For this Toronto family, bees and kids are a sweet mix

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This honey bee is on a suicide mission. She and her tens of thousands of roommates are understandably agitated: they've just had plumes of smoke puffed at them for half an hour and dodged the swipes of a large metal scraping tool.

When the humans finally leave the bee colony alone, most of the hive's occupants calm down. Not this one bee, though. She strays about 20 feet away from her home and circles the four people who have removed the veiled hoods from their white beekeeping suits, exposing themselves to attack. After buzzing around the group, scoping things out, the bee is ready to make her final, dramatic act of life: She dives butt-first into the neck of one unsuspecting human.

That human, five-year-old Norah Marshall, is one of Toronto's youngest beekeepers and this is the first time she's faced the most common occupational hazard of this hobby.

It takes a few seconds for the sting to register – the small spot of pink expands into a large colony of blushing islands on her skin: a reaction to the bee's venom. And then come the tears and the howling until her mother, Judy, comes by to soothe her. Then she's back to normal – no lasting trauma. After all, just a few minutes earlier she was talking about how she wasn't afraid of them.

Norah and her 3-year-old brother Calvin have logged hours upon hours around these creatures. Tim Marshall, 38, was the one who introduced beekeeping to his children – a decidedly eccentric alternative to the toddler tennis or kiddie belly dancing classes on offer in Toronto. It's been a way to share a childhood pastime (Mr. Marshall began beekeeping when he was 12), but also teach his kids about where their food comes from.

Two years ago, their family won a second-place ribbon at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto for the honey harvested from their two hives. This year, they have submitted three jars of their liquid white honey to the fair, which starts Nov. 1, but it's only for the judges to sample (their two hives don't make enough for mass production).

And then there are the greater sociological lessons.

"There's a lot more that goes on in a hive than people realize," Mr. Marshall says. "They're quite a fascinating, almost social, society...the roles for the bees, the way they communicate and the way they navigate and make the honey."

Or, as Norah more quietly puts it, hiding behind her wheat-coloured hair: "Bees are nice."

The kids are oddities in their neighbourhood of Leaside, where most of their peers might run screaming across the backyard at the sight of a bee. Norah and Calvin barely flinch around them, having made a dozen trips a year to the the hives behind their grandparents' home in Collingwood, Ont., two hours north of Toronto. When a cluster of about a dozen bees landed on the back of Calvin's suit earlier in the afternoon, Norah calmly brushed them off with her gloved hand, as though they were crumbs.

4-H clubs (leadership programs for mostly rural youth) across the continent get kids started on beekeeping as early as five, but Norah was brought to the hive when she was only three years old – so young that her suit had to be ordered from one of the few specialty retailers on the Internet that outfits children. Calvin is sporting a pair of children's green gardening gloves adorned with ladybugs and ants – they don't sell beekeeping gloves small enough for his tiny hands.

The kids and their parents are performing the end-of-season duties. Whereas in the spring and summer, with a big clover field and apple orchard nearby, the bees have no trouble collecting enough pollen to keep the hive running and producing a surplus of honey, in the colder months, they need some assistance.

Soon after I get suited up, Mr. Marshall tells me, "Let me know if at any point you feel uncomfortable."

I don't tell him, but I have a mini-panic attack almost instantly. I see a bee land on the notepad on which I am trying to take notes. My instinct is to drop the pad and get into the fetal position.

What is most unsettling about the experience is the soundtrack of beekeeping: the unrelenting buzzing from thousands of pairs (about 60,000 bees live in the two hives, according to Mr. Marshall) of rapidly flapping wings. It's as persistent as the "untz-untz-untz" at a dance club, as jarring as a wailing ambulance.

I try to shift my focus to today's main event: filling up a large yellow container with sugar water for the bees to feed off of before they go into their winter-long hibernation – the female worker bees huddle around the queen to keep her warm, Mr. Marshall explains.

"On a nice day in the winter you'll see them come out and have a pee. You'll see these little yellow dots on the snow," he says. Norah's eyes widen and she giggles.

"Norah, you need some smoke over here. Get lots of smoke. Perfect," Mr. Marshall instructs his daughter. She begins squeezing the bellows on a bee smoker – a tin can in which a small fire has been lit. The smoke puffs out of the spout.

"The bees think there's a fire and they all want to go out and it makes it easier for us to look," Norah explains.

Calvin, meanwhile, is using his hive tool, a metal scraper with a slightly curved head, to chip off bits of comb from the frames pulled out of the hive that the bees are clinging to.

When a small cluster violently flies up from the frame, Mr. Marshall advises Calvin, "Try to be a little more gentle there…" Calvin eases up.

But it's a little too late, as Norah learns a few minutes later when her mother helps extract one furious bee's stinger from her neck. Hours after being stung, though, Norah has the perspective only a kid who's grown up around hives would have.

"She made an interesting comment," Mr. Marshall says. "[She said] 'I got stung, dad, but the bee got it worse because she died.'"