Brian Slattery Photos
The Huneebee Project — a regional beekeeping project maintains beehives in a community garden on Arthur Street in the Hill — was part of the experience tours connected to the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which runs through June 27
For those who participated in the visit to the Huneebee Project Saturday and Sunday, it was a fascinating dive into bee biology, plant sex, and the big wonders that can come from small green spaces in a city.
Founded in 2018 by clinical social worker and beekeeper Sarah Taylor, the Huneebee Project is both a community garden and youth employment program. It runs 11 hives and three pollinator gardens in New Haven-area community gardens. It also runs a four-month-long therapeutic job skills training program to create beekeepers in residence, and has graduated three cohorts of students who have taken positions as junior garden site managers, bee apprentices, and peer instructors. It sells some of its products through an online store. On Saturday, Taylor and several Huneebee Project staff were on hand to walk about a dozen curious novices through the science and practice of keeping bees.
Alex Guzman, bee apprentice with the Huneebee Project, first showed us around the surrounding garden, which was planted with vegetables for humans and plants such as chamomile for pollinators. The garden ensured that the bees in the hives at the back of the lot would have easy access to the pollen and nectar they needed to keep the hives going.
Bee Instructor Sophia Lafargue then gave a quick presentation of the lives of honeybees. “We could go on for days talking about honeybees,” she said. She began with a few overarching facts. Honeybees and humans, she said, “evolved together,” as bees became one of a very small number of insects that humans work in in producing food. There are, in fact, very few “feral bee colonies” anymore, especially in the face of human-wrought climate change.
“Bee biology,” she said, “is largely plant sex — that’s what we’re really talking about,” as they are integral to propagating plant species. But in another sense, honeybees weren’t exactly a “they”; an entire hive, Lafargue said, could be thought of as a “superorganism, one unit. Think of the hive as the body.” Without it, she added, “an individual bee will not survive.” Honeybees don’t tend to sting unless the hive itself is threatened. Within a hive, the organizational structure “is both a monarchy and very much a democracy,” with “everything determined by population.”
The bees in a hive can be categories as workers, the queen, and drones; workers and queens are both female, and only the drones are male. The hive only makes drones “when the colony is thriving,” Lafargue said. “They’re smart about resources, especially going into the winter.”
A queen’s job in the hive is to produce eggs. A queen takes 16 days to hatch; a worker, 20, and a drone, 24. In a functioning hive, when the workers see that the queen’s productivity is failing, or if the queen dies, they feed a batch of eggs royal jelly so the eggs produce new queen larvae. The new queens, once they hatch, then have a fight to the death to determine which of them will become the new queen of the hive. The new queen then goes to a “congregation of drones” somewhere outside the hive to mate. “They know where to go,” Lafargue said. “They meet at the bar, like other civilized animals.” At that congregation, the queen mates with many drones, enough to fertilize eggs for her lifetime. The drones die after mating, as their gentalia are ripped out of their bodies along with some of their abdomen when they decouple.
“It’s a brutal life,” Lafargue said.
Much of Lafargue’s talk about bees centered on the ways they communicate with each other. If something happens to the queen, “the workers know that,” she said. They know when the hive is flourishing and when it has fallen on hard times. If the hive needs to be abandoned, the bees swarm — an action that alarms most humans, but Lafargue said they were harmless. “You could scoop up handfuls” of swarming bees without getting stung, she said; in that state, “all they care about is staying together.”
She then turned to the reason bees and human coexist: honey. Honey is “not bee vomit,” she said, though the workers do produce it in a “honey stomach.” Getting the honey from the combs in the hive isn’t as arduous or as dangerous a task as it may appear; many experienced beekeepers do it without a bee suit. The trick was mostly to remain calm. “The calmer you are, the less likely you are to be stung,” Lafargue said — even if you were there to take the food the bees had made for themselves.
That was a good segue to doing what we had come there to do: don bee suits and get ready to get up close and personal with an entire hive of bees. Getting into a bee suit correctly, it turns out, is mostly a question of making sure you’ve zipped all the zippers, which close the seams on the suit and give it the right shape and structure to half-float around you.
Garden assistant Juan Scruggs started the small fire needed in the smoker. Smoke, Lafargue explained, prevents the bees from communicating as effectively with one another and inspires them to lay low, which calms the hive overall and can make the job of extracting honey a little easier.
As Scruggs applied the smoker, Lafargue prepared to lift out the frames in the hives.
One frame was filled with beeswax and had very few bees on it. In a second one, the bees were more prevalent and producing honey.
A third frame turned out to be a place of great activity — lots of bees, lots of honeycomb, and lots of honey. Now is a good time to mention that I’ve been stung by bees and other insects many times, and have thus developed a bit of fear of them, the kind where I flinch if they get too close. But with the bee suit on, and with the knowledge Lafargue had given to us fresh in my head, it was much easier to stay calm.
We passed the frame among us to be able to get very close to the bees. Lafargue was right. Staying relaxed and making slow deliberate movements meant the bees hardly moved. By this time the air was filled with flying bees, the volume of their buzzing growing. Lafargue explained that the buzzes were themselves communication, the workers telling one another about the disturbance of the hive. Bees began landing on my notebook and camera. Lafargue described the sound as also meant for us: “can you please go now?” But none made moves to sting any of us.
At last, the humming reached a level of intensity that Lafargue said was a sign that the hive was agitated. “If the hive had started off making this sound,” she said, “I would not have disturbed it.” But still there were no stings — even of Sarah Taylor, the Huneebee Project’s executive director, who helped Lafargue extract some honey without wearing a bee suit at all.
There was more than enough for each of us to try some. It was, of course, the sweet, delicious, familiar flavor of honey, but richer and more complex than usual. Perhaps it was the freshness, or the rawness, or the fact that it was tied to the experience of understanding better where it came from. Whatever the case, Taylor agreed that it was difficult to return to mass-produced honey after tasting it right from the hive.
I don’t know what kind of insect this is.
On my way out of the garden, I stopped by the chamomile plant with a renewed appreciation for what it was there for. I stopped to see if I could get a picture of a pollinator or two. Bees and other insects wheeled around me, buzzing and diving to land on the open flowers and spin away again. I didn’t flinch. Who knew how long the effect would last? But for the moment, I had lost my fear.
Visit the Huneebee Project’s website to learn more about its work and public events and to get involved. The International Festival of Arts and Ideas runs through June 27. Visit its website for its full schedule of events.