Perspective: Life is sweeter as a beekeeper. Then you get stung

My first encounter with a residential beekeeper occurred in North Carolina. Until this time, I had not realized that people actually chose to have hives of bees in their yard.

I was picking up a bed frame with my roommate. We drove to the only house on the well-manicured block with a wild, overgrown yard. The woman at the door told us she keeps the weeds in order to feed her flock of bees in the back.

“That’s curious,” I said. “I don’t see a single bee.” She looked at me, stricken. “They’re all dead,” she whispered.

The odds are stacked against the local apiarist (beekeeper). Bees are sensitive little things. Weather, pesticides, horrific diseases like American foulbrood, parasites like the Varroa destructor mite and the urbanization of the natural environment all have contributed to a 93% decline of western bumblebees in the past two decades.

At the same time, bees can smell fear in the form of an alarm pheromone — a chemical I secrete at social gatherings and during screenings of “Monsters, Inc.” (2001). If they were people, they’d be bad people, because when they are disturbed they go straight for the face like Conor McGregor at a Miami Heat game.

But honey is good, really good. So naturally, when I moved to the Beehive State, beginning my own apiary seemed inevitable.

The first step was gathering the right supplies. I found some old hive boxes in the KSL classifieds, and drove down to meet a man named Leslie, who has been in the bee business for decades.

Leslie pulled three large, dusty boxes from his garage. Despite the unsanitary storage conditions, he removed a honeycomb lined tray from a box, dipped his finger into the honey and tasted it. “Beekeeping will make you a better person,” Leslie told me. “They work so hard — you can’t be lazy watchin’ them.”

He handed me the boxes, some of which had “BAD” written in permanent marker. An auspicious start.

I cleaned the hive and set it up in some pastureland out in Summit County (so the bees wouldn’t know where I live). The next step was getting my hands on a real-life colony of Apis mellifera.

It turns out, in cities around the globe, there are gangs of apiarists that hunt swarms of bees. They even have a hotline. If you see a writhing mass of bumblebees on a branch outside your local credit union, you can call the hotline, and an amateur beekeeper will collect the nightmare and put it in a box where it can’t hurt you anymore.

This underground network runs deep. I texted a man who made beehives out of salvaged metal from a crashed semi truck last year. He did not say how he got the metal, but put me in touch with “a very reputable guy” who sells 3lb boxes of bees.

You buy bees at night, because that’s when they all return to the hive after a long day of gathering pollen. So my housemate, his dad and I hopped into a truck and headed over to the pick-up location, under the cover of darkness. We were five minutes away when we got lit up by police lights.

The officer peered into our car. We all had our shirts tucked in, belts extra tight and socks pulled over our pant legs to prevent stings. In short, we looked suspicious. “Please, officer, we need to pick up our bees,” we said. The officer, it turned out, took months of beekeeping classes before his wife decided she wanted chickens instead (we could feel the heartache in his story). He claimed a spoonful of local honey every day cured his allergies, and let us go.

It seems this bee conspiracy goes all the way to the top.

On a quiet residential street at 10 p.m., we were instructed to park along the sidewalk. We exited the vehicle nervously and looked around. The silence of a sleeping city was deafening, finally broken by the creaking of an old gate along the shrubbery. A man in a T-shirt exited a sideyard.

“You here for the bees?” he asked. I nodded. He led me into his backyard, where six boxes sat on scattered cinder blocks. He picked one up like it was a crate of Beach Plum La Croix, not a container of flying thumbtacks. The sound of angry buzzing grew louder. “Let’s go,” he said calmly. We slowly walked to the back of the truck, strapped in the box and closed the topper.

“You boys have bee suits?” the zen master asked. I didn’t want to be the kid that bundled up for the paintball party, so I neglected to buy a bee suit. He shook his head. “I was stung three times just now, but they don’t affect me anymore.”

We were informed that recently a veteran beekeeper went to the hospital after bees climbed up his pant leg and stung him 50 times. We were also informed that upon arrival at our destination, we would be dealing with a very angry box of bees (the juxtaposition of these statements was deeply unsettling).

By the time we got to the pasture, I accepted the fact that I was scared of bees. I came to terms with this reality as I slowly opened the hatch of the pickup. DreamWorks Studio’s “The Bee Movie” (2007) starring Jerry Seinfeld had not prepared me to face the chaotic, petty violence of the natural world.

I was wearing a borrowed hoodie tucked into my pants, and safety goggles with a rag hanging from the elastic headband like a veil. The bees began to stir as I slowly picked up the box, so I did my best impersonation of Jeremy Renner from the independent film “The Hurt Locker” (2008) directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

The 50-foot walk took about 30 seconds, and the bees barely knew they were out of the truck by the time they were snugly set against their new hive. The brisk night air from the car ride had pacified the little devils, and I was safe.

The last step in starting a hive is transferring your box of bees to the new hive (a series of larger boxes).

My plan seemed bullet proof. I would drive to Park City, do a little mountain biking in the early afternoon, and transfer the bees before rain destroyed their cardboard home.

Instead, I was caught in the middle of a hailstorm, biking furiously as lightning struck the meadows around me, hoping against all odds these bees would survive. Covered in welts and freezing from rain, my housemate and I stripped off our soaked shirts and made a beeline to the colony of (probably) wet bees.

We crept up to the box as a light sprinkle tickled our shirtless torsos. We were prime targets for the little insects who have evolved to sting the soft fleshy parts of mammals. Upon finding that they were alive, and very much active, I felt both the churn of relief and icy fear.

To transfer the bees, we had to open the top and place each frame (carpeted with thousands of bees) into the new box. My roommate found an inner peace which transformed him into a natural part of the surroundings. His swaying arms, like the limbs of oak trees, gently pinched the frames barehanded and placed them in the covered wooden hive.

I simply lost my cool. Umberto Eco was correct when he said, “Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.”

I’d like to think it was a good cop, bad cop situation, where I distracted the bees by using my hat like a bullfighter’s cape while my buddy whispered comforting thoughts to them, carrying their queen to safety.

The bees attacked my face and head while he methodically made the switch, at which point an overly aggressive worker plunged her barbed needle into my eyebrow. My roommate walked away without a scratch, but half of my face turned purple and stayed that way for days.

This is the part of beekeeping where you wonder, how much local honey could I have bought instead of that box of real bees? Will my bees survive the summer, and the winter following? Will I survive this hobby?

Only time will tell. If beekeeping has made me a better person, it certainly doesn’t show.