Beehive on the Boat Next Door

One of the more interesting facets of living aboard in a boatyard is getting to know your neighbors.  Every boat is cheek by jowl next to each other, with boats being just a few feet away from each other as the yard tries to maximize the space for everyone.  At Curacao Marine, the yard has a long-term storage yard up a hill where boats stay unattended for months or even years while the owners are gone.  The upper yard is fenced, and nasty-looking Dobermans stand guard all the time, discouraging thieves.  When the owners are planning to return, they notify the yard and their boat is retrieved from the upper yard and repositioned in the working yard.

Right next to our boat was a steel-hulled sailboat whose owners came back just before New Year's Eve.  We had noticed a few bees buzzing around their cockpit, and watched as they seemed to have a home in the lockers of their boat.  Indeed, they had a beehive aboard!  The young couple from Belgium were very friendly and quite shocked at the unintentional pets that had made their home on their boat.  They found bee-keepers on Curacao who came to deal with the problem.

The bee-keepers arrived with an unmistakable license plate

First they had to climb the ladder to get aboard

And then persuade the bees to colonize a special box

The bee-keepers arrived one morning, complete with smoke-can, but no protective gear.  We watched from our cockpit.  Here he is removing the honey combs and the hive, into a box they would take later, after dark.

Some of the honey was harvested

An interesting diversion - the queen bee escaped and started colonizing the yellow vinyl bag of  safety gear.  They had to brush all of the bees out of the bag and carefully remove the queen to the special hive box

You can see all the bees buzzing around as he works

A close-up - bees crawling on his arms, legs, and back didn't seem to bother him

Finally the new box was ready, and the bees took to it during the day.  After dark, the bee-keepers returned to collect the box and all of the bees, once they were all tucked in for the night.  They said that the box needs to be at least three kilometers away from the original site so that none of the bees comes back to its original home!  The next day was bee-free at last.

Over the years on our boat, we have only dealt with pests infrequently.  One time we had an infestation of moths in our rice container.  A fairly benign problem, and easily handled - just get rid of all our rice, wash the container and the locker, and we were done.  In the course of 15 years of living aboard, we have only had six cockroaches.  We are careful about the cardboard containers we bring aboard - most cardboard stays at the dock or in the dinghy, and all foodstuffs are re-packaged.  Cockroach eggs live in the cardboard, and hatch easily in the tropics.  Other than that, we haven't had any other pesky flying or crawling problems.  However, we have heard from other boaters about mice that eat their way through electrical insulation and have babies aboard, mite and weevil infestations in flour and grains, snakes in the anchor locker or bird nests in the sails.  Occasionally rats have been found on sailboats, a problem since they can gnaw through plumbing hose that leads below the waterline and can sink your boat, a real day spoiler.