When the queen (marked by humans with a yellow dot) marches through the hive, the worker bees turn to face her. During active season, the queen lays up to 1,500 eggs a day. Her genes determine the hive's personality; her pheromones, its strength.

Of the many ways to procrastinate on a warm afternoon in the Northwest, watching honeybees is one of the most absorbing. Their aerial loops give shape to the formless air; their hum is steady as a lawnmower's (but less annoying); their trail leaves whiffs of whichever berry blossoms or buttery Scots broom their fuzzy bodies recently brushed.

	Second-generation beekeeper Rob Gorham stings himself with a live honeybee in his Toppenish bee yard. The bee venom relieves joint stiffness in some people. Others eat local, raw, unfiltered honey to alleviate allergies to pollen.

The best part about procrastinating with bees is that while you're avoiding whatever it is you're supposed to be doing, the bees are working. Something is getting done even if it's not by you. And what Apis mellifera accomplishes is astonishing.

To gather enough nectar to make a pound of honey, worker bees visit millions of flowers and fly more than 50,000 miles (twice around the world) buzzing blossom-to-blossom in a one-half to five-mile radius from their hive. Field bees ferry the nectar back to the colony in special hanging stomachs, add enzymes and store it in wax cells. House bees then roll the sweet drops up and down their tongues while fanning warm air with their wings until most of the moisture evaporates. Thus the nectar becomes honey, food for mature bees and for the humans clever enough to collect it.

Around here, a single bee colony may produce 50 to 150 pounds of honey a season. A single bee makes less than half a teaspoon in its entire short life. At the height of honey season, the average worker bee lives only six weeks. Her two pairs of wings become so frayed from frantic foraging, she drops to the ground and dies.

If you were a honeybee and could pick any six-week stretch of the year in which to live your life, this would be prime season. The Northwest's heaviest nectar flow rushes right now through the wild blackberry bushes rambling along roadsides and the fireweed blooming in logged mountains.

Evan Sugden of the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association teaches a class of volunteers how to care for bees at the Washington Park Arboretum. Without beekeepers to medicate hives against mites, there would be no more feral bees in North America.

With sunshine and a gentle buzz filling the air, you might easily be lulled into reverie about cooperation among bees; the interdependence of flora and fauna; the ingenuity of humans who figured out how to harvest the bees' sweet riches.

Enough daydreaming. Of course there's a dark side. Next: Society and human survival.

WES UHLMAN, former mayor of Seattle, lawyer, successful real-estate developer and avid apiary hobbyist, is a charming conversationalist who's good at piquing a listener's interest in whatever he's talking about, especially if the topic is bees.

He describes bee sex. The queen, on a rare flight out of the hive, mates in mid-air with six to 17 males, called drones, who lose their organs — and lives — to the rather violent act.

Male-female relationships. The guys care only about mating with the virgin queen and are so lazy, they're fed and groomed by the workers, all girls, who do every bit of the hive's work: housecleaning, grooming and feeding pollen to newborns, making honey and comb, foraging for nectar and pollen, guarding the hive from predators. "A lot of people feel drones have a very good life because they don't work," Uhlman says, "but I don't happen to agree with that." Come autumn, when the bloom is off and the colony needs to conserve honey for winter, the workers boot the drones out the hive's front door, leaving them to starve in the cold night.

	COURTESY OF VAN SHEROD
	Several years ago while attending the Western Apiculture Society's annual meeting, Sherod volunteered to try out a bee beard.

The former mayor then lightens the mood by joking about the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association's next monthly meeting, "Sex and the Swarming Queen" (he wasn't kidding); comments on bees and governance ("There's no democracy in a bee society. Democracy is sort of messy. It insists we recognize diversity of culture, race, economics. . . . None of that in the hive.") .

He throws in local color about urban honeybees' neighborhood hangouts. (On Queen Anne, where Uhlman keeps his own two hives, the bees forage mostly in great leaf maples; in Magnolia, it's madronas; Capitol Hill, locust trees.) You'd think each neighborhood would lend a distinct taste to its honey, but as it turns out, the bees also sip from sidewalk cherry blossoms and your neighbor's dandelions and flower garden, so all city honey takes on a similar dark tang no matter its hive's street address.

Finally, Uhlman cuts to his takeaway message: There are virtually no more feral honeybees in North America. In the past decade, tracheal mites have choked the bees; varroa mites have caused fatal birth defects. Washington State has a third fewer honeybee colonies than in 1991. Alarmed? Here's the kicker: "If bees did not exist," Uhlman says melodramatically, "humans would not exist."

There are many pollinating insects, including 5,000 species of bees in the U.S., but it's honeybees who shoulder most of the work because they can be moved from orchard to field in boxy hives. America has about 2.8 million surviving colonies of honeybees. We depend on them. They depend on beekeepers.

YOU CAN'T KEEP bees without understanding an enormous amount about biology, botany and truck repair. Setting up even one hive requires a zillion little parts (honey supers, wooden frames, wax foundation, mite strips, uncapping knives, wire mesh, smoker funnels, zippered bee suits, medicated shortening patties and strips) and a tinkerer's temperament. This attracts people who are, in their own words, opinionated, independent, intellectual and intense — the kind of folks who tend to do whatever they're doing to extreme.

On a warm day, hobby beekeeper Van Sherod doesn't bother to don a protective suit to check his Queen Anne hives because he knows the bees are too happy and busy to sting. Honeybees rarely sting unless you threaten their hive. Around here, most casual stings are not from honeybees but from more aggressive wasps and yellowjackets.

Just for fun. The president of the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association, John deGroot, once calculated it would take 2,376,000 bees to lift a 180-pound man.

One hobby leads to another. Twenty-three years ago, Elfi Rahr noticed that on sunny winter days, when bees felt warm enough to fly, they'd congregate around hellebores, winter-blooming plants with fairy-bell blossoms that she'd planted in her Bellevue garden. Hellebores, she realized, could fill the Northwest nectar lull that precedes the bloom of powdery willow catkins and filberts in February. Now, Rahr has 10,000 hellebores in her garden, a nectar paradise for her husband's dozen hives.

Life changing. Bees fascinated Keith Bartelson ever since the 36-year-old road worker did a report on them in junior-high school. His dad's death "made me realize you can't take life for granted, you gotta seize it," so Bartelson made a list of things he wanted to accomplish he hadn't got around to. Find a wife. Scuba dive. Learn to fly. Buy a house. Keeping bees was No. 8.

He was purchasing tin wire, a small paper bag of nails, 200 sheets of wax foundation and a spur embedder resembling a pizza wheel when I ran into him at Beez Neez in Snohomish, the state's largest apiary-supply store. He'd had a busy year. Scuba and flying lessons, a February wedding, new house and now the bees.

Commercial beekeepers differ from hobbyists in number of hives and dependence on them for income, but they, too, can talk for hours about the intricacies and eccentricities of beekeeping.

	Without bees to pollinate the 230,000 acres of orchards in Washington State, we'd have no fruit! In Toppenish, a honeybee gathers nectar from a cherry blossom.

Before visiting a commercial beekeeper in Toppenish, we borrowed white bee suits, helmets, veils and gauntlets from deGroot at the beekeepers association. He's a database administrator for Regence Blue Shield when he isn't minding his own hobby hives or teaching newbie beekeepers about theirs.

"Stuff a handkerchief into each side pocket so that bees cannot crawl down and sting through the thin pocket material," he e-mailed, warning us not to wear anything dark, fuzzy or otherwise bearlike because it would agitate the bees. "Stuff your pants cuff into your boot top . . . Duct-tape the pants cuff to the boot-top . . . Relax. The bees will be unaware of your existence. Crawling all over your helmet and veil is normal and non-hostile."

In the Toppenish beeyard, the photographer and I zipped, taped, tucked and veiled as instructed. Our preparations sent second-generation beekeeper Rob Gorham into peals of laughter. "Damn!" he bellowed. "You look like professionals!"

Gorham sets his 3,500 bee colonies on almonds, apricots, peaches, nectarines, pears, cherries, apples and other crops throughout Washington, Oregon, California and the Dakotas. Farmers pay him for spring fruit pollination, he gives landowners token fees (or jars of honey) to let his bees forage during the summer, and this fall, if it's a good year, he'll harvest 210,000 pounds of honey.

That afternoon, he wore no gloves on his arthritic hands and threw only a flimsy net hood over his baseball cap. He didn't use a funnel bee smoker to intoxicate the bees, like in the movies, because that makes them rush into the hive to gorge on honey. Instead, he gently brushed the bees away with his bare hands before prying off the lid with a hive tool resembling a mini-crowbar.

Tim Celeski checks his West Seattle hives at least once a week during active season to look for brood, overcrowding and mites. In the past decade, invasions of varroa and tracheal mites have reduced the state's honeybee population by a third.

Inside the stacked wooden boxes, frames hung like folders in a filing cabinet, each 5/16th inch from the next, a "bee space" that feels not too big and not too small to bees. The queen was close; we could tell because several of the wax cells held day-old eggs that looked like shimmering white dots. Brown brood cells, containing developing larvae and pupae, were surrounded by a meandering river of honey cells. Worker bees had already capped some of these with wax, made by molding and chewing dandruff that flakes off their abdomens.

The gentle Italian bees didn't sting Gorham until he picked up a worker and poked its stinger into his wrist to demonstrate how to scrape away the pulsing venom sac without squishing it. Bee venom helps ease stiffness in some people's joints; an hour later, his wrist could bend a little more.

"Bees are kinda nice to me when I work with them," Gorham said. "I just wish people could work like that." We talked awhile about how much he learned from his dad, who died in 1996 after 60 years in the business. Then a pesticides truck rolled past. The beekeeper swore.

Some pesticides you learn to live with, he said, but a few of the new ones are killing bees, and it seems some growers and regulators won't listen, even when beekeepers point out carnage on the ground in front of hives, dead bees with their tongues hanging out. "Whether you realize it or not," Gorham said, "people in the city, the farmer, the growers, the beekeepers — we need each other. But it seems there's a generation coming up that says: 'I don't need you . . . I'll spray what I want.' Well, excuse me: Where are you going to get your food, stupid? You like raspberries? Hello? Thank the beekeeper for pollinating them."

Gorham's beekeeping operation consists of a huge, jumbled shed of tools for making bee frames "or whatever, you name it," several extractors, a temperamental forklift, an 18-wheel crimson Freightliner for large loads and long hauls, a couple smaller trucks in varying states of disrepair. He does all the hauling himself and most of the other work (checking, cleaning and medicating hives), with three helpers. To check if a colony he'd set in cherry blossoms suffered tracheal mites, Gorham pulled a Radio Shack microscope from his broken glove compartment, sliced open a bee with his pocket knife and checked for brown spots in its pearly innards. All clear.

	Beekeepers range from former Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman, above, to hippie naturalists. They tend to be intense, opinionated and enthusiastic about their hobby, which benefits neighboring plants and gardeners alike.

Even though commercial beekeepers manipulate their hives, it's striking how homemade and humble a bee operation feels compared to, say, a cattle feed lot, where the animals are artificially crowded and fed corn instead of the grass they naturally eat, or a chicken warehouse where the birds have no beaks and wear red contacts.

The federal government officially considers honeybees livestock, but really, they're little wild things, free to come and go as they please. They answer not to the beekeeper, but to nature. Collectively, the workers decide which egg will become queen and how long she should rule. Her genes determine the hive's personality; her pheromones, its strength. At peak, she lays up to 1,500 eggs a day during her two-year reign, and that, plus a few other natural cycles, limits the population of any colony to about 80,000 bees.

So Gorham's commercial colonies look almost exactly like the hives on Mayor Uhlman's Queen Anne terrace, which in turn are remarkably similar to the homes wild honeybees would make for themselves in tree stumps and hedgerows — if not for mites and development.

This year's cool Northwest spring triggered the strangest bloom cycle Gorham had ever seen in Yakima Valley's patchwork of orchards. Normally, the blossoms of pears, peaches, cherries and apples open in sequence, a couple weeks apart. This year, all the flowers opened together, BANG! so in one evening, we were able to see Gorham's bees in white cherry blossoms and also amongst the pale pink Rome apple buds.

As the sun went down, the stragglers buzzed back to their hive. The orchardist had set out a green pail of water for the bees to drink and thoughtfully put sticks in it so if the bees fell in, they wouldn't drown.

The Puget Sound Beekeepers Association will hold its next general meeting June 25, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Graham Visitors Center, Washington Park Arboretum, 2200 Arboretum Drive E., Seattle. The Beekeepers' Summer Picnic is July 20, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., behind greenhouses at Graham Visitors Center. All welcome. Information, 425-788-2259; www.pugetsoundbees.org.

FOSSILS SHOW the earliest bees on earth about 80 million years ago, as flowering plants came to dominate over palms and ferns. The ancestors of our honeybees likely originated 8 or 9 million years ago around the Caspian Sea. These diverged into the honeybee races we know today, the bees of ancient Rome, of mead and church candles. Bees wax was used as currency; honey, for centuries before beet sugar, was the primary sweetener.

Colonists carried colonies of honeybees to Jamestown in the 1600s. Eventually, swarms multiplied and billowed across the country. For a long time, the home hives, wild honeybees and bugs living in hedgerows and woods were enough to pollinate the nation's small orchards and farms.

"You took everything for granted," says Prof. Walter Steve Sheppard, who holds the Thurber Chair of Apiculture at Washington State University. "Now, when you go into a former desert, irrigate it and put a couple hundred acres of apple trees, you've got to provide pollination for them."

Washington state has almost 230,000 acres requiring pollination. Crop value: $1.87 billion.

Same time, the number of honey-producing colonies has dropped from 85,000 in 1991 to 52,000 in 2000. Mostly the problem is mites, but also, many of the state's beekeepers are in their 50s and 60s, and as they approach retirement, banks are reluctant to help young farmers invest in the risky business.

Given what's at stake, food and money, you'd think people would be more alarmed. Many don't know. "The role of honey bees is underappreciated in general," Sheppard says. "It's also amazing how people don't seem to pay attention to food production." As for the beekeepers, perhaps it's their nature to not get excited or angry, to move slowly; otherwise, the bees will sting.

In the movie "Ulee's Gold," Peter Fonda plays a taciturn Southern beekeeper with a dysfunctional family who finds solace in his bees. At the end of the movie, after getting literally stabbed in the back by his son's cronies, Ulee visits his son in prison. The father-son bond is fragile; their dialogue sparse.

Son: Bees?

Ulee: Hell, mites are chokin 'em. Insecticides are killing them. Drought's starving them. They're fine.

ON A COOL Friday evening at the end of April, deGroot and a half dozen white-suited volunteers gather under cottonwood and holly trees in the Washington Park Arboretum's beeyard to scrape moldy wax and old honey out of the demonstration frames. All 10 hives had died out over the winter. Human error. There was a change in apiary managers, someone thought someone else had removed the mite strips on time, but apparently not. You learn.

It's not like a horse lover walking into a barn and finding a stallion dead, the beekeepers say, but sad. Something in your care died. The intellectual investment didn't pay off; your plan failed. Besides, the club had to pay $300 for six packages of new bees.

Still, everybody gets excited hearing the new bees buzz in their temporary boxes of pine and mesh. Each box holds three pounds of bees (about 10,000), a tin can of sugar syrup, and, in her own tiny box, a queen marked with a yellow dot. Finally, it's time to open the packages and release the bees into their new homes.

First, you pry the cork out of the queen's chamber and shake her into the new hive. She crawls down into the frames, trying to get away from the light, and wherever she goes, the other bees follow. Soon the wooden super is crawling with fuzzy gold and black bee bodies, exploring, tipping their scent glands into the air, pulling at the wax foundation with mandibles.

By Monday, the worker bees will clean and mold the comb so their queen can start laying. Egg, larvae, pupae, nurse bees, house bees, flowers. By the time you read this, the next generation of bees will be out, buzzing in the sun.

On a warm afternoon, take a moment to look. You'll need sharp eyes to spot the tiny pollen baskets attached to their mascara-lash legs and total concentration to follow their airy dance. Bees make a mental map when they forage, later translating the terrain into choreography that tells the rest of the hive where to find nectar and how much. All this, wired into bug brains smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.