Weird winter puts Bay Area beekeepers to the test
You’ve probably heard of backyard chickens in California cities. But backyard beekeeping?
Hundreds of Bay Area residents have been posting hives in recent years, and the hobby took off when pandemic lockdowns forced people to stay home. According to Robert Mathews, the association’s new president, the membership of the Alameda County Beekeepers Association alone has increased from about 60 in 2011 to 500 in 2011.
“There are beehives and chickens in every third house, it seems,” says Mathews, 57, a tech by day, weekend bee enthusiast.
Beekeepers say their hobby is a solitary, meditative pastime that helps them connect with nature despite their busy lives. I first heard about the growth of home beekeeping from my neighbor in Oakland, a full-time nurse who has three hives in his backyard.
Tracy Fasanella, another Oakland resident, got into beekeeping this year. She adopted two beehives from a friend in San Leandro. Fasanella, a semi-retired accountant, said she felt fulfilled and occasionally discouraged by the wealth of knowledge she gained from her bees.
“I had no idea what I was going to get into,” she said. “Sometimes I find it quite scary to have 40,000 bees around you.”
This year’s unusually rainy and cold California winter added challenges for beginners still trying to learn the ropes.
The wind continued to knock over hives, killing some bees and leaving little food for those who survived. The unusually stormy winter too 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 experienced a season as complicated as last winter. Bees couldn’t get enough food or pollen, which made their larvae sick. And opportunistic viruses are popping up more than she’s ever seen.
In the Berkeley Hills during the first sunny week of April, Lambie and her business partner, Karen Rhein, who call their consultancy BeeChicks, conducted mite checks on a group of hives. Mites can damage hives by infecting them with viruses. One type of virus transmitted by mites causes a beetle to be born with no abdomen, while another type deforms their wings and makes them too weak to fly.
“Eleven Mites!” exclaimed Rhein, counting and telling a monster.
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 container of water to record how many mites fall out. If more than 15 mites are found, it means a hive can quickly become distressed and need to be treated.
While Rhein was running the test, Lambie was on the phone with another Bay Area customer who had called in a panic. The customer’s bees swarmed out of the hive en masse.
She turned and sighed. “This is going to happen so often this spring,” she said.
Where we travel
Today’s tip comes from Levie Isaacks:
“I live in Sebastopol, where my favorite trip into town is from Freestone through Valley Ford to Petaluma and Highway 101. The bright green rolling hills with clumps of California poppies and happy cows is an exhilarating, visceral experience this time of year. It’s incredibly beautiful.”
Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We will share more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.
And before you go, good news
The New York writer Dana Goodyear recently published a beautiful essay about the great boom of California.
The year Goodyear moved to Los Angeles, in the winter of 2004-2005, was one of the rainiest in the region, and her memories of that time are of slick roads and fallen palm fronds. She recalls understanding Los Angeles as a place that was “abundant, intoxicating, untapped.”
This year’s spring returns to those days, as gentle slopes have turned purple and yellow and California poppies peek through the cracks in the sidewalk. she writes:
“It is difficult to remain optimistic in a dry landscape. A parched city is a metaphor for dysfunction, and a mirror of it. It seems like the end of a story. The failure of an ill-conceived experiment. Evidence of unsustainability. But when a desert comes to life, the story begins again. There is, in addition to the simple joy of seeing so much color, a sense of possibility. The chaos feels generous and generative.
Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow.
PS Here it is today’s mini crossword.
Soumya Karlamangla, Briana Scalia, and Johnna Margalotti contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.
Sign up here to receive this newsletter in your inbox.