I’ve been in Vermont escaping the world for a few days. Forty miles from the Canadian border, endless cedar waxwings, amazing food, and marble, marble everywhere. On the shores of Lake Champlain, there are marble boulders in white, black, pink, green, and even lavender. You can pick up soft marble stones in the sand, and, if you are ambitious, you can also walk away with a cut slab of it, remnants of the quarries that once made Vermont one of the world’s most productive sources of marble. We were ambitious. We now have a little rectangular slab of white Champlain marble, which we will polish and keep for use as a doorstop or paper weight or weapon, as occasion requires.

While we were gone, a black bear destroyed the beehive. After our raccoon foraging disaster last year, we had approached beekeeping this year with consummate caution. The hive was situated on a base wedged into a concrete foundation. Its three stories–one for brood, created in May when we got our five-frame nuc colony; a second for winter honey stores, added in June, drawn out in comb and filled with honey in less than a month by our amazing bees; and a third, smaller story for our own honey harvest, added in early July and expected to yield by September–were strapped together and attached to the foundation pieces. It was solid, could not be tipped, and the hive bodies alone weighed more than 100 pounds, all of it brood, pollen, and heavy sweet honey. We were succeeding with our girls, and it was good.

Too good. Even I could smell the honey outside the hive. That place was heaven on earth. And a bear got wind of it, and came around in the middle of the night, lifted the entire strapped-together three stories plus foundation pieces, and threw the whole thing down a hill to break it open. Then he had his way with it. He tore out all the honey and comb and ate it. He ate much of the brood as well. So much for our beautiful girls and the amazing experience of helping them thrive.

We moped for a few days. Read a lot about black bears and bees and what to do. Learned about bear proofing hives, and began to move from defeat to determination. Bears are simply a part of the landscape where we live. This one was most likely pushed into a residential area by overpopulation out in the middle of nowhere. Lots of people have been reporting problems with bears coming onto their property this year. You just have to live with it. And so, we are thinking that this doesn’t have to mean we can’t keep bees. It just means that we have to be even more proactive about major pest prevention next year than we were this year. We have plans for how to do that, and will spend the fall putting in a fence to surround the hive area. We’ll start fresh with new bees and a new queen in the spring. And when the bears come around, we’ll be ready.