Copyright © 2019 Bill Anderson

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To Lesley, queen to my drone and our brood

“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

CONTENTS

Introduction: Why Now?

Chapter 1: Idle Isn’t Lazy

Chapter 2: Ideal Homes

Chapter 3: Follow the Honey

Chapter 4: A Warm Welcome

Chapter 5: Bee Chosen

Chapter 6: Sweet Secrets

Chapter 7: Bee Observant

Chapter 8: Bee Gentle

Chapter 9: Bee Productive

Chapter 10: Close to Home

Chapter 11: Spring Awakening

Chapter 12: Seize It!

Those Two Diary Dates at the Hive

Appendices

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Why Now?

Almost everyone now knows how much we all depend on bees. In 1958 the Chinese found out the hard way in a cautionary tale of biblical proportions. Agricultural targets were not being met, and Chairman Mao decided that sparrows were responsible for eating intolerable amounts of the people’s rice crops. He orchestrated a hugely successful campaign to eradicate them. The sparrows. The whole population was encouraged to get involved. Good citizens used guns and catapults to shoot the birds. They banged pots and pans, beat drums: anything to scare the sparrows from landing, forcing them to keep flying until they fell from the sky, dead from exhaustion. Nests were destroyed, eggs smashed, nestlings killed, and the sparrows were driven to near-extinction.

But with the sparrows gone, the insects they ate flourished. Plagues of locusts wreaked even greater devastation on the crops. Chinese scientists then actually looked inside dead sparrows’ stomachs and discovered 25 percent human crops and 75 percent insects. Oops. So now the insects got it. Patchy and panicky misuse of pesticides like DDT not only wiped out the locusts, it killed all the pollinators as well. The bees weren’t the only innocent victims of these acts of devastating human ignorance: the ensuing ecological disaster exacerbated the Great Chinese Famine in which at least twenty million people died of starvation.

In 2012 a study commissioned by Friends of the Earth estimated that if the United Kingdom couldn’t rely on insect pollinators and had to do the job ourselves by hand, it would cost the economy $2.3 billion a year—for a green and pleasant land of sixty million people that doesn’t grow enough food to feed itself.

That same year I got my first bees. But it wasn’t as a result of terrifying, apocalyptic statistics. I’d been in a beautiful English garden directing Lewis, a television drama whose pilot I’d “helmed,” in the oddly nautical language of our industry. We were filming a scene that involved a fictional family enjoying a relaxing lunch alfresco. The laws of filmmaking usually insist upon hurricanes or snow on these occasions, but it appeared we had been given special dispensation: it was merely unseasonably cold. Actors were huddled like convicts in huge quilted thermal coats sprayed with stenciled coat hanger symbols—wardrobe department graffiti to discourage any thoughts of theft or style. Inelegant feather puffas were abruptly plucked away at the last moment before shooting the illusion of a midsummer, hypothermia-free take.

I was talking to the cameraman about how we might make the next freezing shot look warm and golden, and though he seemed to be listening intently, he began to slowly lower himself down to the lawn where we were standing and surreptitiously picked something up off the ground. Dropped litter I assumed, and carried on. But then, without taking his eyes off me, he tried to pretend that he wasn’t gently blowing into the fist he’d made around the litter. Mysterious. He appeared to be still diligently listening to what I was saying, but I wasn’t: I noticed he’d put his other hand into the pocket of his down jacket, a much more efficient way to keep it warm, so what was with the blowing?

Like a schoolboy caught stealing in a sweet shop, Paul slowly unfurled his fingers to reveal an insect lying on its back in the palm of his hand. Six legs skywards.

“Looks like a dead bee,” I offered, none the wiser.

“Well, it might be . . .” Paul looked intently at the bee.

I didn’t have to: “It’s definitely a bee.”

“Yes. But it might not be dead. If they stop moving for too long on a cold day, they can cool down so much their flight muscles stop working. Then they’re stuck outside and they’ll cool down even more and die. But sometimes, if you warm them up a little . . .”

. . . Two of the six legs twitched . . .

“. . . just get them going again . . .”

. . . The dead bee flipped over off its back and started crawling on Paul’s warming palm . . .

“. . . they can fly back to the hive where there’s warmth and food . . .”

. . . Lift off! I watched Paul’s gaze following the bee as it flew off purposefully into the heavens. I’d just witnessed a resurrection.

“Not at all! I just gave her a helping hand,” he said, but his eyes were twinkling with joy.

French philosopher Albert Camus said, “Life is a sum of all your choices.” As a storyteller I spend most of my time interrogating characters’ choices with the question “Why now?” It’s the crux of dramatic narrative. All of us are all too aware that we often avoid making those significant life choices that will change everything: we know they will define us, determine our future, but how to get them right? The circumstances that demand such a choice may have been pressing for years, so when we finally commit and decide to act, what happened? What was the trigger? Why now?

I later found out that Paul, the cameraman shooting my drama, had another life: as Bond . . . Paul Bond, he was secretly a World Champion beekeeper. Even later I realized my choice to keep bees had secretly been made the moment that bee flew from his hand.

Right now you might like to consider why you’ve chosen to be reading this book at this particular moment.

The writing of it goes back to another, altogether grander English garden where the annual Port Eliot Festival beautifully meanders by a tidal estuary on the south coast. In the summer sunshine on the riverbank lawn I came across not a catatonic bee but a large tent: “The Idler Academy of Philosophy, Husbandry, and Merriment.” The use of that last word outside the context of Christmas or alcohol brought a smile to my face and drew me inside. It was love at first sight. The Idlers’ motto is Libertas per cultum and as well as teaching you Latin so you can knowingly pursue “freedom through culture,” philosophy, astronomy, calligraphy, music, business skills, English grammar, ukulele, public speaking, singing, drawing, self-defense, taxidermy, harmonica, and many other subjects were also on the Idle menu along with much hilarity and merriment. But not Idle beekeeping.

The Idlers also publish a bimonthly magazine whose intention is to “return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject.” Not out of sloth, but in a considered, slightly unorthodox, very low maintenance way, this is how I try to keep bees because I believe they know how to do it better than I do.

After the briefest conversation—“Can you write?”—I became the regular beekeeping columnist for the Idler magazine. Most of the participants in ensuing Idle beekeeping workshops assumed these gatherings where I taught the little I know were at least partly a ruse to sell copies of my book, but surprisingly not all of them were relieved to discover no such book existed.

In our biosphere there are outstanding individuals who have given their lives to studying and keeping bees either in an environment of dedicated peer-reviewed academic rigor or through decades of hands-on experience, often both. I am neither. I’m not even a shining example of Idleness. But I have spent many years telling stories for a living. Fabricating a tissue of lies into a believable semblance of truth is only possible through empathy, on the part of both the storyteller and their audience. The basis of the contract we make with each other is an agreement to empathetically work together to viscerally imagine and virtually experience the lives of others.

I wondered if the empathy that can allow us to understand and care for our fellow humans’ dramas could allow us to do the same for the bees. But isn’t that a bit soft and woolly? Where’s the rigor? I come from Scotland, a country where “Physics” is still called “Natural Philosophy,” squarely defining the study of all matter and energy in our universe as an act of human contemplation. This, too, is not possible without empathy. Nothing worthwhile is.

This book is going to show you why keeping bees with the minimum of intervention is positively good, and how to do it responsibly with minimum effort.

1

Idle Isn’t Lazy. . .

. . . like a honey bee isn’t a wasp. Superficially there are many similarities: size, shape, color, buzzing about, stinging. But although carnivorous wasps pollinate flowers, they don’t provide honey. Vegetarian honey bees do.

And while both idle and lazy people seem to be similarly workshy, it’s what they do with the time they’re not working that makes the difference. Truly lazy people rarely cultivate themselves or the world around them. Idlers try to do both by cannily spending as little time as possible in drudgery so they can invest the maximum doing things that interest them, that make them grow.

The current rate of exchange offered by idle beekeeping is this: to get honey, wax, mead, and a share in the welfare of the bee population and the planet, you need to commit to attending your idle beehive on two occasions per year. That’s not two days of work. It may be as little as a couple of hours, twice a year. You are of course entitled to spend as long as you like at the hive, entranced by the comings and goings of the bees, but this is idle contemplation, not laziness, and it’s not compulsory even when it becomes compelling.

If having only two dates in your annual diary seems too good to be true, we used to get away with less. As beekeepers we effortlessly achieved a pinnacle of idleness for fifteen million years by employing the best and most basic strategy of work avoidance: don’t turn up.

For fifteen thousand millennia before we took on the challenge of putting the Sapiens into Homo, honey bees were flying through the air, navigating with astonishing accuracy to pollinate plants as they gathered food to raise their young in structures they constructed with mathematical precision. They worked out what they needed to do and they got on with it, without any help from us whatsoever, while we were still enraptured by our discovery of the amazing things you could do with the sharp edge of a bit of flint and opposing thumbs.

But before we were even standing upright on our two hind legs, we must have salivated at the smell of warm honey mellifluously floating down from high up in the tree canopy. And eventually connected the converging flight paths of bees as they congregated at their sweet source: a cavity in the trunk of a tree.

That was the moment we turned up at the bees’ doorstep, and things got a lot less idle.

So overpoweringly delicious was the smell of that honey we risked climbing to great heights and braved the intense pain of hundreds of stings to steal the sweet treasure of the bees. When we mastered fire, smoke helped us confuse the bees and mitigate the stings. When we mastered tools, we were able to hack away at the tree and expand the entrance to the cavity so we could extract every last drop. We weren’t beekeepers yet—we were bee killers. It wasn’t just the honey we stole: the baby bees, larvae carefully nursed in their individual cells of the honeycomb, are an excellent source of protein and fat. We devoured them alive. Very few colonies of bees would have survived this onslaught, but we were hunter-gatherers of no fixed abode, took what we wanted, and moved on: pillage, not tillage.

Then around ten thousand years ago the idea caught on that instead of roaming out into the world to feed ourselves, we could make the world of food come to us. The revolutionary concept of agriculture and home. We began to settle down, and bees became a wild part of our farming. As with all the plants and animals we were cultivating, we would try to re-create their natural environment on our doorstep.

So we made containers with small, defendable entrances similar to the cavities where we’d seen bees living in trees. And when a swarm issued from one of those cavities and formed into a football-sized cluster of bees hanging from a nearby branch while it decided where to go and make its new home, we would come along and help it make up its mind by dislodging it into our container and taking it back to ours.

But from the get-go this was a process of enticement, not incarceration—to this day humans haven’t devised a hive system with a lock and key. Unlike other animals we cage or fence in, the hive entrance has to be open for blossom-grazing bees to roam the airways as they please. They are wild like The Clash, and “Should I stay or should I go?” is the royal prerogative of their queen.

But she doesn’t require any fancy abode—merely what her lineage of fifteen million years had become accustomed to. And the foundations of those palatial tree cavities that primitive beekeepers were trying to copy had been hollowed out by fungus. Those polypore spores that managed to penetrate the tree’s defenses and start rotting down the wood fibers weren’t guided by set squares, protractors, or spirit levels. Like us they were driven by appetite and organically munched away with the minimum of effort. So no straight lines or right angles for bee palace providers to pursue.

One of our more popular and enduring designs is the skep. Its familiar dome shape, made from a coil of twisted tall grass stitched together with the split stems of willow or bramble, is easy to make, light, and strong enough to take the weight of a man standing on it.

Inside, the bees would treat it in exactly the same way as an empty tree cavity they’d found: hanging from the top, they’d build pendulous, parallel combs of wax that they’d fill with babies and honey.

But we didn’t make reusable skeps to save the bees, we made them to save us the work of finding wild colonies, then climbing and hacking away at trees. When it came to harvesting the honey, we still killed all the bees in our skeps to prize them away from it. The forest was still our near neighbor, and it was a regenerating source of swarms, so we didn’t have to worry too much about where our replacement bees would come from. Indeed our skeps would themselves issue swarms that, with a bit of luck, we could capture in another skep.

We had become swarm-hunters-and-gatherers. But those clustering balls of adult bees looking for a new home contain no available honeycomb and no babies—very little nutrition for us, and all of it capable of flying away. So swarms had been of little interest until we became able to coax them into places where they would make babies and store honey. And then we started to see them as deferred deliciousness.

For thousands of years, whether in skeps, clay pots, logs, or anything else that we could fit bees into, we carried on killing bees to enjoy their honey.

Then on October 25, 1852, the carpenter’s set square fought its corner and found the right angle to intersect with the world of beekeeping: U.S. Patent No. 9300 was granted to the Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth for the design of a new beehive. And that’s when things started to get precise.

Gone was the near-enough-is-good-enough of hand-twisted grass lashed together by eye. Langstroth’s wooden hive was like a mini–chest of drawers lying on its back. With eight or more drawers that not only had to fit tightly together, they all had to open and close smoothly.

You’d need to be a carpenter bordering on cabinetmaker to have the level of woodworking skill to construct this hive. And yet Langstroth’s design now underpins the vast majority of beehives on our planet. Its global success is down to its ability to allow the beekeeper to remove honey from the hive without killing the bees. And to extract that honey in industrial quantities.

Langstroth’s hive neatly confined the bees’ free-form honeycomb building into rectangular wooden frames, like drawers without a bottom. And these frames can be easily removed with their contents intact. Honey from a filing cabinet? It isn’t quite that simple, because producing honey isn’t the bees’ primary purpose: it’s having babies. They’re all laid by the one queen bee living in the hive, and at the height of the summer she can deliver up to two thousand kids every twenty-four hours.

In my entire life I’ve had three. Admittedly the queen bee can have upward of twenty thousand family members actively helping raise hers, but there are some things we do have in common, and one of them is the way kids take over your home. Not in a directly tyrannical way—they didn’t ask to be born, as they will later tell you—but through the requirements and logistics their rearing demands. From the vomit stains on your shoulders that inspire you to ensure that every room in your house is filled with as many muslin squares as an artisan cheesery, to the ubiquitous scattering of toys that might briefly distract an inconsolably crying baby but will definitely hobble the sleepy, barefoot lullaby singer, needs-must rapidly takes over: diapers are never where they’re supposed to be, they’re where you last used them; food could be literally anywhere, from rusks in your undergarments drawer to bananas in your letterbox; and empty, unwashed bottles are usually lying where sleep finally released them from the gums of your progeny. Even when your children have grown into the bedrooms you’ve laboriously provided for them, the idea of any child-free space in your home is a delusional parental fantasy.

Likewise the beehive: dismiss any hopes of simply sliding out a frame of honeycomb that doesn’t come with a brood of larvae wriggling in the middle of it, surrounded by baby food and a lot of protective nurse bees.

So Langstroth, who also had three children, contrived a child-free space in his hive. Between two of the chest-of-drawer hive boxes there is a barrier full of holes of a very particular size. It’s called a queen excluder:

The queen bee is larger than all the worker bees, and she is too big to pass through the holes in the queen excluder, so she’s stuck in the bottom box, where she lays all the eggs. The smaller worker bees can easily crawl through the holes and move freely into the upper box, the child-free space, where they exclusively store the honey.

Langstroth’s hive separates the babies from the honey in a way that allows the beekeeper to take that honey without disturbing the kids.

Top drawer. For the beekeeper.

Murder commuted to burglary from the bees’ point of view. But at least now we qualified as true beekeepers: at the most basic level, we deliberately kept our bees alive, and we started to really make them earn their keep.

Langstroth’s patent came seventy years after patents by James Watt for his steam engine and James Hargreaves for his textile spinning jenny, inventions that combined to create the first factories of the Industrial Revolution. So the universal benefit of human intervention to maximize productivity and efficiency was by now an established creed. And because Langstroth’s frames allowed combs to be individually pulled out, forensically examined, and then replaced, the inner workings of the living hive could be observed. Through the eyes of Industrial Revolutionaries:

This representation of British society—nine layers of classes and trades, with the bank, armed services, and volunteers at the foundation and the monarch at the top—was etched by George Cruikshank, one of Charles Dickens’s illustrators, fifteen years after Langstroth’s invention. In 1867 Cruikshank published it to make the political point that everything was buzzing along beautifully and there was no need to give the working man the vote.

The honey bee colony consists of around fifty thousand bees, the vast majority of them female worker bees whose short careers develop through a progression of jobs. After three weeks as larvae then pupae, they hatch as adults. For the next three weeks inside the hive they will perform a plethora of distinct tasks including cleaning, nursing, housekeeping, undertaking, and guarding the entrance before a final three weeks of flying outside the hive to collect food. A much smaller number of bigger, male bees—called “drones” because their larger wings give their buzz a lower, louder tone—have only one primary job: inseminator. And an even larger single queen bee, usually found at the bottom of the hive, not the top, gives birth to all the children.

Our perception of the industrious bee society as a role model for our own was of course a two-way street. In Langstroth’s time the buzzword for the hive was “hierarchy”: nowadays “collaborative superorganism” might be a better fit—the bees haven’t changed much in all that time, just our projections of ourselves.

But because Langstroth allowed us to get under the bonnet of the beehive, we became able to start tinkering about, or “improving.” And our goal was sweet and clear: more honey. So we manipulated the environment for the bees inside the hive to exploit their behavior in ways that maximize honey production. We did everything we could to turbocharge that one aspect of the bees’ lives. But as any car mechanic will tell you, whilst it is possible to turbocharge any combustion engine to deliver huge amounts of power, if the components of that engine were never designed to cope with all the additional stresses incurred by the increased workload, it won’t last long. It will quickly burn out or break down.

Have we brought our bees to this point?

Imagine life as a bee in California this spring—not glamorously buzzing around the flowers at the foot of the “Hollywood” sign but approaching the one million acres of Californian almond trees coming into bloom in one of 120 hives on the back of a truck after traveling two thousand bumpy miles.

Living in trees never felt like this, even during earthquakes. But once the forklift in the almond orchard has unloaded your hive, you fly out into a world of blossom. The soil and climate here make it the perfect place to grow almond trees—80 percent of all the almonds eaten in the world call this home—and almost nothing else is grown. Every intensive inch is almond. And every almond needs a bee to pollinate it into existence. For miles in every blooming direction it’s All-You-Can-Eat nectar and pollen for the bees, and every year thirty billion of them are trucked in from all over the United States for this feast.

But the food is just one flavor, and it lasts just a few weeks.

Each individual flower is available for pollination for only five days. Once that blossom is fertilized by bees gathering pollen, the almond tree quickly switches its floral energy and resources to making almonds, and there is nothing for the bees to eat. No nectar or pollen for miles. The thirty billion bees, who could be forgiven for thinking they’d only just got here, must now be urgently trucked out again to somewhere else with flowers or they will starve to death in a food desert.

Like a touring stadium rock band, but on a much bigger scale, the bees are forklifted back onto giant trucks that head out on the highway and race them to their next exclusive gigs: cherries, apples, plums, avocados, pumpkins, blueberries, cranberries, sunflowers, and vegetables. It’s estimated that one mouthful in three of everything we eat is dependent on insect pollination. And honey bees are the rock stars of pollinating insects, driven by diesel and heavy metal thunder.

But is the on-tour, rock star lifestyle one you would wish on your family?

Parents of small children know that when they start school they bring home all kinds of diseases that are generously shared in the classroom. Imagine how stressful a National Infant School Camping Month would be if entire families had to travel hundreds of miles to congregate in mass camps of similarly dislocated people—even if the food was good.

The thirty billion bees that traverse the United States every year travel on frames in hives still based on Langstroth’s design. But the honey that design was intended to maximize has become less important to the road warrior industrial beekeepers that collect it. Recently the commercial value of the pollination services their bees provide has become greater than the income from their honey. In cash terms, the honey is not so sweet.

So is Langstroth’s honey-maximizing design still fit for purpose on the spreadsheets of all commercial beekeepers?

Small-scale beekeepers like me are not generating income from honey to feed their families, let alone satisfy shareholders. For us “hobby” beekeepers, many with a handful of hives or even just one, how important is maximum honey production? Does it trump everything else? And yet most of us still use the same hives and methods as the industrial giants. These hives have become synonymous with beekeeping. As if there is no other way.

But another example of small-scale animal husbandry is keeping a few hens to provide delicious fresh eggs for your family. Do the people who keep poultry in their back gardens always visit the nearest industrial sheds of battery hens and copy the farmers’ methods of egg mass-production? And buy the equipment they use? And treat their hens with the drugs the farmers have to administer to keep theirs alive?

In answer to the perpetual conundrum “Which came first, chicken or egg?,” the priority of commercial egg producers has to be the egg. The profit margin on the sale of every egg they produce is the basis of their business, and from that they work back to the hens that lay them, minimizing costs all the way.

As someone who consumes two raw eggs every day, for me the chicken always comes first. We can’t help the egg, once laid, do anything to make itself more healthy or nutritious. But the hen can be helped to do both for her eggs: the better we nurture and nourish her, the better the eggs she lays.

Commercial beekeepers have to start with the profit margin on the sale of their honey and work back to the bees, maximizing productivity and minimizing costs along the way. That’s business, and it allows millions of us to enjoy honey on demand, and at what appears to be at first sight, reasonable cost. A jar of honey on our supermarket shelves doesn’t cost much more than a jar of jam, so they feel like a fairly equivalent treat. But the factories that boil the sugar and the fruit into jam shoulder no responsibility for pollinating into existence every third mouthful we eat. The bees that make the honey do.

So as we begin to understand that the health of the bees may be more important than the short-term wealth we accrue from their honey, maybe it’s time to unbolt the turbocharger and get back to the trees. Not as a retreat from our modern industrial life, but for inspiration: trees successfully gave a healthy home to bees for millions of years when our workload was zero. But so was our honey harvest.

Can we get close to the giddy heights of idleness we enjoyed before we turned up at the bees’ doorsteps and also enjoy a supply of murder-free honey?

There is a hive system that closely imitates the tree cavity, barely interferes with the bees’ natural behavior, but allows us to gently remove their surplus honey with an absolute minimum of effort and time. And if I can keep bees this way, anyone can.

2

Ideal Homes

You may already have a place in your heart for your bees, but this doesn’t automatically translate into desirable accommodation. Whatever your species, the same three golden rules for choosing your ideal home seem to apply—location, location, location—so where you plan to put your hive is crucial for both you and your bees.

Whilst we humans may prioritize easily accessible supermarkets, farmers markets, or organic whole-food temples, all the bees require is nearby flowers that we haven’t made poisonous. Not an unreasonably high expectation to have of your neighbors, but one we disappoint all too frequently. And though even the wildflowers that grow in the margins of industrial agriculture are often tainted by the overspray of pesticides harmful to bees, all is not gloom: in towns and cities millions of gardeners deliberately plant for blossoms from March to November. From window boxes to public parks, we’ve intervened to generate the sight and smell of beautiful flowers that profoundly gladden our hearts, and incidentally provide bees with a varied, reliable, and extended supply of food—largely unsprayed and non-GMO.

Most of the locations we plan for our bees will fall somewhere between genetically modified super-prairie and unspoiled Garden of Eden, but there’s often a concern that even if there is quality local food, will there be enough?

I was visiting a friend on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides who breeds “black” bees indigenous to the UK. The purity of the genetic line of Gavin’s bees depends on the colonies being kept away from inseminating “outsiders.” As I drove for hours through sparsely inhabited countryside, I was struck not so much by Gavin’s splendid isolation but by the almost complete absence of vegetation—the strikingly beautiful rocks, occasionally punctuated by tiny pools of rainwater, initially gave the impression of a quarry. Miles of granite later, I began to feel that I could be on another planet where “green” had yet to evolve. But in the middle of this volcanic vastness were prospering colonies of bees that were finding plenty of food, because they knew what to look for: tiny pink flowers on leafless stalks that seem to float above green cushions of thrift eking out an existence in hairline cracks, and wild honeysuckle erupting from unassuming gaps in the rocks to release a cool flow of nectar and pollen from a cascade of golden blooms.

Within easy reach of my own bees in London, there is a wildflower area preserved in Wormwood Scrubs, a public park that adjoins the famous prison. When I walk our dog through tens of thousands of wild blooms, I frequently struggle to use up the fingers of one hand to count the honey bees feeding, and I’ve never seen them queuing up or fighting to gain access to a flower—even when the bees do turn up in huge numbers. I’ve seen dogs occasionally disputing ownership of a muddy, saliva-drenched old tennis ball, but I’ve never seen honey bees kicking some other pollinator off a blossom. Unless you’re planning intensive bee farming, there seems to be plenty to go round.

So if your neighborhood is likely to be conducive, what about your neighbors? You are going to be introducing a wild animal into their lives as well as your own: if next door decided to keep a tiger as a pet, you might want to have a chat with them about the state of the garden fence. I dropped my nearest neighbors a note explaining my plans before I got my first bees. Included was a contact phone number and a picture of a honey bee—it’s surprising how many people think all bees are bumblebees—they’re not. Many are struck by how much honey bees look like browner versions of wasps. This is a distinction that needs to be made clear—though there is a lot of sympathy around for the struggling honey bee, I wouldn’t like to be a wasp-keeper trying to persuade my neighbors of the merits of wasps.

Everyone seems to know that bees die if they sting you, but many harbor the suspicion that wasps sting you just for the hell of it, and might do it again for kicks. And again. Sweetly, people assume the honey bee knows that stinging you will be fatal and therefore considers that option very carefully, and only as a last resort like the leader of a world power with their finger on the nuclear button. In fact, although the honey bee will only use her sting defensively, it comes as a complete shock when she flies off to discover that she can’t retract her sting from human skin and has just terminally eviscerated herself—this never happened before when she was dealing with other insects, with whom she could use her sting again and again: as devastating as a spray of bullets from an Uzi . . .

I left any reference to automatic weapons out of the note to my neighbors, but there is a legitimate concern about insect stings causing anaphylactic shock. And if you increase the local population of stinging insects, the risk of being stung increases, even for bee-lovers trying very hard to never inadvertently threaten any bees—everyone makes mistakes. But risk is different than fear. If neighbors are concerned that they and their children, pets, or livestock might have an extreme reaction to a bee sting, that is fear. Valid fear, but whose proportions may bear very little resemblance to the risk. Like you being justifiably afraid of the tiger you just imagined prowling next door—the huge one with the very big teeth that already had its eyes burning into you—even though it doesn’t exist. Probably . . . But if you have neighbors with prior experience of allergic reaction to stings, then you really need to consider the risks carefully. Death from anaphylactic shock is as final as death by tiger, so you may have to consider placing your bees somewhere else, farther from any sensitive humans.

A couple of years after I installed my first bees on our roof, we were unusually away on holiday during the Notting Hill Carnival and returned to find that our teenage son had turned our entire basement into a community rehearsal space for local bands—carpets had been dragged out of nearby skips and thrown down on the floor and up the walls. Guitars and amplifiers vied for floorspace with the drum kit, a precarious keyboard, and slumbering musicians. All silently covered in party detritus. As they surfaced and began wearily clearing up, I heard them sniggering as they impersonated a furious neighbor who’d evidently come round at four a.m. and apoplectically demanded they stop playing.

I went round to add my apology. What seemed to annoy him most was they’d kept playing the same song. For hours. While I was in mea culpa mode I thought I might as well include the bees, and asked him how much of a nuisance they’d been over the last two years: “Oh, did you actually get any?” was his reply. He hadn’t even noticed, so no palpable increase in his risk of getting stung, but by now there were four hives up on my roof—how could their inhabitants have escaped his attention?

Bees don’t require you to seek planning permission to build a concrete runway on your property, but they do immediately bring a flight path whose arrivals and departures from the hive would leave a human air traffic controller breathless.

Airports have runways that take advantage of the prevailing winds to help aircraft fly. Sunlight isn’t a factor in deciding the direction of the flight path—747s are equally comfortable taking off and landing in the dark. Bees, on the other hand, generate their own lift when flying, like helicopters. They don’t need to exploit the breeze to get airborne, but they do need to know where they’re going, and their guidance systems calibrate to the sun. Positioning your hive so its entrance faces the prevailing direction of the sun, south in the northern hemisphere, allows the bees to check their bearings as soon as they fly out.

Even when it’s cloudy, bees’ polarized eyesight allows them to see the position of the sun, but when it disappears behind our planet they are unable to navigate and return to the hive for the darkness of night. Light on the dawn horizon is their wake-up call, so an entrance including some eastern promise in its southerly aspect alerts them to the start of the working day as early as possible.

The vast majority of flying bees are collecting food, and most of them already know where they’re going as they leave the hive—directions to the various locations of nourishing flowers are shared by those foragers that found them. Flying out to their nectar and pollen destinations, bees will fan out from the entrance and up into the air. They’ll return by the same route. It’s this busy cone of determined airborne bees that we need to position with care: stand behind the hive entrance and there’s nothing going on; stand in front of it and at peak times five hundred bees are coming and going every minute—you and any children, pets, or neighbors will be very in the way.

Imagine an invisible, weightless foghorn with a mouth bigger than an adult. Attach it to the front of your hive, point it toward the sun, and see where it will fit into your life.

If available space falls a little short of your full foghorn, you can use or create an obstruction that will divert the bees upward sooner: a human-height hedge or a panel of trellis or fencing near the hive entrance will ensure that the bees’ flight path doesn’t disturb. They will patiently accept this interference as a landmark: millions of years living in trees in forests full of other trees has given bees a lot of experience negotiating permanent obstacles near takeoff and landing.

Because my hives are up on the roof of our house, their entrances are already higher than anywhere the public frequents. And because the foghorn of their conical flight path is upward as well as outward, my TV-antenna-and-chimney-dodging bees are even less likely to get in my neighbors’ way.

Which probably explains why the teenage music pumping from the basement was perceived as the only nuisance.

But even height doesn’t guarantee harmony in the hood. Whilst elevated bees may have spread out from the hive by the time they’ve flown down to plants growing at ground level, fanning out to disperse the “runway” effect, if there is something especially desirable right by the hive, lots of bees will find it.