hive of sisters

by Kristen Dorsey

Iexperiencedmy first honeybee swarm in the summer of 2000—my second year on the farm. Tim and I were still crazy in love then: with each other, with life, and with renovating the small, weedy, Martinsburg, West Virginia homestead we’d purchased the previous year.

Tim and I were working outside in the late afternoon sunshine— he was repairing the old, cranky riding mower he’d dragged to the gravel driveway. I was pulling weeds in the front yard from the flower gardens we’d planted around the wavy stone foundation built in 1930.

A low vibration invaded the reverie of my repetitive, relaxing work. I ignored it—probably a distant neighbor’s chainsaw or weed whacker—but it got louder. I stood and wiped tendrils of hair from the sweat on my forehead. What is that sound?

Turning in a semicircle, I homed in on the humming and walked around to the driveway side of the house. The hum was louder there, sounding somewhat like the drone of a powerful, smooth-running engine.

“Tim,” I called, “can you hear that?” He stopped clanking his wrench against the mower deck, detached from the rusty machine and overturned on the gravel, and looked up. He cocked his head, nodded, and stood. We walked toward the back of the house on intersecting paths.

Clustered on a low, thick branch of one of the arching twin maple trees that grew between the farmhouse’s back door and the small barn was a writhing mass of bees. I grabbed one of Tim’s sun-hot arms and gasped. The hum increased in volume as we approached until I could feel it in my chest, like the bass of a too-loud stereo.

The swarm was the biggest I would ever see. The mass bubbled and churned, shape-shifting with the movement of the insects. We gaped at that spectacle of nature, me clutching Tim’s wrist and peeking over his shoulder from behind. i had a farm, a shattered heart, and a mountain of debt. I was forty-one, single, and alone.

“They won’t hurt us, Kristen,” Tim said, pulling me into the circle of his arms and resting his chin on top of my head. “They are only interested in their queen right now.” We watched them reverently until the sun dropped behind the edge of the distant Blue Ridge mountains. The cooling air calmed the bees, and the few still flying around joined the cluster for the night. Tim and I made a wide circle around them to the back door.

Honeybees—both wild-living and domesticated—swarm when the queen runs out of space to lay eggs and needs a bigger home. Occasionally, a new queen is born and needs to find a new hive lest the current monarch kills her—only one queen can rule each colony. Either way, a queen takes flight, and her sisters fill their stomachs with as much honey as they can carry and follow her. Scout bees roam the area searching for a new home, but until they find one, the bees cover her where she lands and stay clustered around their queen. Her pheromones ensure they can think of nothing but protecting her and finding her a new palace.

In the morning, the swarm of bees in the maple tree was gone.

Later that day, we noticed bees flitting in and out of the rickety farmhouse chimney. The old brick fireplace was not functional—it had been sealed off and drywalled over years before—but the chimney poked up like a crooked tooth over the roofline. I was nervous about bees living so close to us then—I wouldn’t choose to keep bees for many years yet—but Tim was sure they were good luck. He insisted we let them stay.

At that time, Tim was still my gentle husband who fed scruffy stray kittens the bologna from his lunch sandwich; still the barrel-chested cinnamon-eyed man who often brought me wildflowers gathered and presented from his thick-knuckled hand.

Those bees stayed in the chimney for the fifteen years I lived on the farm. They were my housemates through every frigid West Virginia winter, even when my store-bought bees starved or froze. When I finally sold the farm in 2016, I made the new owners promise never to kill or evict those bees.

Did I choose to keep honeybees because they reminded me of the sweetness of the golden years with Tim before he became sick—and ultimately died—from addiction to OxyContin? Did those bees mirror the parts of me that survived the winters of our shared pain?

Sometime in 2002, Tim fell off a ladder and injured his back. We owned a thriving contracting business—time off didn’t happen. He went to a walk-in clinic and brought home a chunky yellow pill bottle stuffed with OxyContin tablets. A new nonaddictive pain killer, he told me, and he felt better already.

Two years later, on our June anniversary in 2004, this addicted and unrecognizable man handed me back his wedding ring.

A few weeks later, following one final violent confrontation, I watched the angry red taillights of his pickup swerve away for the last time. I’d declined to give him access to the locked shed where I’d hidden the remainder of the company tools and equipment he hadn’t yet sold or pawned. He smashed his fist into the drywall beside my head, and I slid to the floor, crouching and cowering, and threw the key across the room.

The county magistrate declined to issue a restraining order—it was all marital property, and I was reminded Tim was still my husband.

Tim failed to appear in court for our divorce proceedings in October. The court returned my name, and granted me the farm and all the business debt.

The honeybees looped and twirled like living smoke from the chimney above the farmhouse roof.

After a time of deep mourning and mind-twisting confusion, I chose to surrender to my circumstances. If life gave me a farm, I’d farm to the best of my abilities.

In March of 2007, I drove to Pennsylvania to pick up a ten-weekold Lakeland Terrier—one of the best beings I’ve ever known. I named him Aengus McKee Dorsey.

I took the West Virginia Eastern Panhandle Beekeeper’s Association’s beginner’s beekeeping class early that year as well. I spent hours learning from a local beekeeper named Mark that summer, helping him with his hives. i picked up two vibrating packages of Carniolan honeybees (Apis mellifera carnica) from Mark in April 2008. Mark had mail-ordered hundreds of the three-pound packages of honeybees for several local apiaries, orchards, and hobby beekeepers.

During the late winter months later that year, I spent my spare time in Mark’s cluttered, dark, unheated warehouse workshop, putting together two wooden beehives with parts I’d purchased from him.

It was hard work building those hives, but I couldn’t afford to pay Mark to make them for me, so I bundled up in multiple layers and labored beside the bear-like, mid-50ish, taciturn beekeeper and West Virginia Highway Department worker. I blew warming breath across my aching, bloodless fingers as I stapled and screwed together hive bodies, nucs, and supers and strung wire across honey frames to prepare them for wax foundation panels. Mark never wore more than jeans, a flannel shirt, and a down vest, no matter the weather: something that always astounded me.

Mark and most of the beekeepers in North America use Langstroth-style hives, invented in the 1800s by Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth. These tall hives, made of stackable, 16” x 20” wooden boxes, contain removable vertical frames for storing honey and pollen and raising honey bee brood.

The Langstroth hive consists of deep, medium, and shallow boxes. The “deeps,” or hive bodies, are ten to twelve inches high and used at the bottom to raise the hive’s brood. The subsequent layers include the “supers,” which come in medium and shallow sizes for storing the honey that the beekeeper will harvest. Between the deeps and the honey supers is a “queen excluder” screen, made of a mesh large enough for worker bees to squeeze through but too small for the larger queen to breach. Since only a mated queen lays eggs, this keeps all the brood confined to the lower-level hive bodies and ensures that only honey and pollen get stored in the upper-level supers.

As winter continued, my hives got built and painted. Finally, I loaded them into the Jeep and drove them to the farm. I stacked together the parts that made the tower-like hive—the bottom board, the wide boxes of the deep hive bodies, the narrower-sized honey super, and finally, the inner and outer covers. The hives were ready for my new spring bees.

I’d had to show a property that Saturday morning—I now worked as a sales agent for a real estate company—and I arrived at Mark’s combination junk lot/bee yard/warehouse just after. I’d picked my way in black patent pumps along the rutted dust and gravel path to the open double doors of his squat, rusty warehouse. Stacked beside the doors was a hill of bee packages, their hum audible from the parking area, and Mark squinted at me in the morning sun as I navigated over twisted metal and slalomed around old tires.

He waited, holding my two bee-boxes in his ham-sized hands.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked in his slow drawl. “I could swing by in a few hours and help ya.”

“I’m good,” I said, wobbling around a final crater and smoothing my skirt. “I’ve got this!”

Mark pursed his lips, gazed at me under raised, bushy eyebrows for a few seconds, then handed over the bees.

“Alright, then,” he chuckled, “give a call if you need.”

I could feel his gaze burning my back as I tiptoed to my Jeep, the droning of the bees vibrating my arms.

Driving with two packages of mail-order honeybees on the passenger seat of my Jeep was both nerve-wracking and exciting. I headed back to my farm, bumping along Martinsburg, West Virginia backroads. The bees’ communal humming spiked momentarily louder each time I lurched over a pothole, as if in criticism of my driving.

Each mail-order bee package contained about ten thousand gentle Carniolan honeybees and a young, newly mated queen. The wooden-framed containers, each about the size of a shoebox, had a can of sugar-water suspended inside to feed the bees during shipping, a small-mesh screen stapled across the open front and back sides, and a second, tiny wood-and-wire cage that housed the queen.

A plug of pliable candy blocked the round doorway to the queen’s cell, and it would take several days for the worker bees clumped in a crawling, shifting ball around her to chew through the candy plug and release her. The artificially inseminated queen hadn’t been raised or mated by these bees, so the delay ensured that the bees would be exposed to the queen’s pheromones during shipping and accept her as their new matriarch. Additionally, it gives the beekeeper (oh my Goddess—me) time to install the young community into their new wooden hive. on february 6th, the Mid-Atlantic experienced a powerful snowstorm now popularly known as “Snowmageddon 2010,” which brought blizzard conditions and more than two feet of snow to the Eastern Panhandle and other parts of the Mid-Atlantic. Roofs collapsed, cars piled up on impassable highways, more than 50,000 homes (including mine) lost power, and the government and public transportation systems shut down for days.

My heart fluttered and my hands shook as I suited up in my new, snowy-white long-sleeve beekeeper jacket with the wide mesh bonnet. The non-crushable veil of the bonnet won’t fold down against the wearer’s face, protecting the beekeeper from angry honeybees that target an intruder’s eyes, nose, and mouth. The protective jackets are tough cotton cloth that sit just below the hip line. The elasticized cuffs and waist keep the bees from crawling under the coat. I pulled on yellow rubber gloves and carried the bees to their new high-rise apartments.

Spring sunshine warmed the morning, and wisps of steam rose from the dew-jeweled grass. I paused to take deep, calming breaths— bees respond to their beekeeper’s mood and I needed to stay serene and focused. I opened the hives’ lower-level large box—the deep hive body—and placed the upper-level supers beside me in the wet grass. I rapped the package of bees against the ground to dislodge them from the feeder can and the queen cage attached beside it and gently pried off the stapled wooden cover. I wiggled the can out from its circular hole. Bees dripped off the end of the can and began to fill the air around me.

I placed the queen in her cage in the bottom of the deep box of the hive and then upturned the package of bees and shook them—all 10,000 annoyed, humming bees—through the circular hole into the hive box, over top of the queen cage. They poured out of the hole. Most tumbled into a writhing heap atop the queen and stayed there, but many of the bees took flight. Bees clung to my mesh bonnet, dotted my arms, and crawled up my legs.

I repeated the process with the second package of bees, installing them into the second hive.

Bees looped through the air around my veiled head, then landed on the hive towers and found their way inside within minutes.

Honeybees live for their queen, and her pheromones call them to her with a magical, insistent pull. After freeing the young queen, the new beehive would begin its wondrous collective—gathering pollen (and pollinating our food crops and flowers), raising baby bees, and building mathematically astounding hexagonal combs filled with golden honey.

I didn’t expect a honey harvest the first year, as the young hive needs all the honey it can produce to get through its first winter. My bees would be busy making wax and honeycomb for their first several months. Honeycomb houses their brood and stores pollen and honey—their food. After that, there wouldn’t be much time left in the season to produce extra honey for me.

My bees spent the spring building the colony. In June, the irises opened their bearded purple faces, locust tree blossoms perfumed the air, and dandelions turned their golden faces upwards, reflecting the gold of the sun. I suited up, puffed calming smoke into the hives, and opened the top.

Nothing on earth smells like the inside of a beehive. Wax, honey, propolis, and wood give it a warm, sweet, earthy, slightly astringent smell, and I breathed it in.

I slipped a metal hive tool, specially designed for just this purpose, under a wood and wire frame covered with brownish-yellow wax cells and pried it loose, pulling it up to take a look. The girls were doing fine, building wax comb and raising babies. I closed up the hives and left them to their work.

I often sat on the grass, just outside guard-bee range, watching my bees come and go, their shiny black legs encircled in giant yellow pom-poms of pollen like fancy show-ring poodles, then exiting again, clean-legged, to fetch more.

I smiled as they greeted each other at the hive’s entry door. The guard bees checked I.D.s like nightclub bouncers, bumping their black, glossy heads against all incoming bees, sometimes stroking each other’s antennae. Once, I even saw the honeybee “waggle dance”—a mysterious, mathematical communication of sun angle, gravity, and distance by which one bee expertly shares the location of a new food source with her sisters.

I fell in love with those bees. I marveled that the workers were all females—even the guard bees. Honeybees only keep a handful of male drones around in case of the ultimate emergency—the death of their queen. If that occurs, the nurse bees quickly raise a new queen by feeding a baby bee a unique substance they make called “royal jelly.” Then, the newly hatched queen requires a one-time, virginity-busting love-making session, after which she exits the hive, drones in tow, and flies straight up into the air as fast and high as she can. The drone who catches her gets to mate with her, and the hive has a new, strong matriarch.

Those few larger male drones don’t work—they eat and hang out, waiting for the opportunity to mate. In the fall, the female workers kill any remaining live male drones. No need, it seems, to feed mouths that have nothing to contribute over a long winter. They’ll raise more drones in the spring when food is plentiful.

I was single and wholly self-supporting for the first time in my life, working two jobs and tending the farm, and this hive of sisters inspired me. I admired their orderly focus and accepted the wisdom of their ways.

The swan-necked summer goldenrod gave way to the vermillion, lime, and orange hues of autumn, and the bees began to stay inside the hive. When the air temperature drops below the upper fifties, the bees gather in a communal cluster around the queen, where they eat their stored honey and shiver their wing muscles to generate heat. The internal temperature of a honeybee cluster is about ninety-three degrees, and it takes a lot of pollen and honey to fuel the colony. If the bees break away from this warming cluster, they’ll die if it’s too cold outside. Having honey inside their hive is their only way to feed during cold winter days.

On the farm, the wind blew snow into drifts that reached hip height. I had to pull my legs up out of the snow hills with my hands and throw them over the barely recognizable landscape.

It took days to struggle through the drifts to the barn, chicken coop, and beehives. The chickens needed the coop dug out to get water, their feed was in the barn, and the bees needed fresh air and a way out of the hives on warmer days. Bees will not relieve themselves inside—they will literally die before pooping in the hive. The beehives looked like snow cones poking up from the yard.

Pipes froze. We had no water—the farm was on a well run by electricity, which was out for four days.

My long driveway was impassable, and no amount of money could buy the services of a plow, as every truck with a blade was recruited to clear emergency routes throughout the county. About a week after the storm, plows made it to Divine Drive. The street sign was just visible above the snow left by the plows, as if someone had planted a flag on a mountain summit. Eventually, my closest neighbor, who farmed small lots of beef cattle, took pity on me and plowed my long driveway with his tractor.

After a few weeks, I had cleared small circles of snow away from the coop, hives, and the barn and had narrow footpaths to each of them. Aengus thought it was fantastic fun, and he raced through the snow path maze, running horizontally up the curved sides like a racecar on a track and leaping onto the now-crusted surface of the snow, skidding and skating across the shining moonlike expanse of the landscape.

We waited for spring.

I saw the bees at the end of that hard month. A milky sun warmed the day up just enough for a “cleansing flight.” They crawled groggily from the hive boxes, spiraling up toward the sun to relieve themselves, then tumbled down to bask on the hive and the small circle of brown grass cleared for them.

March pulled its usual cruel stunt, and it got cold again. Puffy snowflakes twirled from crouching, blue-gray skies, and I worried about my bees.

I called another local beekeeper, Herb, whom I’d met at last fall’s Beekeeper’s Association meeting. Herb was a dark-haired, cranky, older man who owned a local apiary and had given a talk about winter hive management. Herb, Mark (from whom I’d bought my bees), and a small group of local apiary owners were the Eastern Panhandle Beekeeper’s Association’s core members.

“There’s nothing you can do but pray they have enough honey left,” Herb said with frustration when I called with my concerns. “This is the time of year when many hives starve,” he continued. “The whole lot of ‘em.” I heard the strain in his voice—he was worried about his bees, too.

“But why,” I asked the old man during that call, “are the bees dying now when they used to survive the winters?”

“Well,” he growled into the phone, “it’s the Colony Collapse Disorder. What it means is that the bees just ain’t as strong anymore, and weak bees can’t survive a long, cold winter.” I heard him banging on something as he spoke. “And it ain’t just us,” he continued, raising his voice over the background noise, “even the Southern bees are dying. Bees are dying all over the world.” He shuffled around, his voice going from muffled to clear as he shifted the phone between hand and shoulder.

“Can’t I just give them more honey?” I asked. “Just open a jar and pour it into a bowl?”

“Well, it ain’t just the honey,” he said, his voice sharp with frustration. “The damn mites are eating their brood, pesticides are poisoning them, and there ain’t enough flowers anymore with all the construction and lawns and dandelion haters moving in.” He grunted and muttered. “Sure, you go ahead and try feeding ‘em. If it works, you let me know. Bye now.”

I warmed my hands on a cup of hot chai tea, fragrant with cinnamon and cardamom and sweetened with honey from a jar in the pantry, and gazed out the window. Bony trees, black against a bruised-looking sky, nodded solemnly in the forceful wind that streamed, icy cold, down the sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The following day, I chose a pretty serving bowl painted in cheerful red poppies and dumped my jar of raw, unfiltered wildflower honey into it. Cheap honey—like the kind that comes in a plastic bear from the grocery store—is primarily sugar water imported from China and isn’t good food for bees or people.

The raw honey oozed into the bowl—golden-brown lava smelling of flowers and hot summer days. I pulled on my bright pink Carhart coveralls, plaid-patterned rubber boots over two pairs of thick socks, and wrapped my head, face, and neck in a wool scarf.

I trudged down the slope to the beehive, Aengus leaping ahead, gazelle-like. The grass crunched and shattered under my boots like upside-down icicles. I placed the honey bowl offering atop the hive and then knelt at the tiny front door opening.

“Hello?” I removed my glove and tapped the wooden side three times with a fingernail. The sound was hollow and lonely. Nobody came to the door. I hoped the girls were snuggling in a bee-ball, vibrating their wing muscles to stay warm. No matter what I offered them, it had to get above fifty degrees before they could break away from their warming ball to eat it. I sent them a prayer for luck.

Spring arrived later that month, and it grew warm enough to open the hives. I draped the hat with its attached veil over my head—I hoped I’d need it—and walked to the hives. The bowl of uneaten honey was a swamp of debris and petrified ants. I dumped the dirty honey on the greening grass and set the bowl against the base of the Maple tree. I pried the top from the hive—it gave way with a loud crack. Bees seal out all light with a remarkable substance called propolis, which is as durable as glue and so powerfully antimicrobial that people gather it for medicines.

No bees popped their little black faces between the frames of brilliantly efficient hexagonal wax cells to see who breached their home. There was no low warning hum of wings.

When I pulled out the frames, they were vacant—no honey, pollen, or baby bees. Beneath the frames, piled inches deep, dead bees curled their black legs around empty bellies—hundreds of tiny little C’s.

I scooped up a handful. They were light and dry, and a few of the bees at the top caught the breeze and rolled away like tumbleweeds. My other hand lifted the worthless veil from my face. You may kiss the bride, I thought, strangely, as I sank cross-legged to the cold, soggy ground. The wet soaked through the seat of my pants. I stirred the tiny bees in my palm, tenderly exploring their papery, translucent wings and stiff legs.

Eventually, I rose on numb limbs and retrieved the bowl that had held the uneaten honey meal. I wiped out the last of the honey with a handful of brown grass, which I flicked off the end of my fingers.

I dipped into the hive, ladling every bee from the dark interior, tumbling them down the sides of the pretty, red poppy bowl. The mounded bees resembled popcorn, and I jiggled the container to level them.

I studied the bowlful of bee bodies.

The sun warmed my back as I bent to gently arrange the bee-barrow amongst cheerful daffodils that swayed and nodded on the cool spring breeze.

In April of 2010, I tried again.

I purchased two new packages of Carniolan bees from Mark and installed them into my vacant hives. This second batch had an advantage: last year’s bees had already built out the wax honeycomb between the frames, and these new bees would save months of work. They could focus directly on filling the wax cells instead of spending months building them.

I filled the top feeder with sugar water to give the gals a food source until the dandelions and locust trees could provide natural nectar and pollen. The spring of 2010 was luscious with abundant sunshine and fragrant flowers. I’d stopped mowing my front and back fields by then, and the wild plants—a.k.a. weeds—that grew in mad profusion added to the bees’ food supply.

In June, I suited up to check on the bees.

I puffed smoke into the hive’s front door, cracked the propolis seal from the top cover, and peered inside. Using my frame-pulling tool, I wiggled and tugged until I could lift one free—beautiful, healthy bees crawled across the frame. The girls were already stuffing the comb with honey and pollen.

My bees grew strong in the hot summer sunshine that year. I let the bee girls keep all their honey; I bought two half-gallon mason jars of honey from Mark instead of harvesting. I wanted them to have as much food as possible to survive the winter.

My hives were dense and healthy by September, and bees from the chimney and hive boxes filled the air, buzzing past my ears and clinging to my arms and legs as I worked around the farm. I’d lost all fear of them. Only the guard bees are quick to sting—the pollen-harvesting bees are gentle and sweet-natured. I believed they recognized me as well, and we worked side-by-side in fond companionship.

That year, my garden produced more herbs and vegetables than I’d ever dreamed possible. The bees would swirl around me in contented camaraderie as I rustled through the gardens, bent or kneeling, plucking and digging buckets of herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, and potatoes.

Cooling autumn breezes slid down the sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains into our valley, and winter approached. The bees snuggled into their well-stocked home. I stacked bales of hay around the tall hives to block the sharp mountain winds and wished them well.

Over the winter, nestled in an overstuffed armchair with a quilt, Aengus, and a cup of honey-laced tea to warm me, I read dozens of books about natural beekeeping. The snow fell gently that year, painting the farm in monochrome shades of gray and white.

The year turned, and my bees took to the air on a warm day in February 2011 for a cleansing flight. I raced to offer them a bowl of Mark’s honey before the day cooled and they had to retreat into their warm box. I knew by now that late winter is the most precarious time for bee survival. They landed on the edges of the bowl, crawling down to lick the amber honey with tiny black tongues. Aengus ran in circles, barking and leaping up to snap at the twirling, swirling bees, a habit he never outgrew, despite many stings over the years by irritated bees. I watched the happy activity, laughing and cheering in the milky light.

When the overgrown forsythia bushes exploded in ladders of yellow blossoms and the black limbs of the redbuds bloomed purple, the bees emerged again.

They’d survived.

That year, I began using holistic, organic practices with my bees. I stopped using the chemical treatments encouraged by the Beekeeper’s Association to treat varroa mites, hive beetles, and tracheal mites. These pests, along with chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, are the primary suspects of Colony Collapse Disorder, which is decimating the honey bee population on a global scale. I’d already gone organic with my gardens and chickens and never used chemical sprays or insecticides on my land. It was natural for me to extend these practices to my bees.

I moved the hives to the East-facing corner of the front yard, where the rising sun warmed them in the morning and kept away dampness that leads to bacteria and fungus problems. Raising the hives onto two cinder blocks and spraying beneficial nematodes in the soil around the hive base discouraged hive beetle (Aethina tumida) infestation. Hive beetles lay their eggs in the hive, and their larvae hatch and feed on the hive’s honey and pollen stores. A thick mixture of wood ash and diatomaceous earth sprinkled around the bottom of the hive helped keep ants away.

I fed my girls watered-down raw honey—a more nutritious alternative to traditional sugar syrup—but only until the yard was full of spring flowers. I laced the honey with lavender essential oil to reduce varroa mites (Varroa destructor), nasty parasitic bugs that suck the bee’s body juices, leaving them weak and even killing them.

Grease patties replaced chemical miticides to control tracheal mites (Acarapis woodi), which live and reproduce in the bees’ breathing apparatus, eventually clogging and suffocating the bees.

Finally, I began spending time sitting quietly near the hives, singing and sending them good, healing vibes as they flew to and from the colony. I’d been learning about energy medicine, and while I wasn’t sure the bees found it helpful, I found it very rewarding.

That year, I had two colossal honey harvests, gathering seven five-gallon buckets of sweet, golden honey and still leaving the bees with plenty for the winter.

When I stopped by Mark’s warehouse/apiary in July to sign out the Beekeeper’s Association honey extractor—a benefit of membership—for a second harvest, he was surprised.

“Well, now,” he said as he pulled a clipboard from the top of a dusty metal file cabinet, “my bees didn’t make much honey this year. How’d you manage two harvests?” He handed me the clipboard with a nubby pencil attached by a string and black electrical tape. “You’re not stealing their winter supply, now are ya?”

“No,” I said with enthusiasm. “Last week, when I opened the hive, there was so much honey the bees were making honeycomb on top of the frames.” I scribbled my name across a line. “Mark, I’m using holistic practices this year.”

“Hole-is-tick?” he replied, scratching his head through short grey hair. “Now I’ve heard of that and the organic stuff, but those aren’t approved beekeeping methods.”

I nodded and continued as Mark helped me haul the bulky honey extractor to my Jeep. “I know, Mark, but I’ve had amazing results. I didn’t use any medicated supplements or miticide strips this year, and I didn’t spray any pesticides around the base of my hives.” I described my raw honey, essential oil, and natural pest control methods. Mark listened attentively as I lifted the gate of the Jeep. “And I’ve started singing to my bees, Mark, like the ancient beekeepers used to do.”

Mark shoved the honey extractor in the Jeep with one hand and turned to face me.

“You sing to them?” he asked solemnly. “Like, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ or something?” a few days later, I had to go to Mark’s warehouse for some woodenware I’d ordered. Mark greeted me in his typical taciturn way as he dug out my order from his cluttered shop. I took the supplies, paid him, and turned to leave.

“Better quit singin’ to them bees,” he said, “or we’ll be calling you the witch on the hill.” He chuckled and raised his hand in goodbye as he turned away.

The witch on the hill.

I decided to own the title. After all, “witch” was a name given to many powerful women throughout human history. Lucky for me that it was currently illegal to burn one at the stake.

Perched on my hill, I continued to appreciate my bees. Honeybees are magical creatures, and I saw my second honey bee swarm in the early morning of June 2012.

That morning, I took my coffee and Aengus to the front porch to warm ourselves in the early sun. In a garden to my left, a small swarm of honeybees, about the size and shape of a basketball, clumped around a slender branch of a butterfly bush.

At first, I was afraid my hive bees had swarmed, which is something every beekeeper works hard to avoid. An empty hive makes no honey. But my bees were busy buzzing to and from the hive in their usual morning commute. However, the chimney bees were in an uproar, twirling and whirling through the air between the chimney and the branch.

I pondered the swarm. I had an extra hive body. Should I capture this wild-raised, West Virginia native swarm and install the queen and her cluster into one of my hive boxes, where she or her daughter queens might interbreed with my purebred Carniolans?

Of all the things I’d done as a rogue, holistic, beekeeping witch, this would be the worst. Unthinkable.

The old-guard beekeepers I was learning from always used specific “races” of bees, and my hives were “pure” Carniolans. Honeybee races occur globally in areas isolated by natural barriers such as seas, deserts, or mountains. This geographic isolation results in close breeding, giving each race a set of unique characteristics. Carniolan honeybees originated in Eastern Europe, and are well-suited to cold, wet weather, thereby considered an excellent choice to survive overwintering. They are also said to be amongst the gentlest bees with strong resistance to parasites and diseases.

I loved the idea of feral, native bees. These bees had survived every winter cohabitating in my chimney for twelve years, whereas I had to buy new packages of non-native Carniolans every few seasons when they died over the winter.

Are imported, lab-bred bees better for my local ecosystem than the native bees chosen through natural selection? Breeding “pure races” of bees seemed another contrivance of the patriarchal system of power that I’d been swimming upstream against my entire life. Wouldn’t I eventually end up with more robust, healthier bees if I let the natives mate with my Carniolans? And wasn’t that a kinder, gentler way of keeping bees? My trust in Mother Nature’s wisdom was outweighing my adherence to the status quo as I worked in partnership with the land.

Throughout the day, I watched this small swarm between showing houses, working at the computer, feeding the animals, and harvesting eggs and vegetables for my dinner.

Finally, I decided that if the swarm was still on the butterfly bush in the morning, I would offer them a home in one of my extra hive bodies.

The cluster was still there in the morning, and I suited up, grabbed a hive body and a pair of pruning shears from the barn, and marched to the front yard. I arranged the hive body atop cinderblocks beside my current hive of Carniolans.

Using the pruning shears, I grabbed the base of the limb the bees were clustered around and squeezed and sawed at the wood—sleepy bees, still lethargic in the cool morning air, buzzed in protest. When the branch broke free with a jarring crack, many bees took flight around me, vibrating the air with their iridescent wings. They followed me—well, they followed the irresistible scent of their queen— to the hive body.

I stretched the limb across the opening of the square box, centering the writhing ball of bees, and thumped the thick end of the branch near my gloved hand hard against the box’s wooden edge. The clustered bees plopped as a group into the bottom of the hive box and then streamed into the air like living smoke. Only a fistsized ball remained in the bottom—the bees who were touching and stroking their queen—and I was sure then that I’d gotten her into the box.

Most of the airborne bees settled back around their queen inside the box. A small group wandered back to the branch where Her Majesty had left some scent behind, and I placed the limb onto the grass beside the hive body, beneath the slit at the bottom of the box that served as the front door of the new palace. I gently placed the wooden lid onto the box, and it was done. My hive sisters and I had gone feral.

Both hives—my purebred Carniolans and my native bees—survived the winter of 2012 and gifted me with surplus honey in 2013. I used much of the honey I extracted for food, made herbal medicines, and sold the rest to defray the cost of keeping the bees.

I caught another swarm in 2013, this time with less internal debate and more confidence. I was hosting a drum circle that day—a community event where people come together to enjoy rhythmic drumming, dancing, and friendship—when I noted a small swarm under the maple at the curve of the driveway in the front yard. I instructed the group to stay inside to avoid potential stings, suited up, and installed the bees into a hive.

The group watched in wonder from the windows, and we talked about honeybees all that evening. I told them that one worker bee makes only about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her tiny stomach during her life. We discussed that three-quarters of all flowering plants, including thirty-five percent of global food crops, need insect pollination to reproduce. I brought out a jar of amber honey, and we all ate some in celebration as I explained Colony Collapse Disorder and what we could do to help our bee sisters.

“Stop spraying your dandelions,” I said, “and using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Reduce the size of your lawns and plant native flowering species in your yard.”

In this way, bees gained some new protectors that day by sharing the magic and wonder of honey bees and discussing the perils they face.

Winter came early in 2013, with the first snow falling in October. It snowed several times in December, and in February 2014, the skies dumped more than a foot of snow across the farm. Finally, the air warmed enough to check my hives.

The girls in the Langstroth hives didn’t survive that winter. The bees in the chimney did, growing ever more vital and vibrant.

I sat beside the open crypt of wooden hives on the chilly grass and leaned back on my elbows. Aengus curled against my ribcage, and one of the resident barn cats climbed aboard and purred like a rusty engine across my belly. I watched the chimney bees twisting into the cyan sky.