If you’ve been reading this column for long, you will have gathered that my family and I don’t have too much going on. Very boring, not that many hobbies, definitely lots of free time. Cough. 

In light of that, we got another one! Hobby, that is. 

It’s been a long-time dream of my wife to have some honeybees, but we’ve always been pressed for time, money, space, you name it. But this year, when her grandma ordered bees, she jumped on the caravan and ordered her first nuc. For those who don’t know, a nuc is like a box of starter bees. It has a couple of frames, ideally a queen and all the little workers to get things started. The idea is that you can set these up in a small hive and they will grow themselves into a bigger hive, which you can split to make more small hives in the future and so on to grow your bee operation.

For my wife’s birthday last fall, I got her her first beehive and a bag full of brand new tools and a full bee suit. Yes, Mrs. Hill’s apiary was on its way to fruition after years of dreaming and scheming. 

It worked out really well for us that her granny was already farming bees, because they live right next door. When the nucs arrived, we went up there to help Granny sort her bees out before she walked down the hill to help us with ours. 

If you’re thinking this all sounds rather idyllic and glittery like a misty-eyed fairy tale, then I’m sorry, but this is the part of the story where I rudely drop the other foot. That other foot I will cryptically call “the plot.”

While everything went about 90 percent according to plan, there was one considerable hiccup. The queen.

When you purchase these nucs, it is more or less a given that there should be a healthy queen in the hive to get things going as they acclimate to the new living situation and begin kingdom building, so to speak. If there is no queen, or if she is not faring well, the bees will form supersedure cells to essentially create a new queen. 

If this happens in a nuc that you are trying to start a hive with, it can be tricky. They might not get the queen to hatch and survive quickly enough; the rest of the bees may suffer; or worse, the whole hive could fail. 

Depending on the situation, the bee supplier might send a new queen to help save the hive, or the existing bees might get through it and reestablish the health of the system. 

It’s a bit delicate, particularly because you can’t just look in the box whenever you want. In the spring, while we still have cold weather off and on, we have to be careful not to chill the bees by letting the heat out of their box and potentially killing them.

So that is the limbo we are at with the bees as of now, with careful observation and correspondence with the bee supplier ongoing.

I would like to take a moment to state that if I am slightly off in my explanation of how bees work, don’t crucify my intelligence. Anything and everything I have stated here has been a working understanding of what my wife has been telling me. I really don’t know what she has begun to learn from books and working with Granny, but suffice to say that it’s her project, and I’m just the guy who’s waiting patiently to have some honey donuts in a year or so.

The way out here we learn by trying, pushing forward and juggling the monkey wrenches that fly our way. A pessimist would concern himself with the queen, an optimist would concern themselves with the newly arrived bees, and a writer concerns themselves with trying to get the facts about bees correctly from his wife before quoting her to the vast readership of the River Reporter. Tune in again for more about my queen and her bees.