Bee Friends with Benefits – The Misfit Farmer

It’s amazing how fast Thomas can make a friend. His method is pretty direct:
“Hey, what’s your name?”
“Addie,” responds a little girl.
“Want to play?”
Instantly, Addie and Thomas are chasing each other. Occasionally, they pause for brief respites on the platform of the sliding board, where they chat about their favorite toys. They talk with a casual familiarity that implies they’ve known each other for twenty years, though they’ve only known each other for ten minutes. Plus, Thomas has only lived for four years, and I suspect Addie is a little younger.

I don’t think Thomas is a playground playboy in any regard because I’ve watched other kids use the same technique. In fact, it seems standard on the playground. A kid approaches another, names are exchanged, play commences, and soon they’re swapping toy stories until a parent announces it’s time to go. Then simple “byes” are exchanged, as if something extraordinary hadn’t just happened.

But it is extraordinary—at least if you’re an adult. Making friends is hard—or at least adults make it hard by overcomplicating things. Case in point: Thomas (who can’t read) seems innately more proficient at making friends than his dad, despite the latter having read Aristotle’s treatise on friendship—which, it turns out, hasn’t helped me much. The problem, I think, is that Aristotle forgot to include a chapter on making friends in an era of social media. Or if he did, that chapter has been lost to antiquity.

I am thankful for beekeeping, not just because I enjoy it, but because other people do too—and beekeeping occasionally draws oddballs into an orbit of friendship around this shared pursuit. And I mean pursuit in the literal sense, as in chasing and catching swarms. For instance, once I showed up for a swarm call only to be greeted shortly after by another beekeeper pursuing the same swarm. He looked oddly familiar, though I couldn’t place him at first. It turns out he was my wife’s obstetrician-gynecologist—the doctor who delivered Thomas into this world. Before long, we were not only swapping bee stories but extracting honey together.

Last year, I made a new beekeeping friend who lives nearby. He’s an engineer. I’ve always been impressed by engineers because their brains make decisions based on logic, math, and physics, whereas my brain mostly fails to make decisions. I’m also impressed by engineers’ discretionary income, which makes them the best bee friends—not only can they design an efficient and ergonomic honey house, but they can afford to build it and stock it with state-of-the-art shiny equipment. Meanwhile, with inflation these days, I can’t even afford to shop for equipment in my daydreams.

My engineer friend designed his own swarm trap and had a local woodworker make forty of them. He plans to place them in trees throughout the countryside. He said if he spent thirty dollars apiece on forty traps—$1,200 in total—he’d only need to catch ten swarms to break even since a swarm has roughly the same value as a three-pound package of bees, which currently costs about $120. I told him I was impressed, that being a former English major, I never knew math could be used like that. “Is that what calculus is for?” I asked.

“No, that’s just arithmetic,” he said.