Beehive Tours

Hive TOURS are fabulous if you want a totally low-risk experience just putting on a bee suit (which is different from a bee costume, believe me), and perhaps even touching – or NOT touching, if you don’t want to – a few frames… all while getting some basic facts about bees from a knowledgeable beekeeper who can tell you interesting tidbits about our favorite little pollinators.

I did our tours with the same beekeeper I took my Beekeeping 101 class with: Hilary Kearney of Girl Next Door Honey. I feel like I share much of her beekeeping philosophy, but more importantly for you, she does this kind of tour regularly and is a real pro at it.

I did one tour with my then-bee-phobic daughter. I’m just kidding about the phobia! I don’t think a person with an actual Bee Phobia would enjoy this tour at all. But you can see bee aversion all over her 13-year-old face, below. I just knew that if I was going to keep bees on our property, I would need to educate any unrealistic bee fears out of her. This is an excellent tour for someone you know like that.

I also took the old man and our little son on a tour.

The bee suits for kids are just adorable!

It’s like taking a fun tour through Bee Town! Below, you see one of Hilary’s bee yards near La Jolla. Only the boxes with umbrellas over them actually house any bees. Beekeepers like Hilary who do live bee removals (bee rescues, really) need lots of extra boxes to strap feral honeybee comb into. And honestly, the fact that this particular bee yard is at the bottom of a small canyon surrounded by lots of other houses is proof positive that beekeeping can be done in a suburban – and even urban – environment.

In my experience, Hive Tours are excellent for beginners because they’re filled with other novices. There’s no pressure to know or do anything. Just listen to the Beekeeper’s basic instructions (most importantly, Don’t Swat At The Bees! And also, Don’t Freak Out). 

Your guide will check your suit to make sure there are no gaps at the start of the tour. If you remain calm, and keep your calm even if the bees start behaving aggressively (which is highly unlikely), you will always have a safe outcome. Well no one can ever promise you “always.” Just use your head and consider that the statistics are greatly in your favor.

Smoke does much to distract bees from their natural defensive instinct. Scientists theorize that it puts them on alert to possible forest fire (that is
a millennia of survival instinct for you), which makes them consume some of their honey in the event that they need to flee their hive. Consuming honey also releases endorphins, as you and every other honey-loving bear-like human already know.

Start by just observing the bees at the hive entrance. You can often tell a lot about a colony simply by watching the activity at their front door. It’s not unlike that nosy neighbor who always watches your comings and goings, except you are the nosy neighbor in this scenario. Maybe you are actually the nosy neighbor in every scenario.

As time moves along, you’ll start actually feeling comfortable enough to hold a frame and look closely at the action happening on it.

I find it fascinating to watch everything that the bees are doing. Honestly, they are up to more interesting endeavors than many people are.

Is that a bee on your hand? No matter! You’re wearing GLOVES so those fuzzy little babies couldn’t even sting you if they tried (pretty much). 

You might notice that when you hold a frame of honey, it gives off that thick, sweet odor. I love little surprises like that. In fact, there is a great deal of variety among honeys, especially given the variety among honeybees and – most importantly – the flora they are harvesting from.

This is a close-up of a honey frame in all its sweet succulence. The bees will cap it when it has reached the optimum level of dehydration:

Your guide may find the queen and ask, “Can you see her?” It’s fun to actually look at all of those striped little busy-bodies and notice one in particular who is just that much more regal. She’s longer because her body is full of years-worth of fertilized eggs! And her every need is attended to by her court (retinue, but I like anthropomorphizing bees). Imagine if this royal court had any of the interpersonal drama found in a human royal court? Believe me, it actually does.

Below is a queen searching for places to lay her eggs. That is pretty much her one job, so you can imagine the drama when she starts faltering at this? It’s like an angry chorus of buzzing critics proclaiming, “You had one job!” Except instead of just saying so, they kill her and replace her. It’s all very 19th-century France, but instead of using a guillotine, they cook her to death by “balling” her. 

You might be asking: what are those other big bees? Are they all queens?

NO. Those are drone bees, and they do nothing for the hive, work-wise. However, without drones, we wouldn’t have queens or worker bees at all. Below, you see a frame of drone brood and some newly-hatched drones, which look kind of silvery-gold in appearance:

A queen can either lay unfertilized eggs which go on to become drones (passing on her genetics if they ever successfully mate with another queen), or she can lay fertilized eggs, which become female workers (or in rare cases, a queen, which is actually decided by the workers based on the diet they feed her and the cell they build around her). You can always tell sealed drone brood because it looks so different from worker brood – it looks to me like someone wedged Kix cereal kernels into the cells. Don’t taste them to see if they also taste like Kix – they definitely don’t.

We all know that female workers are the backbone of the colony. But again – without eggs fertilized by drones – you wouldn’t have worker bees, so you would very quickly have no colony. 

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Fun fact about drones: they have no stinger! So theoretically you can handle them to your heart’s content and they couldn’t sting you. They can still bite you though, or at least give you a very disapproving look with their giant eyes. They are also very strong fliers – just look at the one taking off from the top of this frame!

I just love to see all the smiles from my favorite people when they’ve come to understand the magic of bees like I do:

This particular bee yard also houses chickens, which my teenager took a liking to after the excitement of bee-handling wore her out.

Chickens actually coexist with bees quite well. Just don’t let your dog roam around the hives – years of evolution have put bees on guard against anything large and furry enough to be confused with a bear (ever wonder why bee suits are white?)

So go ahead and book a Hive Tour if you’re on the fence about pursuing your beekeeping dreams, and take your family and friends along. You’ll have fun and learn so much at the same time!

Thanks for looking! xxoo