I arrive early for my visit with Lisa Hay, owner of Happy Creek Farm in Goldstream Valley on the Fairbanks periphery. The petite redhead, always eager to “talk bees,” puts on boots, and I notice stylized bees adorning her colorful socks. Hay asks me to let her know when her knowledge sharing exceeds what I need. The next couple of hours are a crash tutorial on the science and culture of beekeeping in subarctic Alaska by this adept in her ninth season.
Hay grows peonies, vegetables, and haskaps—an introduced superfood honeysuckle like an elongated blueberry—for which her bees provide pollination services. She has also tapped her property’s birches for syrup.
As the Alaska Director of the Western Apicultural Society, Hay helps beekeepers to share know-how and support each others’ efforts. In the Interior, devotees number about 100. When hooked by Sue Hubbell’s A Book of Bees memoir, Hay took her first beekeeping class. The teacher insisted that one could not overwinter honeybees here. She should expect to kill hers at the season’s end. Hay, abhorring this prospect, sought advice from Yukoners and Alaskans who had kept bees alive where winters can last up to eight months and the mercury drops to -60° F. Temperature more than wind or rain limits a colony’s foraging within its three-mile radius. For daytime flyers, the work shift varies with latitude too. Hay found that many old-timers shunned email and online forums and that their legacy was fading. Many had brought methods from countries like Russia, Germany, and Finland, and then adapted them to North America’s Far North.
Hay’s Interior & Northern Alaska Beekeepers Facebook page disseminates the survey data she collected for this taxing environment. Apiarists network and mentor through it. She started teaching a class on overwintering honeybees both outdoors and indoors in the Interior and organized a conference on the subject. She has adopted hives scheduled for euthanasia. Some of hers outlast multiple winters. Subarctic domestic bees are sheltered in root cellars, basements, garages, sheds, and other structures built or modified for the purpose. Hay monitors her own thickly insulated “bee barn” for temperature and humidity— moisture buildup in a hive is a major problem with bees clustered inside at outside temperatures too cold for them to fly. An infrared camera allows her to check the health of her wards inside the dark hive. Outside, bees survive in sealed polystyrene boxes shielded with inches of foam board, warmed by their activity. A group of wood chips, a moisture quilt, or corkboard absorbs condensation from vapors the buzzing mini-dynamos produce. The warmth generated can melt snow atop a hive.
While I zip up my one-piece beekeeping suit—a cross between fencing uniform and hazmat outfit—slip into surgical gloves, and seal my sleeve cuffs with rubber bands, I intuit the origin of the phrase, “a bee in your bonnet.” The white fabric cools apiarists and signals “not bear” to the bees. Hay warns me that some people panic when she opens one of her multi-story hives and instructs me to walk away calmly should “things get dicey.” Her kids won’t come near, traumatized by a wasp swarm once. On this sunny August day, however, the “gals” seem mellow. And females they mostly are, except for the plumper, bug-eyed drones whose only job is to mate with a queen as she ascends into the air above a hive. “The hive is a family,” Hay says, but a bee and its colony are “separate entities,” the whole being more than the sum of its parts: a hive mind guiding one multi-winged body. She is so tuned in to her tribes that she can tell their mood by the pitch of their hum. She reads the body language of individual bees. They in turn recognize human faces, and she mentions how formerly a new beekeeper announced the death of the previous one to a hive, thereby introducing himself. “I have a relationship with them; they react to me,” Hay confirms. She misses “the ladies” in the quiet season when they’re in the barn.
She demonstrates how, when you walk through the beeline—the direct flight path between a hive and its food source—guards appear at the entrance and, sticking their butts out, emit pheromones, which recall foragers to defend their queen. I also learn that the foragers’ famous “waggle dance,” spelling a food’s distance and direction, is performed inside the hive, among busy bodies, not in midair.
On leaves near her brightly spray-painted “Hippie Hive,” Hay points out a tiny pale spider commonly preying on bee larvae. She frequently tests her hives for mites spreading viruses, and worries about an introduced hive beetle advancing northward. Before unroofing the hive, strapped down since moose knocked down several, Hay smudges it with a few puffs from the bellows-operated smoker. The can containing smoldering bark, spruce needles, or moose nuggets is the non-pipe-smoking honey farmer’s Valium. The bees, thinking wildfire! settle down to fuel up for the perceived emergency and potential exodus.
Next, Hay pulls out ten wood frames slotted inside the hive, one by one, careful not to crush any stray bees. She coaxes reluctant ones away from the danger with a drop of syrup on a gloved fingertip. Furry with insect bodies, some combs show empty dark brood cells, in which eggs will be laid; others shine with nectar, highoctane floral nourishment for the larvae and foragers; white chalky-looking cells brim with honey from foraging bees, nectar concentrated by wing fanning. Hay will extract that in a centrifuge, filter it, and jar it by hue. Foragers haul another food in baskets bulging on their legs: pollen. Different colors indicate different sources, which Hay identifies under a microscope. Plant species determine the honey’s color, amber from mixed wildflowers, silvery-yellow from fireweed. Hay calls the latter “the Champagne of honeys.” She meticulously tracks her hives’ populations and productivity with an app—beekeeping to a high degree is bookkeeping, it appears.
In the teeming, I spot the Hippie Queen, which Hay daubed with a green spot of paint. On another frame, there’s a “supersedure cell,” the larger wax cup from which a new queen will emerge to a lifetime reign of between one and seven years.
Beekeeping originally had been one of many items on Hay’s bucket list. Informed initially that it required 15 minutes of daily labor, she spends six to seven hours a summer day with her bees, finding their company calming and restorative, a still zone foil to her psychotherapist job of dealing with violent or depressed humans. A trauma specialist treating Hay, who had suffered a brain injury in a car accident, years ago told her that tending to hives is therapeutic. It demands focus, attention to detail, and problem solving, all without causing stress.
But for this bee whisperer, the attraction runs deeper. “We are all enchanted by this magical creature,” she has said of herself and her kind. Even I feel this, as a layman. Still, Hay is concerned about the future. “So many of our bees are vanishing for so many different reasons.” She has lost two hives through the city’s mosquito abatement. In 2019, those sprayings poisoned almost 40 Fairbanks-area apiaries.
“Bee wranglers” replacing losses sell starter stocks priced by the pound, taken from California almond farms. According to the Alaska Division of Agriculture, more than 3,000 boxes each spring are shipped to Fairbanks alone. Kenai, Palmer, Anchorage, and other areas in the state get additional ones. Some carry mites or spores.
Then there’s a climate gone haywire, mostly benefitting northern horticulture, it seems at a glance. Interior Alaska’s gardening season has grown by a month in the past 30 years. In the next ten to 15, we may see free-living bees here year-round. Already, honeybees that split from some keeper’s hive were found nesting in a tree outside Palmer, about 400 miles to the south. They did not survive long, unattended.
Natural-style beekeeping is Hay’s next, though likely not last, frontier.
“In the wild, they construct their hives in ways that work for them,” she has written, while “we put them in hives that work for us.” She saved several cuts from a century-old tree felled because carpenter ants had devoured the core of its base. Having watched bees living in a tree hollow in Scotland, Hay plans to turn these stumps into log hives like the ones she studied in pictures of Eastern European and Russian hives, to someday upgrade her current Finnish polymer bee homes.
