Jill Lambie puffing cool smoke on top of a hive frame to help calm the bees at a property in Berkeley, California. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
YOU’VE probably heard of backyard chickens in California cities. But backyard beekeeping?
Hundreds of Bay Area residents have installed hives in recent years, and the hobby really took off when pandemic lockdowns forced people to stay home.
Membership in the Alameda County Beekeepers Association alone has jumped to 500 people from around 60 in 2011, according to Robert Mathews, the association’s new president.
“There are beehives and chickens in every third house, it seems,” said Mathews, 57, a techie by day, bee enthusiast on weekends.
Beekeepers say their hobby is a solitary, meditative pastime that helps them connect with nature despite their busy lives.
Oakland resident Tracy Fasanella stumbled into beekeeping this year.
A bee climbing on a flowering plant at a property in Berkeley, California. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
She adopted two hives from a friend in San Leandro. A semi-retired accountant, she said she felt fulfilled, and occasionally daunted, by the wealth of knowledge she was gaining from her bees.
“I had no idea what I would be getting myself into. Sometimes I think it’s pretty scary having 40,000 bees around you,” she said.
The unusually rainy and cold winter in California this year created additional challenges for novices who are still trying to learn the ropes.
The wind kept knocking down beehives, killing some bees and leaving little food for those that survived.
The unusually stormy winter also posed problems for bees that pollinate California’s commercial crops elsewhere in the state.
Jill Lambie, a hobbyist turned professional bee consultant in Oakland, said she had never witnessed a season quite as complicated as this past winter.
Bees couldn’t get enough food or pollen, which caused their larvae to fall ill. And opportunistic viruses are surfacing more than she’s ever seen.
Hundreds of Bay Area residents have installed hives in recent years, and the hobby really took off when pandemic lockdowns forced people to stay home. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
In the Berkeley Hills during the first sunny week of April, Lambie and her business partner, Karen Rhein, who call their consulting business BeeChicks, were performing mite checks on a group of hives.
Mites can damage hives by infecting them with viruses. One type of virus carried by mites results in a bee being born with no abdomen, while another deforms their wings and leaves them too weak to fly.
To conduct a test, experts scoop a cup of bees from the hive, place them in a jar of sugar, and shake the container in a shallow tub of water to record how many mites fall out. If more than 15 mites are found, that signals that a hive could quickly be in distress and need to be treated.
While Rhein conducted the test, Lambie was on the phone with another Bay Area client who had called in a panic.
The client’s bees were swarming, fleeing the hive en masse.
She turned around and sighed.
“This is going to happen so much this spring,” she said. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
