They're perfect boarders. They hardly stray from campus, love cramped quarters and, contrary to popular impression, don't get nasty unless they feel put upon.

They're not wide-eyed freshmen or fresh-from-grad-school professors.

They're bees. Not killer bees, but Buckfast bees from North Carolina. The good-natured kind. Relatively speaking.

Thank Dan Margolies, an assistant history professor, for bringing them here. When Margolies was in graduate school in Wisconsin about six years ago, he developed a fascination with bees. Now he wants to pollinate students with that interest.

 

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Margolies and Victor R. Townsend, an assistant professor of biology, will co-teach a beekeeping class this winter. It will be among a scant few at Virginia colleges. State officials don't have the buzz on the number of beekeeping classes in Virginia, but Virginia Tech offers one in its agriculture program.

Margolies hopes the class will take the sting out of bees for skittish students. ``If you're afraid of bees and open the hive and see that it's non-threatening, it will take the mystery and fear out of bees,'' he said.

Margolies bought 20,000 bees -- a bargain at $74 -- and, in April, set up two hives in a field at the southern edge of campus, near Lake Taylor. He estimates their numbers have more than doubled since then.

Earlier this week, Margolies and Townsend visited their swarm to replenish their supply of sugared water. Margolies always brings his small smoke machine: Burn some pine needles, spray the smoke, and the bees tend to settle down.

``They're really mellow bees,'' Margolies said as he opened one hive. ``They won't sting you.''

Just in case, most visitors wear veils, gloves and white jump suits tucked into their socks. Margolies forgoes the gloves -- it's harder to take out the frames, or compartments, with them on. He's been stung three, four times this year. No big deal. Townsend doesn't wear anything special, not even the suit. No stings yet for him.

Margolies removed one rectangular frame covered with bees, including the queen, the largest inhabitant, but not freakishly so. She seemed preoccupied with one task: laying eggs. She can lay 2,000 a day, Margolies said.

Margolies and Townsend don't anticipate offering regular-semester classes, but they will teach a one-credit, three-week class in January as part of the college's winter term in between semesters.

Befitting their specialties, the course will cover both the history and biology of beekeeping. And, of course, the mechanics -- how to feed them, how to recognize disease, how to improve their health. Students should be able to start their own hives afterward, Margolies said.

Townsend won't wait till winter to take educational advantage of the hives.

He'll incorporate them into two fall courses, general zoology and invertebrate zoology. Students, for instance, will see firsthand the bees wiggling their stomachs as part of their dance to alert the others to pollen. ``It will bring the biology alive,'' Townsend said.

Margolies also sees financial benefits: Why not sell the honey at the campus bookstore?

He quickly ascended the ranks of beekeepers since he moved to the area two years ago. Recently Margolies was elected vice president of the Tidewater Beekeepers Association. How did a scholar of 19th-century American foreign policy get caught up in all of this?

It was the sweet sting of curiosity when he paged through that book in grad school.

``I find it fascinating to pull out a frame of bees and see them doing what they do naturally,'' Margolies said. ``It's herd management on a really small scale. It's a way to be a rancher without having to own 1,000 acres.''

When he came to Hampton Roads, he got some pointers from the beekeepers group and set up his own hive at the Suffolk farm of a student, Ronnie Jordan.

It's contagious. A handful of students have helped tend the college hives since spring. They formed a group called WASP, or Wesleyan Apiculture (the fancy term for beekeeping) Studies Program.

Jackie Thomas, a senior from Virginia Beach planning to be an elementary schoolteacher, got the bug bad.

She drifts into rapture describing what happens to her when she opens a hive. It's almost a Zen-like feeling, with that ``woodsy, wild smell . . . . You feel their life force.''

When she tells folks about her involvement with the bees, ``they get this scared look on their face,'' Thomas said. But if they spent some time with the buzzers, ``maybe they'd recognize they're not so scary and you can have fun with them.''

Reach Philip Walzer at 222-5105 or walzer@pilotonline.com

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