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Rémy Rougeau

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Posted Friday, May 11, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET

May is the month for bees. The abbey apiary is my department, and I must clean out each hive in May, making sure the insects are well fed and ready for another season. The smell of spring is, for me, the sweet, waxy, and slightly boozy odor coming from a healthy hive. One whiff informs me they're all right, even before I see them. An odor of mold and rot—just the boozy part of the equation—tells me they're dead.

This year, I lost only one hive. The others made it through a long winter. We do not transport our colonies south, as do commercial beekeepers. Those people earn another season of income setting out hives to pollinate California almond or Georgia peach groves. Our bees stay here. I simply make sure that each hive has at least 90 pounds of honey, then tip the back of the box up for moisture runoff and place a black cardboard wrap around it to keep wind out and to warm the hive on sunny winter days. I've never lost more than four hives in a winter. And why I lose them is always a mystery: Dead hives seem to have plenty of honey in them.

In autumn, when the days become cold, bees form a basketball-sized cluster inside the hive. The queen is at the center of this cluster, and the bee colony keeps her cozy warm all winter, even in below-zero temperatures. Bees make no attempt to heat the entire hive. Instead, just the cluster itself is warm, generating heat from honey much as our bodies produce heat from food.

One concern I have for bees during the winter is heavy snowfall. Should hive entrances be covered, bees can suffocate. After every blizzard, I put on my snowshoes and walk two miles over prairie hills with a shovel. The trip itself can be an experience. Antelope, snowy owls, and jackrabbits are usually about. Mule and whitetail deer are everywhere. This year, a porcupine has been about near the bee yard. If I don't see these animals on a given trip, their tracks are always in the snow.

Throughout the year, I keep some bees at the abbey so that I can sting myself. Each week I take one bee sting in the knee; a local allergy specialist suggested this. Years ago, when I was first assigned the apiary, I nearly choked to death when a bee got into my suit and stung me in the neck. I was far from help and not breathing well. Fortunately, I had an anaphylactic kit my mother had given me, and after three injections of epinephrine my throat began to relax. Later, after the allergist thoroughly tested me, he suggested regular exposure to venom. And nowadays, I have no reaction to bee stings at all. They hurt for 10 seconds and it's over.

Not so hornet or wasp stings. Nasty creatures! Pain is worse the next day. The allergist told me that hornet venom is more closely related to that of rattlesnakes than to honeybees.

Hornets and wasps have a very loud color: glossy black and yellow, almost as if they were made of plastic. But a honeybee is a muted amber and black, sometimes all black. And the honeybee is not inquisitive like the hornet; it is interested only in plant pollen and nectar. As soon as a honeybee discovers that the cologne you are wearing and your loud shirt do not equal a flower, it will move on.

In a good year, I harvest a ton or more of very light clover honey. This is called "white" honey; it's almost as colorless as water. The first of it goes on the table in the comb. In addition, the monks consume about 600 pounds of liquid honey, but this is partly due to the fact that honey goes into all the freshly baked bread here. Not even Saint Elizabeth could make bread good as Brother Alban's.

I do love honeybees. For me, nothing in the world is more calming than to clean out hives after the long winter. Bees buzzing around my head seem to know I'm tidying up for them.

Monks and bees go together. Historians assume Benedictine monks harvested honey in Italy 1,500 years ago, judging from illuminated manuscripts depicting bees and monks and hives. And here I am today, a monk beekeeper with a lofty sense of continuity. I assume that one day a younger monk will take my place as beekeeper.

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Posted Friday, May 11, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET
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R? Rougeau is a Benedictine monk living in the upper Midwest and author of the recently published novel All We Know of Heaven (click here to buy it and here to read an excerpt).
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