Allan Appel photos
Childhood beekeeper assistant Paul Caron and beekeeper Ray Sola.
Mind the bees.
Beginning as a little kid growing up along the river in Fair Haven, Paul Caron used to don gloves and a long-sleeved flannel shirt as he rose in the bucket of a cherry picker, the proud assistant to his grandfather, Frederick Klein.
Klein was the neighborhood bee-keeper whom the police called upon to remove swarms lodging in people’s attics or walls.
No matter how often he performed this feat, Caron recalled with pride, he was never stung, not even once. It couldn’t be just good luck, but what, he had wondered all these decades, was the reason?
Some 50 years later, on Sunday afternoon at the New Haven Museum’s Pardee-Morris House in Morris Cove, Caron learned the likely reason why.
He was was among some 40 people on a bee-friendly sunny afternoon who had gathered on the grass to hear Ray Sola — an apian advocate, educator, and keeper of more than 100 hives in southern Connecticut — offer an hour’s riveting and entertaining talk, “Bee-Keeping Basics.”
“A swarm is calm,” Sola explained, “because the bees are full of nectar that they fill up on to give them energy to fly. They’re so full of nectar, they can’t bend their bodies sufficiently, which they must do, to get in position to sting you.”
“I never knew that,” Caron called out from underneath a yellow hat he was wearing against the sun.
And that was followed by one interesting fact after another about honeybees, of the kind Sola displayed in a demonstration hive under the white tent that had been set up for him on the grass.
Of the 30,000 to 60,000 or so bees in an average hive there’s one queen, who lays all the eggs; 3 percent of the residents are drones whose only job is to mate (and then die) with the queen, some 30 matings in succession and all in flight — that’s what a swarm is, and no wonder they’re tired! And the rest of the colony’s residents are worker bees, who are also female.
In effect, Sola concluded, “a honey bee colony is basically a women’s colony.”
If mating in flight is not the only cool thing about honeybees, how about that they are deaf?
That means, Sola said, “if they sting you and you yell at them, they’ll get over it.”
They also never sleep (next time you call someone a busy bee, make sure they aren’t operating a motor vehicle). They also are entirely vegan (pollen, nectar, water being the diet). And they fly up to five miles from the hive to dine, but can’t even get airborne if the temperature is below 50 degrees.
You just got the feeling that Sola, although he’s been stung some 180 times this year (he’s read that if you are stung 200 times in a year, you are immune from most of the swelling effects) is utterly fascinated by this hobby and small business (“Rays Raw Honey”) and it was catchy.
Audience members asked why the stings didn’t seem to bother him.
They’re mostly occurring on his fingers, he answered, which come into contact with the hive when he “works” them. To work the hives means checking that there’s a queen and the work of honey-making is going on and also, importantly, pro-actively treating to remove the Varroa mite, which is responsible for the roller-coaster colony loss and then rebound that has been the fate of pollinating bees over the last ten years or so.
(Unlike wasps and yellow jackets who have stingers like straight needles and can repeatedly sting you, the honey bee’s stinger is barbed shaped and it can only get you once because it stays stuck in your flesh until you pull it out yourself!)
As to why he hangs out with his stinging pals, Sola learned the skills initially 16 years ago from a neighbor and began with two hives. He discovered after his hives accumulated that North Haven, where he lives, requires two acres of land to have a hive. He had less and, notwithstanding his love for bees, Sola was not about to move.
Instead he began to disperse his hives among friends, fellow amateur melittologists (from the Greek word for honey) and those he had begun to mentor all over our Greater New Haven area, including one hive that, until recently, lived happily beneath the turbine at Phoenix Press at the end of James Street in Fair Haven.
All told, in his 113 hives, with an average of 50,000 bees per hive, Sola is the keeper of some six million bees. “That’s more than the population of Connecticut.”
His hives also produce about 25 pounds of honey per hive, which actually is quite poor — Connecticut is a honey-poor state — compared to a place like North Dakota that produces some 100 pounds per hive.
But Sola’s clearly not in it for the money.
Buzzing back (sorry, I succumbed) to why he hangs out with the perpetual danger of being stung, he concluded, “I’d rather be around thousands of stinging insects than certain people. If I’m stung, I’ll know why, that it’s because I’m breaking into their house.”
He also said he likes the calmness that is engendered being around bees as they respond to the vibration of movement.
So, class, they’re deaf, they reproduce while flying in mid air, they don’t sleep, and I haven’t added that they are able to hold their poop in for many months in the winter rather than befoul the hive where they are busy serving their queen.
Paul Caron knew about that too. He said after 20 years of amiably raising bees on empty lots where Chatham Street meets the Quinnipiac in Fair Haven, his grandfather, along with his partner in the bee biz, Pip Regan, were finally — this was about 1970 –asked to remove the hives. Reason?
Because the local housewives had complained to the police. The problem was there were stains, bee poop, all over the white sheets and other clothing that hung on the outdoor clotheslines of Fair Haven.
Today, Sola said, to his knowledge there are no specific regulations he was aware of regarding beekeeping in the Elm City, as opposed to North Haven where the two-acre rule still obtains. “The idea is to place the hives in a way as to be good neighbors.”
Next up in the Pardee-Morris lecture and talk series is an Aug. 10 presentation, “Reviving the Quinnipiac,” by Courtney McGinness, same place, 2 p.m.