Working from the Heartland

Ike Brainerd
Beekeeper
Branford, Connecticut

I have to say straight out that I abhor the current fashion in cutesypooing warmed-over management theory by bringing innocent animals into the business discussion. Flying with the geese, swimming with the sharks, coping with the moose in the corner, talking turkey with turkeys. On and on it goes.

But now that I've made that plain, I must also say that anyone who really wants to study a healthy relationship between management and self-motivated employees should take a look at the beekeeper and his colonies of bees. It's a conglomerate like no other human enterprise. A single hive — or colony — contains as many as 60,000 bees. And, in order to be officially classified by the U.S. government as a commercial operation, the beekeeper must have at least 250 hives going at once. Do the math and it won't take you long to figure out that micro-management just won't cut it in beekeeping.

"My job is to give them what they need to do what they do best, and then to leave them alone," says Ike Brainerd. He lifts the outer cover of his hive, gives it a good, solid whack on the ground, causing the clinging bees to drop to the ground like so many clumps of dried mud. Perhaps a little doped up by the fragrant pine smoke from Ike's smoker, or perhaps accustomed to the abrupt treatment, they don't seem at all offended. They just set about the business of finding their way back into the hive again.

They'll start at the hive's bottom, where its entrance faces east or southeast to catch the early morning sun (the warming entrance serves as a sort of honey bee reveille, causing them to get up and at 'em earlier in the day, collecting more honey and making the beekeeper that much richer by September). Then they go about their appointed rounds, working upward from comb to comb, until they're at the top again, where maybe in another couple of weeks Ike will find them clinging to the inside of the cover, give them another solid whack, when they fall to the ground again. There's probably a lot of starting over in a bee's life.

In the meantime, they'll be busy sallying forth on foraging missions, bringing nectar and pollen back to the hives, cleaning cells in the comb for new bee eggs, feeding their newly hatched sisters, attending to their queen's every need, grooming each other, standing guard and, of course, filling the combs with honey. The bee's list of duties changes as it gets older, but if it's not specifically assigned to a project at the moment, it will roam the comb until it finds something to do.

Each hive consists of two deep boxes, similar to file cabinet drawers. This is where the colony goes about its queenly business and collects honey it gets to keep for the winter. The beekeeper will place a "queen excluder" on top of those two big boxes, which keeps the queen from laying eggs farther up the ever-growing tower. On top of the excluder, Ike continues to pile on "super" upon super. Supers are shallower boxes, sort of like sock drawers in comparison to the deeper boxes downstairs. It is in these supers that the bees make the honey that Ike gets to keep, filter, bottle, label, and sell.

The taller the hive, the more supers are being stacked, the more productive the bees are being. And all that whacking and cracking that Ike performs clears the clustering bees from the super the bees are currently working on. That way he can peer inside at the nine frames where the bees are building up comb and filling honey. As a super begins to look crowded, the space between the frames getting filled up with comb, Ike adds another super on top, tenderly brushing away the bees from the edge with his gloved fingertips so they don't get mashed under the heavy weight of the new storey their colony has just received.

Even though he might have 59,999 more bees left in the colony (and 174 colonies scattered throughout these parts of Connecticut ), it's not nice to kill even a one. Not to mention ill-advised.

"I love my bees and I consider them my pets," he says, later telling me he also has three cats and two parrots waiting for him at home. "Sure, they're stinging insects, and they certainly can be cantankerous at times. But they deserve to be treated well. Treat them well and they'll take care of you in return."

But smash a bee and the whole colony is alerted to the murder. They'll come out and investigate. Justice is swift, leaving us humans very little time to make a run for it.

So, at this time of year Ike's task is really to make sure they have plenty of room to spread out and keep up production. Perhaps killing a hive moth or two. At other parts of the year, his job description includes medicating the hives against two types of deadly mites, moving his hives to different locations, repairing equipment and planning for next year. As the weather gets cold, it's mostly administration and planning. And in the winters, bees feed themselves on the honey they stored in the lower two boxes. But if the winters are especially long or hard they might run out of food. So Ike and his neighbors will up-end a jar filled with sugar water to supplement their diet. You can actually see their little tongues working at the metal screen placed between them and the jar's punctured lid.

Winters require a certain amount of heavy housekeeping as well. Ike doesn't have to worry about their bathroom habits. Fastidious creatures, they won't use their own homes for that bit of business. They wait for the sporadic warmer days to venture out and do it the way the bears do. But because they keep their hives at about 92 degrees year round, it's a toasty enticement for field mice to come on in and set for a spell. Bees have a way of coping with this takeover as well, not really needing Ike's intervention at all. But he's handy as a cleanup crew.

Ike shows me the underside of the cover he's just pried off with a "hive tool," identical to the small crowbar I used to take the tacking strips off my father's floor one summer when I decided his wall-to-wall carpet just had to go. With the sharp edge of the crowbar, he points to and scrapes a dark brown gooey substance.

"See that? That's propolis" he says, chipping away at the stalagmite-like stuff. "That's sap from the trees that bees also collect. You don't want to get that on your fingers, because it will never come off. They use it to seal their hives back up after I'm done with them. But it also has antibacterial properties. So when a mouse invades their hive, they'll sting it to death and then mummify it with this stuff."

A mouse is too heavy for them to evacuate, so Ike will take care of those kinds of duties when he drops by now and then during the winter. But the bees will clear most anything else away from their pristine home and factory. Including their own dead sisters. I see one doing just that right outside the entrance to one of the hives. Its persistence is riveting. Ike spots my fascination and points out a pile of dead bees on the ground.

"A skunk's been here," he says. This is the only hive whose entrance isn't protected by carpet tacking strips, with protruding nails, a medieval-looking solution to wildlife attacks on the honey cache.

"A skunk will come by and use its paws to go boom! boom! boom! right here at the entrance," Ike says. "The bees will come out to investigate the commotion. And the skunk will scoop them out and suck out the honey, tossing away the bees when he's done."

I'm reminded of those liqueur-filled chocolates I used to crave. All those cherry cordials. And here scattered at my feet are the chocolate husks. And a single bee straining and pulling at her dead sister, ultimately hoisting her off the entrance shelf to fall onto the tragic, heroic heap below. Saving Private Ryan also crosses my mind.

"Gotta get this hive some of those strips," Ike says, making notes on his to-do list. Also on his list: bring out a trap for that skunk. It must be a Have-a-Heart trap, with which he will transport the disappointed animal to another location, far, far away from his bees. The oldest of nine children, with a father who earned his family's keep through hunting and fishing, Ike is no sentimental softy. However, over the years his membership roster has included The Humane Society and Greenpeace. The relocation of this particular skunk will be beneficial to all concerned, at the expense perhaps only to this particular skunk's sweet tooth.

We spend the day this way, going from property to property, visiting five hives here, nine hives there. Some hives have only one or two supers on them. One hive towers with seven supers stacked on top of its two deep hive boxes. There is a lot of honey in that hive. And the top is far above Ike's head. The step ladder is a hopeful thing among beekeepers.

As we approach each new group of hives, I'm repeatedly reminded of a Jewish cemetery. The white boxes are topped with big stones placed there to hold down the outer covers. But to me they look like the stones left atop grave markers as a sign to one and all that the departed is still alive in cherished memory. As with a graveyard, a beeyard is still as death at a distance but vital and relevant at close-range.

At one yard, which is actually a backyard, complete with children's toys, Ike stops by a fragrant patch of chest-high foliage and a few blossoms. He breathes in deeply, his chest expanding as his nostrils open wider. "Mint," he says. "When this patch really blooms in a few days, the bees will come straight here. If there's enough nectar, I should have at least one super filled with mint honey. That's premium." And that's how Ike makes the big money jar for jar. Most supers are actually a bouillabaisse of honeys from a variety of different nectars from whatever blossoms are growing in the area. That indeterminate honey gets labeled, "wildflower honey." And there's a lot of it. Ike sells it at $1.90 for a half-pound jar. At a yearly yield of between 40 pounds to several hundred pounds per hive multiplied by 175 hives, Ike's take is comfortable, especially combined with his wife's salary and his own social security.

But he's working to cultivate a premium honey business. While his fellow beekeepers can't be bothered to keep the honeys separated and identified, Ike focuses on making sure he knows one from the other. Consequently he can offer these honeys at $2.25 per half-pound jar: pumpkin honey, blueberry honey, clover honey, black locust. And, unlike drug dealers and casino owners, Ike loves to indulge in his own product.

"My favorite is wild raspberry honey," he says, "I love wild raspberry honey, especially on top of hot cereal in the winter."

And, unlike many managers, Ike also says that should his little employees actually turn into humans, he would actually enjoy being their friend.

"Why not? They're sweet creatures," he says with a twinkle at the whimsical prospect. But then he gets serious, "We would have very important things to talk about. There are a lot of things I don't know about bees still. I never stop learning. If I could talk to a bee, I'd want to know why bees do certain things and how they do them.

"Like when bees raise larvae, who caps the cell? Do the worker bees cap the cell or do the larvae do it?" But he still doesn't want to know too much. That would take the fun out of beekeeping, he says.

"There always has to be a mystery about a thing. If you knew it all, there wouldn't be a challenge anymore. If we were so smart that we could discover every fact of nature and life, there wouldn't be any point to doing anything any more."

(And now a little commercial for Ike: He sells his honey by mail order. Wildflower honey sells for $3.50 for a pound jar; half-pound jars sell for $1.90; 6 oz. jars sell for $1.75. Premium honeys, as available, sell for $2.25 for half-pound jars. He takes cash or checks. No credit cards. Shipping is extra. For more information call 203-481-6533.)

Copyright 2005 by Martha Finney. All rights reserved.