Last winter, my thoughts were filled with honeybees. I bought and read a mountain of how-to books and reached out to local beekeepers for advice. I wa

The trouble with beekeeping

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2022-01-20 19:30:11

Last winter, my thoughts were filled with honeybees. I bought and read a mountain of how-to books and reached out to local beekeepers for advice. I watched videos and placed orders for two hives and two nucs — prestarted colonies, each complete with a comb and a queen already busily laying eggs — to bring home in spring. I’d spent years making my half-acre of yard attractive to pollinators; now I was inviting them in en masse.

The biologist E.O. Wilson warned that the only way to save Earth’s biodiversity was to protect half of all land and sea from human interference. Sixty percent of the United States is in private hands, and I’d joined a movement to turn backyards back into habitat. This meant conserving water and creating food and shelter for wildlife by removing invasive plants and replacing them with natives local to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where I live. Where there had once been quiet and a decades-old patch of ivy, we now had an owl family nesting in a wild cherry tree, fat squirrels running amok and the strange high-pitched twitter of bats in the night.

All the life was addictive. Honeybees, I thought, would be the perfect addition. I spent hours painting and stenciling the sides of the hives to look like an old Norwegian chest. I planted flowers in what would become the “bee yard” so the bees could smell fresh lavender when they left to forage every morning. Each hive could easily have 40,000 bees or more — that meant 80,000 pets that wouldn’t need a sitter when I went out of town. The hives and the bee yard turned out beautifully. I love the hives. But I do not love the bees.

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