the honeybee colony. These tasks include foraging for nectar and pollen, constructing hexagonal wax cells to store food and house the brood, and nurturing the developing young bees. Drones’ primary role is to mate with a new queen from another colony.The colony is governed by a single mated queen bee for a period of up to three years. The queen not only lays eggs to produce new brood but also secretes pheromones that promote harmony and unity within the hive, while providing unique identity among all neighboring hives in a bee yard.
As important as the queen bee is, it is the worker bees who determine whether her majesty is doing a good job; if she does not, they will raise a replacement queen from selected larvae.
Healthy worker bees would collect pollen and nectar from blooming plants within 3 km radius and produce honey – the colony’s energy source for times of hardship. A bee colony, if deprived of a sustainable supply of new generations of bees — experiencing a “deficit of future”, to quote Georgi Gospodinov, the Bulgarian writer and recent winner of the 2023 InternationalBooker Prize — would start behaving erratically and aggressively, as if sensing that regardless surplus of honey it has stored, its demise is inevitable.
The Future – Uncertain but Hopeful
With one child, who used to eagerly help me catch swarms of bees, now disabled, and another one in college, I am not sure if there will be a fourth generation of beekeepers in my family – whether in Virginia or in Bulgaria. Nevertheless, I have faith that with a growing awareness of the oneness of the human family and its crucial role in sustaining and restoring nature, there will always be those who strive to find that delicate balance between humans and nature, between the global and the hyperlocal, between the sweaty and the sweet.
