Colonies are on the wane, but it's a honey of a hobby
by Joe Tarr
The hot August sun is beating down and Bob Yost is about to pry the top off of a large white rectangular box and peek inside.
Because there are some 40,000 honeybees inside, we're wearing white canvas jump suits and hats with a long mesh veils that stretch down to over our chests.
In this heat and in these clothes the sweat beads up quickly, but you don't want to go poking around inside a beehive when there's no sun. When the sun is shining, more bees will be out collecting pollen and fewer will be inside the hive.
Yost's 6-year-old son, Ben, is also suited up and Yost's wife, Beth, stands several feet away watching it all. Ben's job is to work the smoker, a metal container with bellows attached and smoldering pine needles inside. The theory is that if you puff enough smoke into the hive the bees will think their home is on fire and gorge themselves on honey in case they need to find a new home.
Their collective buzzing is as loud as a groaning refrigerator, perhaps louder. As his son pumps on the smoker the humming picks up a disturbing notch in volume. "It seems to make them madder," Ben says. He has a point.
A few scatter about as the elder Yost pulls out one of the frames. Bees scurry along the comb, doing bee-like things, feeding brood, storing pollen or eating. Yost works without gloves as he handles the frames. At one point, a worker bee attaches to his hand near the sleeve of his suit. Yost feels him and tries to swat it away, but it's too late. He gets stung.
But any beekeeper knows that every once in a while, you're going to get stung.
Yost is just too fascinated with bees to let a few stings stop him. "It's a touch to the past," he says. "In the old days, everybody had bees. Somebody in everyone's family was the beekeeper."
There are no longer any—or, at least very few—feral honeybees in the country. Honeybees aren't native to North America—they were brought over by European settlers in the 17th century. But the spread rapidly and many became wild.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were about 300,000 colonies in Tennessee and in 1980, there were at least 150,000. But two species of mites—tracheal and varroa—that were introduced to this country in the '80s have devastated the honeybee population. Today, there are only an estimated 20,000 colonies in this state.
Most honeybees out there are being kept by farmers, hobbyists and honey producers who can help their colonies fight off the mites.
Beth Yost remembers one of the first meetings she went to of the Knox County Beekeepers club. "What struck me is the first time we went to beekeeping meeting was most of the people were 60 and older. Whoa—what if this dies out?" Beth says.
Yost is concerned, too—he is now president of the group and is eager to help people start their own hives. "There's an impression that you have to live on a 40-acre farm to do this," Yost says. "There are many people keeping a hive or two in their back yard."
You can get started for a few hundred dollars and with a few hives, you can usually make your money back selling some of the honey you produce. "It's not a money loser. Unless you do it on a large scale, you're not going to make much money," Yost says.
Dan Brown has been a beekeeper for 20 years. He's had several hives over the years, but now has just two at his home in Rockford. His tenant, Rikki Hall, has just started one.
Brown remembers one of the more harrowing encounters with bees in the 20 years he's been a beekeeper. He and a friend were moving some hives from Knoxville to Elkmont in the Smokies, where Brown used to have a cabin. They were driving them in an old Volkswagen bug and one of the hives came open, letting a flood of bees into the car.
"As long as we were moving, the bees would stay on the windows. But when we stopped, they'd swarm all over," he says. So he and his friends wore their head covering as they drove. When they stopped to get gas, they rolled the window down just a crack and to give the attendant instructions and slip him money. Surprisingly, neither him nor his friend was stung.
On Brown's back porch there's a painting of an old man in Elkmont, a few hives behind him in the background. He's called Lem Owenby, and he lived in Elkmont until his death in late '70s or early '80s, when he was well into his 90s. For the last several years of his life Owenby was blind, but he kept his hives. "Most mountain families kept a hive or two of bees. That's where they got their sweetener," Brown says.
Putting medicine in Brown's and Hall's hives to control mites, the bees at first seem oblivious. We smoke them as much as possible, trying to drive them down into their brood boxes, the place where they lay eggs. We remove a couple of supers—the upper level boxes where the excess honey is stored.
But by the time we get to the third hive, their buzzing reaches a noticeably agitated level and they're swirling around, bouncing into our veils.
There's a visceral thrill to being around hives, especially when they start to swarm around you. With the heavy canvas clothing, a veil, and long, thick gloves you feel moderately safe, even though bees can sometimes sting through this protection. The intensity of their buzzing is something you interpret instinctively. You know when they're pissed.
"All of sudden, your realize the pitch goes up. When they really get angry, they'll hit that wire and they'll start going after your eyes. That's when you're really glad you've got that veil on," Brown says.
"I never understood the term 'bee in your bonnet' until I got a bee inside my veil. It's a whole different world when you've got that veil on and you're looking out at a bee inside the veil. Or when you get one in your pants and you know it's going to sting you but you don't know where or when."
It's been years since I've been stung and I find myself wanting to feel it again, but I don't have the courage to court it by taking off my gloves or jumpsuit.
There are a lot of folk tales about bees and their effect. Some hold that if you eat local honey, it'll help your allergies. Others say bee stings are good for arthritis. The Yosts have an elderly friend who works on his hives unprotected when his arthritis is acting up. After three or four stings he feels better, they say.
"My theory on that is if you get stung by anything you go through such contortions you loosen up your joints," Brown jokes.
The taste of honey varies greatly depending on where the bees are gathering from. But it's one of the safest foods you can eat, needing no processing. (Although children are not supposed to eat it until after they're a year old.)
Brown doesn't have as many hives as he used to, but he continues to keep them in part because he likes the honey and in part because he's fascinated with them. "I like to watch them. I'm amazed at their culture. Everybody has a job and these jobs change over time. Drones have one purpose and that's it," he says.
"The queen bee is not a ruler, she's an egg layer. She makes no decisions. If she gets old, they'll build a new queen cell," he says. "If a colony gets too crowded, they might create a lot of queen cells. Who ever is born first will sting all the other [queen cells] and kill them. Then she'll mate and swarm and a lot of the bees go with her. That's how they propagate."
A lot of what beekeepers do today is making sure their hives don't swarm. "We like to have a strong colony without swarming so they produce a surplus of honey," Brown says.
Although it can be hard getting started, keeping hives doesn't require a great deal of work. The bees take care of themselves and most keepers only need to check on them a few times a year. Extracting the honey is the most time-consuming part. The supers are removed from the hive, and the bees are shooed away either with a chemical or an air blower. The frames are put in a metal extractor, which spins them around. The honey is then filtered and ready to eat. Yost can extract one of his hives in about five or six hours.
After we've checked out Yost's hives, we're quickly out of our jumpsuits. But his son keeps his on, playing for a while near the hives.
"He takes a lot of pride. One of the reasons to do it is to give him an experience that's hard to get these days," his dad says.
"These days beekeeping is so far out of people's experience and knowledge. But it's incredibly useful. It'd be a shame if it disappeared."
August 28, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 35
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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