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Marsha Giambalvo, co-founder of Backdoor Harvest—a local company that helps people plan, build, maintain, and harvest gardens—is so dedicated to her bees that when one stung her during a demonstration for this article, she waited until we were finished to remove the stinger. “When you get stung, you don’t want to scrape the stinger out because it releases a pheromone, and the bees smell it and start getting aggressive,” she explained. Although Giambalvo has always had a healthy fear of bees, she knew she wanted to work with them. When her dad gave her a beehive one year for Christmas, she knew she had to. After joining the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association, reading as many books about bees she could get her hands on, and talking to “a bunch of old dudes” about their principles and methods, she was ready to try it out for herself.
Giambalvo and Joe Mohr (above left), who helps with the bees and happens to be the brother of Backdoor’s other co-founder, Melissa Mohr, have five hives in the area. Three of the hives sit in the woods behind The Green Center, a non-profit organization in University City that is located, fittingly, at the corner of Blackberry Avenue and Mulberry Lane. With its gardens and focus on nature education, the center is the perfect place to host Backdoor Harvest’s bees. The bees pollinate the surrounding gardens, produce honey, and offer a valuable learning opportunity to the center’s visitors, many of whom are children. On the day of our visit, for example, a kids’ camp group (above right) came down to the hives for a look. Giambalvo and Mohr took questions from them, helping to dispel myths that bees are pests to be feared and exterminated.
Although Giambalvo is stung on a regular basis, she doesn’t blame the bees and fears them less than she used to. “Working with them puts you in a meditative state,” she said as she suited up in a beekeeper’s hood and gloves. Nearby, Mohr worked on filling the smoker with leaves (above). Getting the smoke to just the right temperature, where it’s “cloudy and puffy,” is essential to calming the bees, and allows the pair to open the hives.
Comprised of stacked boxes (below left) that can be rearranged from bottom to top and added to as the hive grows, the hive’s structure is carefully planned. Inside the boxes hang upright trays that simulate a natural hive. Trays in bottom boxes have deeper holes for larvae, while those in the top boxes are shallower for honey. If too much space is left between the trays, bees will fill it up with wax; if large amounts of honey collect at the bottom, the hive’s too crowded. In a natural hive, the bees would split, forming a second home; in the artificial hive, it’s up to the beekeepers to add more boxes.
As Giambalvo pulled trays out of the hive, carefully loosening them first with what's called a hive tool, we fell into the meditative state she described with nearly all of our senses engaged. We watched guard bees lingering around the outside of the box protecting the hive from invaders, and worker bees buzzing past, returning from their pollination runs. We heard the hive humming with life when we stepped closer, and when we held a tray filled with bees (above right), we felt the vibrations of their buzzing. We held another tray considerably heavier from its load of fragrant honey, and we imagined how that honey would taste on a warm slice of toast. Not once did we worry about getting stung.
Our visit turned fortuitous when we saw the queen (the longest bee, below left) on the first tray Giambalvo pulled from the hive. Larger than the other bees and with fewer stripes and smaller wings, the queen can also be identified by the several attendant bees following closely behind her. Another lucky sighting was of a “new-bee” (below right, in the middle) as Giambalvo called it, poking its antenna out of the wax covering its hole. Even Mohr had never seen that before and joked that the bee would forever think it was special since its birth was greeted by a picture-taking audience.
If someone is interested in starting his or her own hive, Giambalvo can assist. In addition to helping clients set up and maintain gardens, she and the other farmers at Backdoor Harvest can build suitable environments for chickens and bats. Like bees, bats are often maligned in our culture but remain one of the best ways to control mosquitoes. Also like bees, who are threatened by Colony Collapse Disorder, bats are dying off from White-Nose Syndrome, proving to many that pesticides and global warming have very real deleterious effects—topics that Mohr covers in his cartoon series “Hank D and the Bee,” which combines his love of bees and concern about the environment.
It’s not too late to start a garden, Giambalvo stressed, since they continue to plant through the summer and build gardens in the fall, adding: “We are completely flexible to helping anybody in any capacity because we want to build community and we want to build the knowledge that you can grow your own local food and eat healthy without having to buy it at the store.” If you’d like to see Giambalvo and Mohr in action, they’ll be back at The Green Center later this year, when they’ll harvest honey as part of the center’s fall fundraiser (check the center’s website for more details about the event as it draws near).
Photographs by Kate McDonald
