The Beekeeper

The Beekeeper

One beautiful summer afternoon Don and I were driving down a country road in the area when I noticed bee hives in someone’s back yard. Coincidentally I was reading a novel at the time that had a bee keeping aspect to it. When I say to Don, “I have an idea”, his response is always, “uh oh”, and he knows we are off on another one of my little adventures. So I contacted Steve Buckley who is a good friend of mine and is also the President of the Floyd County Beekeepers Association. Through Facebook I know that he has quite a beekeeping enterprise going on in his precious free time. His honey is delicious and he even won a blue ribbon at the Kentucky State Fair just last week. I contacted Steve and he gave me a crash course in beekeeping 101.

Steve grew up locally watching his grandpa and his dad keep bees. He said his grandpa would get wild honey out of a tree, which sounds terrifying. Steve currently has about 150 hives located in 7 locations in 4 counties in Kentucky and spends a lot of time managing his hives. But before we can understand beekeeping, we have to understand the bees themselves.

Let’s just say in the honeybee world, you guys are not the kings of the castle, or the hive. The queen is the only ruler of the hive as she is the only fertile lady and she lays all the eggs. To propagate a new queen a larva is fed royal jelly, a protein secretion from the heads of young worker bees. The queen is the only adult who receives royal jelly and that helps her to grow bigger than everyone else and to reproduce. The queen mates only a few days in her life when she is about a week old. She flies from the hive and attracts cruising drones from other colonies. From that she collects zillions of sperm cells that she will use over the course of her egg-laying years. She will reign supreme over her bees, laying up to two thousand eggs a day for 2 years or more. The queen is the largest bee in the hive and the only one without a barbed stinger. This means she can repeatedly sting, like a wasp. The queen rarely leaves the hive and she is more likely to use her stinger against rival queens.

The drones are the males of the hive and they exist solely to mate with the queen. They spend their days like guys on a street corner, they congregate outside the hive and fly around for hours on end waiting for the presence of a newly mated queen. Their purpose on earth, to mate, also kills them. Yikes!

The worker bees are the young ladies of the hive and their name is accurate; they work constantly. They have many jobs and they cycle through them. They guard the hive to watch for attacks and they will die in their defense of the hive. They act as nurses to the larvae and newborn bees feeding them a mixture of pollen and honey which is called “beebread”. They also attend to the queen by feeding and protecting her and spreading her scent, or pheromones, around the hive, the scent keeps the bees on task.

The foragers are the mature bees that we meet on a sunny summer day, sometimes with our bare feet. A bee flies to thousands of flowers to make only a spoonful of honey. They fly up to sixty miles a day collecting nectar, pollen and water. A forager bee flies so much in fact that their wings will tatter and soon they will die of exhaustion.

It’s the job of a beekeeper to understand all of the little residents of his hive and manage their activities to produce the very best honey. Steve explained to me that the color and taste of the honey depends on the variety of flower that the bees visit. In the spring the bees will gather from autumn olive bushes which produces a light honey that is harvested in May. If the bees frequent the tulip poplar tree, that honey will be darker and if you like a honey with a little bite to it, place your hives near sourwood trees and you can harvest sourwood honey in July. Beekeepers often move their hives nearer to nectar sources to produce the desired type of honey. Steve is passionate about spreading the word on the importance of bees in our lives. He explained to me that one third of all fruits and vegetables are pollinated by honey bees. Some estimates say that 50% of the world’s food supply is directly or indirectly affected by pollination by the honey bees. He said, “Imagine what we would do without them? Farming practices around the world would change, driving prices out of the sky!” He reminded me of how dangerous pesticides are on bees and on the decline of bee populations world wide. He told me that a common one we sometimes use on our roses, 7 Dust is deadly for the bees. He suggested if you do need to use pesticides to use them after the sun goes down and the bees have gone to the hive. By the time they’re up and about it will have dried.

Beekeeping can be a great hobby which benefits everyone. If you would like to get started with this great craft, the Floyd County Beekeepers Association meets the first Tuesday of every even month at 6pm at the Floyd County Extension office on Auxier Road. The next meeting is October 4th, at 6pm.

“He is not worthy of the honey-comb, that shuns the hives because the bees have stings.” Shakespeare