Honeybees, lightly used

It was terrifying, and it was love at first sight

People ask how I got my bees.

Did I find a swarm? Did someone give them to me?

I bought them online! On a website for secondhand things. Yes, really. They weren’t really secondhand bees though. Can you imagine? Honeybees, lightly used.¹

So yes. I bought them in the winter, and had to wait until the next summer to pick them up.

My first beehive: in the back of the car and in its final standing place. Also me in my bee suit.

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These were fraught months spent pouring over my class notes, books and magazines, videos and blog posts. I definitely freaked myself out by trying to be super prepared and know all the answers to all the questions ahead of time.

They guy messaged in January to say they’d come with full equipment: great!

There was just one problem.

He also said they were coming in an aflegger. I couldn’t find a translation of that word that made sense. The internet said it was ‘a depositer’. My Flemish husband was mystified too. My Dutch language beekeeping book discussed afleggers without ever explicitly explaining what they are.

I had a sneaking suspicion that an aflegger was a ‘nuc’ but you can’t know what you don’t know.

The plan was that I’d be driving all the way over there (an hour away), putting the hive into my car. The thought of driving in a car that had a beehive in it was horrifying to me, but actually ….it’s grand.

They’re strapped down in there, and have no way of getting out no matter how many sneaking feelings you might have in the back of your mind.

We arrived at the guy’s giant meadow full of a hundred or more beehives (and sheep). Turns out an aflegger, as I suspected, is what they call a ‘nucelus hive’ in English, or nuc.

It’s a small version of a fully established colony. It contains bees in all phases of life, including newly laid eggs (the queen will even continue laying eggs while the nuc is being transported), larvae, and so on. There are even bees in all the different stages of their lives: from nurse bees, cleaners, guard bees, foragers, undertaker bees, and everything in between. You’re set up to go.

As he loaded it up into the boot of my car, he asked my husband if he already knew how to keep bees. I’ve since discovered that beekeeping is actually incredibly trendy, and frequently think back to that moment. I was also to learn that beekeeping is a very male-dominated space.

My husband laughed and pointed at me saying she’s the beekeeper. I did a course! I proudly exclaimed. Oh well then, the man grinned at me, slamming the boot closed. This grizzled, commercial beekeeper was probably seeing people flooding in from everywhere to pick up their orders. I imagined him as the Quint of the beekeepers, with me being the over-educated but super-enthusiastic Hooper.

It was a huge relief to finally be driving home with the beehive. The anxiety-filled, over-preparation of the winter months were long behind me now.

I’ll never forget that first sight of my honeybees when I opened the entrance of the beehive, peeping out, dozens of them, ready to get to business without a moment to lose.

It was terrifying, and it was love at first sight.

A note on books and bees

Once I had my beehive, basically nothing was as neat or solvable as it would have been in a book. I was quickly to learn that there is only so much ‘book-learning’ you can do before you start beekeeping. You quickly discover that the bees themselves are the best teachers.

I was constantly just watching how my bees behaved, and then looked up what it meant. What does this situation mean and how do you tackle it? Look, and look up. Look, and look up.

Really the main thing you have to get thoroughly squared away before you start …is all the boring legal stuff. There’s no escaping it in the EU, where I live. I shared it all in a Note if you’d like to check it out.

Thanks for reading

I always love to hear from you in a comment, with a ❤️, or even a restack to Substack Notes. 🐝

1. There are other ways to get bees. In America you can get them sent by post to you, which is insane to me (and not great for the bees either).