UP FRONT: What’s the buzz around town? It’s bee season

 UP FRONT: What’s the buzz around town? It’s bee season

Expectant parents are always giddy awaiting their new arrivals and when you’re expecting 5,000 or so of the little tykes it’s enough to make you buzz with excitement.

This is the time of year beekeepers take in new colonies — a time we’ve been anticipating for months. Getting bees is something like adopting a new puppy or kitten. There are details to take care of, such as where the bees will live, what they’ll eat, if they will get along with the neighbors and so on. The difference is that you can’t cuddle your bees like you can a dog or a cat and bees don’t come when you whistle.

On the other hand, you don’t have to worry about house-training.

On the big day, eager beekeepers pick up packages containing 3,000 to 5,000 bees from bee breeders and transfer them to hive boxes. It’s a thrilling adventure, driving back home with a couple thousand bees in the backseat, humming quietly. These transfer boxes are supposedly sealed tight to keep the bees inside until you reach your destination but that doesn’t always work out as planned. Occasionally a bee will escape and one just has to hope that the little critter is distracted enough by the outside scenery that she won’t try out that nifty little spear on her backside.

A friend of mine was driving home once with bees in a faulty box and they escaped. It was his first time dealing with honeybees and even though it was one of the freakiest experiences of his life, the bees just buzzed happily around the cab of his pickup truck while he kept steering down the road and trying not to lose his cool.Raising honeybees is a joy but there are major risks out there. This year there have been reports of catastrophic honeybee colony losses, with commercial beekeepers reporting an average loss of 62%. Zac Browning, a commercial beekeeper who heads Project Apis m. said the scale of these losses “is completely unsustainable. Honeybees are the backbone of our food system, pollinating the crops that feed our nation. If we continue to see losses at this rate we simply won’t be able to sustain current food production.”

Although there’s no clear single explanation for the high death toll, loss of habitat, pesticides and various diseases knock out colonies every year. I read once that if dairy farmers experienced the same fail rate that beekeepers do they’d sell off the cows and move to the city.

I was lucky this year. My colony, headed by Queen Aretha, survived a harrowing attack from bald-faced hornets last summer and sub-zero temperatures this winter and appear to be poised to produce plenty of honey this season. Just in case, I also ordered another colony, Queen Mavis and her backup singers, and I’m hoping to buck the trend of colony loss.

There are plenty of us hobby beekeepers around this area who keep trying even though colony loss is something we all deal with. Some of us even risk our neighbors’ wrath by holding off on mowing our lawns and refusing to spray for dandelions until after the new colonies get established and there is enough pollen for them to begin their sweet work of manufacturing honey.

So if you are neighbors with a beekeeper or know somebody nearby who raises bees, give them a break with some bee-friendly practices in your yard or garden this year. Not only will you be rewarded by a more luxurious garden and possibly a jar of honey, but you will be helping sustain our food supply. And you can just be grateful your neighbor doesn’t raise dairy cows.