Beekeeping is mighty sweet work, if you have a taste for honey, and aren't given to sudden jerky motions.

By their wing and work, nectar becomes honey; honey becomes wax; the apple bough bends with fruit, and the blueberry barren yields its crop. Busy as a bee-for good reason. But honeybees transform more than nature while foraging for food and building their colonies. The winged alchemists turn curiosity into passion, by charming the people who spend hours attending, observing, and learning from them.

Sue Rigby sees bees in myriad ways: in the field, under the microscope, or forming at the tip of a pencil or paintbrush. "They're such an essential part of life, but people just take them for granted," she says. "They're the good guys."

Her teachers chided her in school for drawing during math class or covering her notebooks with animals. But Sue kept drawing, and became a scientific illustrator, rendering physical and biological forms in precise detail, mostly for federal departments. One project spanned a decade-illustrating a taxonomy manual of the Hymenoptera, the insect order that comprises bees, wasps, and ants. As an artist in her spare time, she has also painted a glorious, pastoral symphony of honeybees.

Now a research technician at the Atlantic Food and Horticulture Research Centre in Kentville, Nova Scotia, she and her colleagues have just finished a three-year survey of Nova Scotia's approximately 170 bee species.

"We found one bee; its genus had never been found," says Sue. "It may not be exciting for everyone else, but it was to us."

Another particularly unusual bee, netted just west of Kentville, had not been seen in the province for 40 years,. The Macropis nuda forages for oil from yellow loosestrife, for food and lining for its burrow.

Sue's favourite bee is a cleptoparasite that preys on the nest of another groundnester. When the female of that species leaves, it runs in and lays its eggs there, to hatch and devour the provisions and offspring of the other bee, or kill its young.

While Sue has studied all kinds of bees, her most recent work relates to the perilous plight of the honeybee. The global trade in bees unleashed the varroa mite into New Brunswick, and then the rest of the Maritimes, in 1989, decimating colonies of bees. The reddish-brown mites grow to the size of a quarter of a grain of rice by feeding on the blood of immature bees. Then they settle under the abdominal platelets of adult bees and attack their hosts, whose wings become deformed. The bees begin to crawl. Whole colonies die.

Beekeepers fought back with Apistan, an effective treatment. But the mites regained the upper hand in New Brunswick, where beekeepers have twice switched solutions to contain the outbreak. Now that that seems to be under control, "the harsh winter seems to have taken its toll," said Paul Vatour, who speaks for beekeepers in New Brunswick. He estimates that last year's cold weather wiped out almost half the province's colonies.

Colonies in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island were also crippled. Mites, weather and now, neglect. Until 2000, Dick Rogers was the head bee guy in Nova Scotia, wearing the title of provincial apiculturalist. But the government sacked him and closed its production technology branch, which was the interface between agriculture and science. It devolved some duties to a crown corporation, AgraPoint, in Kentville, but there's no one there paying the same attention to bees.

"We don't have a person per se whom we can call the bee person," said Dale Kelly, the executive director, "nor do I know of anyone in government."

Instead, his agency employed an integrated pest management specialist to play a development role in agriculture. Sometimes they brought in Dick Rogers, an entomologist who now runs his own research company in Kentville, Wildwood Labs Inc.

"Honeybees are really struggling," said Dick. "There's no one gathering statistics and monitoring the development of the industry."

Brian Smith, executive director of the province's agricultural services branch, agreed: "I think that's probably true. We have staff that are sympathetic to the honeybee. There is not one person whose sole interest lies with that particular sector." Brian said he had hoped that industry would step into the breach.

"But the industry is not flush enough to pay for it," countered Dick. "It's kind of a dim situation," he said. "Without proper measurement, bees will become more and more unappreciated as people lose sight of their contribution to agriculture. We can read the writing on the wall. If we lose all our bees, people will sit up and take notice."

Back in Kentville, Sue is working with a team of researchers to prepare a helpmate for the vulnerable honeybee. The group, including PhD student Cory Sheffield, is testing the ability of blue orchard bees to fertilize MacIntosh apples. They introduced the bees into experimental orchards by erecting nesting boxes made from stacks of paper nesting tubes, about six inches long and the diameter of a cigarette. Unlike the honeybee, which is an oddity among bees, this species of mason bee builds its nest with mud, not wax. Like most wild bees, it is a solitary bee, yet the females build their nests close by one another, creating a tightly knit population, suitable for mass pollination. "They might possibly be a back-up to honeybees," said Sue.

There are some 500 beekeepers in the Maritimes, and more than a third of those earn some of their living by making honey or renting their hives to pollinate flowering crops. While bumblebees, solitary bees and wasps do farmers a natural favour, honeybees are suppliant farmhands that can be shipped en masse to complement the work of wild pollinators. The blueberry harvest, especially, depends on honeybees flitting from one trumpet-shaped flower to the next. More than 20,000 hives are deposited in blueberry fields across the Maritimes each spring. Honeybees are also stacked in boxes and shipped to cranberry and canola fields, and apple orchards.

As beekeepers like John Murray are fond of saying, "They're the sparkplugs of agriculture."

When I met John, it was in a foggy grove on a rainy night behind his house in Masstown, near Truro, Nova Scotia. Three guys in white suits and head gear-on a break from The X-Files-worked through the downpour. One sprayed plumes of smoke into each hive to settle the bees; sensing danger, they gorged on honey and remained still. As the bees snacked and the smoke lingered in the dense, damp air, the other men hoisted each stack of hives onto a boom truck, whose shrouded headlights were staving off the dark. The timing of this strange scene was critical: bees don't fly at night. So, in repeated scenes like this one, they're spirited away, safely inside their boxes, to work their magic on the spring bloom.

Nestled in Nova Scotia's apple basket-the Annapolis Valley-Jack and Lorraine Hamilton are breeding an army of bees to pollinate the Maritime's largest blueberry operation. Oxford Frozen Foods is owned by John Bragg, one of the province's richest businessmen-and its largest keeper of bees.

"Inside each one of those 9,000 hives is a different story," said Jack. "You have to figure out if it's a good story or whatever. I feel a responsibility to the hives we manage. They're kind of like co-workers. How can you make things better for them?"

Jack handles his charges with respect. "When they sting the daylights out of you, you don't care for them very much, but it's also a reaction to whatever you've done to them. Bees don't sting just because you're there."

Jack was hired on as Bragg's beekeeper 12 years ago from his native Saskatchewan, where he was raised in a family of beekeepers, in the northern town of Nipawin. His parents and brothers still keep bees. Around the dinner table there's something wrong if they don't talk shop, said Jack's wife, Lorraine, who moved from Toronto, where "you never see a bee."

It's her job to raise 6,000 or so queens a year to replenish the hives. The life of a female worker bee is very short; after about six weeks, their wings give way and they die. The male drones are expelled from the hive once their duty is done. The queen alone lives to see in a second season, sometimes three.

Lorraine jump-starts the bees' breeding regimen by removing frames of wax from the hives and scooping lava from each cell, six to 12 hours after the eggs have been laid. (The cells are molded by the worker bees from the secretions of wax that fall in flakes from their abdomens, the mysterious transformation of digested honey into building material.) She drops each nascent bee into the bottom of a thimble-sized cup hanging upside down from a wooden bar set horizontally into a frame, just like an empty picture frame. Forty-five cups complete a frame. The position of the cups simulates the bat-like queen cells, which hang upside down in the hives. And so, as the larvae develop, they're fed a queen's share of royal jelly to engender their royal traits. At least two-thirds of the grafted cells will successfully emerge as virgin queens, ready for their mating flight, then to settle down to make their brood.

When the hives are up to strength, they're shipped to the apple orchards and blueberry fields, and the Hamiltons and 20 neighbours settle down to their annual "Bees are Gone" breakfast.

This year Lorraine worried that the plentiful rain would dampen the mating habits of the bees, but they persisted in their frisky flight. By September, there was a healthy brood. With the summer flowers fading, the Hamiltons began feeding "the guys" sugar water to fatten them up for winter. Come December, the bees will be put back on the pallets and shipped to their winter quarters, 'til spring calls them to flight.

Far away from this industrial-sized operation, actor Richard Donat keeps just a few hives near Kejimkujik National Park. He gets a buzz out of eating his own honey, on bread or toast, or drizzling it over vegetables in a stir-fry. "I can't say it is the best honey," said Richard. "It was just a wonderful sort of thing, the fact that I was partly responsible for creating this."

Partly. When honeybees dance around different flowers, they produce honey, of a lighter or darker complexion. Lighter honey carries higher, sweeter notes, sometimes so sweet it will make your teeth ache. Blueberries, blooming in spring, yield a dark reddish honey. Dandelion honey, from another spring bloom, is also dark. Raspberries and white clover give light, runny honey.

Goldenrod, blooming in fall, produces honey of a tawny hue, whereas another fall bloom, aster, yields a light syrup. That being said, most Maritime honey is a hotchpotch of honey dew.

Inside the hives, honeybees fill the wax cells with the nectar they've collected, and to which they've added a glucose catalyst to thicken the watery liquid, which they desiccate by fanning with their wings. Then a wax cap seals the honey in each cell, to preserve the life-giving essence.

While Pooh Bear snatched his honey in clumps from the hollow of a tree, the honey on our shelves has been spun, filtered and settled before it is poured into jars. Gary Smeltzer learned how to do this from his father, Jerry, who died last year after supervising the honey display at the Atlantic Winter Fair in Halifax for almost three decades. "I've always been around the bees for as long as I can remember," said Gary. "My father did this 'til he was 82." At his small honey operation in Kentville, Gary takes a slightly warmed blade to scrape the wax coating off the comb, releasing the honey into a spinning machine to remove any clinging wax. The honey is filtered again as it passes through a centrifuge and a succession of tanks. One frame of honeycomb yields seven or eight pounds of honey, and Gary keeps enough hives to supply Co-op stores and roadside markets.

Jerry Draheim is another beekeeper who butters his bread with his own honey. In the warm months, Honey Wind Farm, near Oxford, is alive with crimson clover, buckwheat, sunflowers, daffodils, poppies, crocuses, phacelia, and the faint buzz of bees' wings. June to September, Jerry spends five hours a day tending 160 hives, each yielding 100 pounds of honey.

He also breeds up to 1,000 queens a year, and sells them to beekeepers in Canada and the US for $18 each. Each long and slender queen is packed into a 10-square-inch wooden box with a mesh lid, and placed in an envelope marked "Handle with care." Seven or eight escorts are given to groom and feed her, along with a store of candy for the journey. The entire package is thin enough to pop through the slot at Canada Post. Jerry observes that living off insects is an odd life to lead, but he's fallen under their spell. When the bees stop flying in winter, he misses their vibrations in the air.