THE MYSTERY AND THE MAGIC

THE MAGIC AND THE MYSTERY

with Michael Thompson In summer 2017, beekeeper Michael Thompson and his colleagues installed two colonies of honeybees on the Studio’s roof. We spoke with Michael about his experiences as a beekeeper, setting up the hives, and details of the Studio’s honey extraction.

What is your history with bees?

I read about beekeeping in an encyclopedia when I was a child in Wichita, Kansas. I had already become a gardener. I was always in the ground, in the mud, and so I was exposed to insects all the time—I collected them and every other animal I could get my hands on. When I asked my parents if I could have a beehive, they raised their eyebrows and said maybe someday. When I was twelve, they bought me a beehive for my birthday, which was a big step for them and for me—it cost fifty dollars and it was a working beehive, so you had to really hit the ground running. It changed my life. Beekeeping is addictive. Once you start you just don’t want to stop.

What’s the difference between beekeeping on a roof and beekeeping on the ground?

Well there are many similar things . . . First of all, in the wild, honeybees choose a nest that’s an average of 20 feet above the ground. This is thought to be because there are fewer predators—like birds, mammals, reptiles, and other insects—at that height. It’s also cleaner and drier there than closer to the ground, and there’s a lot of ventilation. Bees really like to have things ventilated. The book Honeybee Democracy describes the perfect nest that they choose and how they come to a consensus about living there. It’s phenomenal.

It’s we humans who have decided to have bees nest close to the ground for our own convenience; we have to lift everything and inspect the hives. I think that bees produce honey a little bit better when they’re off the ground, although I haven’t studied it deliberately or kept records. I can say that it’s interesting for the beekeeper to work with hives that are off the ground. On all the roofs that I work on, I’ve noticed there are always so many insects and spiders. I like that—seeing all the insects that are up here with the honeybees or hunting them.

How do honeybees interact with local pollinators and other insects? Since they’re European, Asian, or African, do they compete with local pollinators on some level?

I really love that question. I’ve only read one study that spoke to that issue and it was buried in the book The Forgotten Pollinators. The study took place in the Sonoran Desert. Because that environment is so fragile and fewer things bloom there, and when they do bloom it’s at odd times having to do with rains and moisture, honeybees did negatively affect the local pollinators. For example, when the yucca plants bloom, which are a really important nectar source, then all the pollinators go right toward them, and the honeybees might arrive before other species or in greater numbers because their hives are so huge.

So that kind of competition has only been documented in a scenario of scarcity?

That’s the only place I’ve found it. So when people ask me about honeybees’ negative impacts on local pollinators, I always say that in this climate there’s so many nectar sources and so much forage available to insects, that I wouldn’t worry about it. As you can see, your rooftop is vast. Even if you never watered this roof it would be filled with flowers right now.

Actually, I just thought of a good example of how honeybees and local bees cooperate versus compete. There is a blue orchard bee. It’s a local bee that’s really, really tiny, about an eighth of the size of a

honeybee—they’re iridescent blue-green, very beautiful. They live right underneath the little crevice that is formed on the inner cover of our beehives and they build their nests in there. They’re solitary bees but they sort of hang out together in small groups. Once, on a roof downtown, we were opening a hive and on the inner cover there was a honeybee worker sharing nectar with a tiny orchard bee. It was a very clear illustration of how the species interact in this environment of abundance.

How do you set up the hive?

It’s a long process and you have to think ahead. In this climate, you begin by ordering the equipment in the winter—I always say January is a good time—so that you’re sure to receive it well before April. You should order the bees in January, too, or no later than early February. The dead of winter. This is because the bees are produced by bee farmers in the south or on the West Coast and they have to know two months ahead of time how many bees to produce. We usually order three pounds of bees with a queen for every hive; this is a fairly standard order. In April the bees arrive. You want to assemble the equipment prior to that time so you’re ready to put them in the hives.

What kind of equipment do you need?

Simply put, it’s wood frames. More specifically, it’s a movable frame hive that was invented in the 1850s in the United States by Lorenzo Langstroth, who’s called the father of American beekeeping. He had this notion that if the pieces that make up a hive were a certain distance apart, you could move everything around because they wouldn’t stick it together, and it worked.

Does beekeeping differ from place to place?

Beekeeping is definitely specific to its geographic place in the world. I could not explain to you how to be a beekeeper in Florida or anywhere else but the upper Midwest. That’s where I grew up and that’s where I’ve kept bees, and it happens to be one of the greatest places on earth to be a beekeeper because of the climate—nice and hot, very cold, and great rainfall and soils.

But bees can be kept all over. It’s just a timing and management difference?

It varies from place to place and it’s not always as successful as it is here, with our perfectly suited climate. In particular, for productive beekeeping, the average rainfall has to be above a certain amount in order to maintain a constant bloom of plants. You also want plenty of plant diversity; that’s really important.

Can you talk about the domestication of bees?

It’s a unique situation because we’re dealing with wild animals even though we raise them like livestock. There’s a lot of controversy about whether honeybees are in danger of dying or going extinct, and I think it’s important to speak to that. Because the threat to honeybees is really about domestication and industrialized agriculture.

To give just one example out of many: here in the US all of the almonds— which, like honeybees, are not native to this continent—are grown in central and northern California. They bloom in the winter, and so many, many beekeepers ship their bees to that area in February to pollinate almonds that only bloom for one week. To get the beehives there safely, they cram the hives full of corn syrup. After that week, they give them more corn syrup and transport them to Florida or New Jersey for more pollination. Effectively, what’s being done is confining and constraining these animals, which is really damaging to the environment and to the health of the honeybee. So when people worry about honeybees dying, they shouldn’t be worrying about extinction. The threat is not extinction; it’s our dominant model of agriculture, which doesn’t support healthy honeybee populations.

So when you say it’s damaging to the environment to ship bees around the country, you’re talking about our heavily managed model of agriculture, not that it’s the honeybees themselves—as nonendemic species—that are damaging?

The bees are not damaging the environment. I think industrial agriculture is damaging to them. The way it’s been developed has been destructive in so many ways, especially to the soil, air, and water.

What do bees do for people, besides making honey?

There’s a really great book called The Value-Added Products from Beekeeping, produced by the United Nations. What bees do for people is vast and ancient. There’s just no shortage of things you can make from what bees do and what they produce. The pollination aspect is definitely very important. Would we need them if they had never been brought to this continent? Everything would likely have been fine because there are local pollinators galore in vast quantities, but it’s true that these local pollinators are smaller, they don’t pollinate as well as honeybees, and their colonies are not as large. I like to think of bees as being important as a part of the biomass, and that’s one of the reasons I do beekeeping. I like to add more biology to the world.

What do bees need to survive?

They need pollen and nectar—those are the things they eat. So they need a large diversity of plants blooming all the time, from early spring through fall. They also need a clean, dry, elevated environment with good ventilation. Their nest also needs to face a certain direction. It has to face south or east or somewhere in between; they choose that orientation in the wild because that’s where the sun comes up and it warms them.

Can you give us a quick overview of the social structure of the beehive?

There are three different castes of honeybees in the hive. I like to say that the most important one is the worker. Without the worker, there would be no hive. The workers are all female and they’re not fertile; they purposely develop without being able to reproduce. Of course the queen is pretty important, too—she’s the only fertile female. She can lay 1,000 to 2,000 eggs a day, so the hive can get really big really fast. In the summer, the queen will lay infertile eggs, which become male bees (drones) whose primary role is to mate with new queens and provide genetic diversity.

Workers can sometimes lay eggs—if the queen goes missing and they didn’t make a new queen in time, then a certain amount of the workers’ ovaries will develop and they will lay eggs. Those eggs, however, become weak drones and the hive eventually dies.

How do the bees make a new queen, and how do they know that they need to?

If you take the queen out of a hive, perhaps within minutes the entire hive will somehow know the queen is gone. Then they go into a mode where they take a young, fresh larva that’s only a day or two old and they feed it a special diet: royal jelly, which is a secretion from a gland in the head of the worker bee that contains nectar, honey, pollen, and a lot of enzymes. This larva then develops into a queen. So, as long as the previous queen has recently laid eggs, the hive can always make a new queen.

There’s about six or eight weeks in the summer when hives tend to build queen cells, and this is how the honeybee propagates in the wild. We’ll often remove those queen cells so that the hive stays together in one place. They’re filled with royal jelly at that point.

We had an event over the summer where the bees swarmed. What’s happening during this time?

I like to use the term migrating rather than swarming because dividing is such a

natural thing for a hive to do. It may look intense, but it’s an incredibly gentle activity. The bees have a plan. It’s not about us.

What’s happening is that the old queen is moving with half of the bees to start a new hive. The hive they’re leaving has already started queens and has queen cells that are just about ripe. The departing queen is also leaving behind a large brood, meaning young bees, in the cells.

In the wild, this process would happen almost every year. For domesticated hives, we of course try to prevent the colonies from splitting because we want the honey; you need to have a lot of bees in a hive to have a lot of production. That’s one of the reasons I do this work. I really like producing honey—and of course the magic, the mystery and magic of it all.

How many bees do you think we have in our hives at Studio Gang?

Combined? I would say at least 100,000 bees, maybe 120,000 bees. It could be more. But your hives are definitely full of honey.

How much honey do you think we have?

You mean surplus honey, the honey that we can extract and eat? I’d say you definitely have 40 pounds of surplus honey between them. That’s a lot of honey for the first year. The trick to producing that much so quickly is that we kept giving the bees more room—we kept giving them new frames to fill out.

We always leave at least 80 pounds of honey on the hives. The bees need it because they eat honey all winter. They overwinter in Chicago, clustering together in the hives to stay warm. They’re adapted to the cold and they somehow know how to prepare for it. That’s why we keep giving them more room during the warm months, to encourage more storing.

I noticed that there’s a white sweet clover plant blooming by one of the hives. I’ve been keeping track—the first day I saw a honeybee on yellow sweet clover was May 30th. The white sweet clover started blooming about two to three weeks after that. And now the white—I’m keeping an eye on it and I’m going say that the white sweet clover is going to stop blooming this week. Altogether, that’s nine weeks of sweet clover bloom, which is a huge amount of time to have access to the greatest nectar source in the world. Being fed like that, it’s no wonder these bees are so strong. A big hive can fill one of these boxes with honey in one week.

What does the honey extraction entail?

Essentially, it involves spinning the comb so that gravity can bring the honey out. First we remove each frame from the hive. Then we slice off the cappings of the honeycomb very carefully and make a big mess. Then, frame by frame, we place them into a centrifuge and spin it until the honey flies out against the sides of the barrel. There’s a little gate at the bottom and a spout from which you can pour the honey into containers for storage.

It’s a pleasure to harvest the honey with you all and share the process with you. That’s why we’re here; to see together what bees can do and make in the city.

Michael Thompson is a beekeeper with the Chicago Honey Co-op.

Goldflame Honeysuckle

Custom trellises provide structure for climbing vines.

Aunt Dee Kentucky Wisteria Trumpet Vine

American Bittersweet

Bats 28–30 Eastern Red Bat 28 Hoary Bat 29 Silver-Haired Bat 30 Bees 31–32 Italian Honeybee 31 Birds 33–43 American Crow 33

American Goldfinch 34 American Kestrel 34 American Robin 35 Barn Swallow 35 Canada Goose 36 Caspian Tern 36 Chimney Swift 37 Cooper’s Hawk 37 Double-Crested Cormorant 38 European Starling 38 Herring Gull 39 House Finch 39 House Sparrow 40 Mourning Dove 40 Peregrine Falcon 41 Ring-Billed Gull 41 Rock Pigeon 42 Song Sparrow 42 Turkey Vulture 43 Virginia Rail 43 Grasses and Shrubs 46–49 Canada Wild Rye 46 Dudley’s Rush 46 Lead Plant 47 Little Bluestem 47 Prairie Dropseed 48 Prairie Junegrass 48 Side Oats Grama 49 Winter Wheat 49 Trees 50–52 Black Maple 51 Bur Oak 51 Downy Hawthorn 52 Vines 53–54 American Bittersweet 53 Aunt Dee Kentucky Wisteria 53

Goldflame Honeysuckle 54 Trumpet Vine 54 Wildflowers 55–78 Anise Hyssop 55 Biennial Beeblossom 55 Black-Eyed Susan 56

Butterfly Weed 56 Calico Aster 57 Common Milkweed 57 Common Yarrow 58 Compass Plant 58

Cornflower Bachelor Button 59 Culver’s Root 59 Early Goldenrod 60 False Boneset 60

Firecracker Sunflower 61 Foxglove Beardtongue 61 Golden Alexander 62 Great Blue Lobelia 62 Hairy Mountain Mint 63 Hoary Vervain 63 Lakota Squash 64 Lanceleaf Figwort 64 Maryland Figwort 65 Missouri Ironweed 65 Nodding Wild Onion 66 Ohio Spiderwort 66

Pale Purple Coneflower 67 Pasture Thistle 67 Prairie Blazing Star 68 Prairie Coreopsis 68 Prairie Dock 69 Prairie Onion 69

Purple Coneflower 70 Purple Prairie Clover 70 Rattlesnake Master 71 Rocky Mountain Blazing Star 71 Rose Milkweed 72 Rough Blazing Star 72 Round-Headed Bush Clover 73 Sand Coreopsis 73 Showy Goldenrod 74 Sky Blue Aster 74 Smooth Blue Aster 75

Stiff Sunflower 75 Sunchoke 76 White Wild Indigo 76 Wild Bergamot 77 Wild Quinine 77

Yellow Coneflower 78