"I try to get at least one bee sting every year," said Dr. Maky Erdely, "People believe it builds up immunities — beekeepers especially." Erdely, an acupuncturist and doctor of Oriental medicine, has been raising bees for more than 30 years. As we sat in his backyard — home to a garden, three hives and a chicken coop — he sang the praises of his bees. Not only did they give him seven gallons of honey this year, they're also superb pollinators.

"I wish you'd been here earlier," Erdely beamed, "they were all over the squash blossoms." Erdely's bees travel within a five-mile radius, he said, and on their travels, they pollinate plants in his Casa Alegre neighborhood in Santa Fe before returning to the hives with nectar and pollen.

By beating their wings to circulate air throughout their hive, they evaporate the nectar, which then becomes honey. When it thickens sufficiently to the point that it will not ferment, the honey is "ripe." When each cell of the honeycomb is full of honey, the bees cover it with a thin layer of wax (each bee has glands on its abdomen that transforms honey into wax), which they metabolize by eating the honey in a process called capping.

"You have 10, 15, 20, 30 bees hanging upside down," Erdely explained, "and other bees hanging from them upside down. Then they rub their bellies, and from each belly comes a little granule of wax, which becomes the honeycomb."

Erdely once kept 11 hives at the head of the Mora Valley, but said he had a battle with bears — and the bears won. He now keeps three hives in Santa Fe. In the past he has lost hives to mites as well as to moths. A moth will make a buzzing sound similar to that of a bee, and after she is allowed into the hive, she lays eggs, which become larvae. As scores of larvae burrow through the hive, they build hundreds of tunnels of silk, which can completely destroy the hive.

When his hives were obliterated, Erdely said he ordered more bees from Koehnen & Sons in California (www. koehnen.com). He also orders beekeeping equipment from a number of suppliers — Dadant being the oldest (www.dadant.com).

This is a stressful time for bees, Erdely explained. Many commercial beekeepers hire out their bees to growers and orchard owners for pollination. This is harmful to the bees because harmful pesticides are brought back to the hive.

"And you have Vanishing Bee Syndrome (also known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD)," Erdely said. "The bees leave the hive and never come back, and nobody knows why."

Erdely's fascination with bees began many years ago when he was in high school. He wrote a paper on bee behavior that included their "waggle dance," which allows them to communicate with hive mates; how they recognize where their hive is; and how they orient themselves.

In the late 1960s, when he was hitchhiking around the country, Erdely stopped in Chicago to visit an old friend who was a monk in the Russian Orthodox Church. As it turned out, the archbishop was going to spend the weekend at a monks' retreat.

"He had a little farm somewhere in Indiana and that was on my way to Boston," Erdely said. "So I hit him up for a ride and I said I would gladly do some work on the farm. I was a long-haired hippie with a backpack, but I was a Russian boy — a Russian Orthodox boy — so he must have figured I was OK."

After arriving at the farm, the archbishop gave him a mug of fermented honey beer, which is similar to mead (in Russian it is called kvass, which means "ferment"). He then showed Erdely around the farm. When they came around a little clump of trees, he saw the beehives, and immediately he felt like he was in heaven. Erdely asked the archbishop if he would teach him about beekeeping, and the lesson began.

"He took me to the house, threw a white shirt on me, wrapped rubber bands around my wrists and put a veil on me, and we went out to the bees," Erdely said. "He had the same getup, and I asked, 'No gloves?' 'No gloves,' he said."

Erdely learned how to use the smoker and to take the hives apart. He and the archbishop went to the shed where the extractor was kept, and he learned how to spin the comb in his hand-cranked centrifuge to separate the honey from it. They spent the entire day with the bees and the comb, after which Erdely was sent on his way with a half-gallon of honey. He said that was his first and only lesson in beekeeping — and added he prefers to work with gloves.

How do the bees feel about Erdely taking their honey? "Not very well," he quipped, adding that it depends on how busy the bees are. In the warm weather, the more-antagonistic, older bees are outside collecting nectar and pollen. Only the younger, less-hostile bees are in the hive keeping house. When it's cold, all the bees remain inside, and certainly don't want their precious harvest taken from them.

"They all have very different personalities," Erdely noted. "That hive is pretty mellow," he said, pointing, "but the back hive is extremely aggressive. They swarm me, and they can get very upset. They will follow me into the house and then I can't approach the hive without protection for two or three days, because they remember me."

Erdely said he raises bees because they are fascinating to watch, and he believes they are exceedingly complex insects.

"And since I'm a fanatic about not using sugar, honey satisfies my sweet tooth," he said. "I like to raise my own bees because I can have organic honey. But the main reason I raise them is that I enjoy having them around. They're like my pets."