Bees to Honey

It was a warm spring day in 1984, and I had just arrived for my first day of work as a laboratory assistant for a honeybee researcher with the USDA bee facility in Baton Rouge, LA. A clueless high school senior, I vaguely remembered a friend’s older brother had kept bees as a sort of father-son bonding exercise, and based on that I had bluffed my way through an interview (sure, absolutely, I knew all about bees!). Now I was receiving my first instructions as a full-fledged beekeeping pro from my new boss, John Williams, a biologist with the Agricultural Research Service.

Take these targets, said John, handing me a stack of small, square, painted boards, And nail them to those hives over there. He pointed outside where the air was thick with bees from some 200 large beehives.

Excuse me?

A hammer, nails and 200 beehives? Surely this was some sort of hilarious initiation gag. But no, he was serious, and had already turned back to his microscope. I thought about it for a minute, went outside and did it. My headnet was on backwards; someone took pity on me and taught me how to use a smoker to calm the bees; I got stung a dozen times or so; and I had a great story to tell the guys the next day at school.

Thus began my love affair with Apis mellifera, the common honeybee.

Humans have gathered honey since prehistoric times — the earliest record dates back nearly 9,000 years. Beginning some 5,000 years ago, the practice of keeping bees for the express purpose of honey and wax production was begun. Those ancient beekeepers would be right at home in today’s bee yards; not much has really changed since the earliest days of beekeeping. Aside from mechanical centrifuges to extract honey from the combs, the methods and equipment used today are remarkably un-mechanized, low-tech, and accessible to anyone.

A headnet, a smoker (a metal canister with a bellows attachment and smoldering grass inside) and a flat pry tool are still the basic tools of the trade. A modern beehive consists of a stack of wooden boxes (called supers) with no tops and no bottoms. Inside are eight to ten frames, each one holding a sheet of honeycomb. It looks exactly like a file drawer with hanging file folders — the file folders are the frames, and each can be lifted out individually to inspect the bees’ handiwork.

Approaching a hive, the beekeeper sends a few puffs of smoke at the entrance; this has the effect of pacifying the bees and keeping them in the lower portions of the hive. More smoke is puffed around the lid, which is then pried off with a flatbar. Honeybees like to cement everything together with a substance called propolis. It’s good to work a hive at least once or twice a month to keep things from getting permanently glued together.

With the lid off, one can see the tops of the frames. Reaching in bare-handed (gloves make you clumsy and more likely to get stung) one can pull a frame out. A few bees crawl over the combs, which are utterly beautiful to behold. Perfect hexagons, some filled with golden honey and capped with wax, others filled with a kaleidoscope of different colored pollen – orange, yellow, green, brown, and red.

Want some honey?

No problem; simply keep the frame you’ve removed and replace it with a new one holding a starter sheet of beeswax. The bees will quickly go to work building new combs and filling them with honey.

Honey. Orange blossom honey, clover honey, wildflower honey — who doesn’t love it? We even call our sweethearts honey.

People who consider insects to be universally creepy will happily spread honey on their toast, in blissful denial of its origins. (The scientists at the lab where I worked often smeared honeybee larvae on crackers and ate it. It had a wonderful buttery, sweet flavor. For some reason, this has not gained popularity at the supermarket.)

What has gained popularity, however, are boutique honeys, including herbal and fruit varieties. These honeys have a delicate floral taste and aroma and are described in terms not unlike those used in wine-tasting. Like fine wines, they also command a premium price. A jar of lavender honey sells for $12 in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, and one can find white truffle honey for over $40 a pound selling on the internet.

Honey gets its flavor by the flowers from which the nectar is collected.

As children, few of us experienced anything more exotic than Orange Blossom honey. Today, a whole industry of honey varietals has sprung up — Avocado, Blueberry, Basswood, Eucalyptus, Buckwheat, Sage and Tupelo honey, to name just a few.

Lavender honey is produced by Duane Swenson, of Woodland, CA. Swenson, a fourth-generation beekeeper from Minnesota, operates a beekeeping supply warehouse that sells to professionals and hobbyists all over the West Coast. In 1909, his great-grandfather, Carl Edwin Swenson started keeping bees to pollinate his fruit trees. Business was handed down from father to son. When Duane learned the craft at age six from his father, the family had two-thousand colonies.

Duane’s bees collect pollen and nectar from fields of lavender, nearby. When the bloom is on, Duane adds additional supers (those boxes that hold the frames) to the hives so the bees have room to store the honey. He leaves enough honey for the bees to eat over the winter, but can harvest 20 to 30 pounds from each hive.

It is not uncommon to harvest upwards of 100 pounds of honey from a single hive, depending on what’s blooming locally. When you multiply this by 1,500 hives, which Duane considers to be the maximum that one person can handle, that’s a lot of honey.

There’s gold in bees. But honey production is only part of the game.

Aside from the market for bee pollen, propolis and royal jelly (the substance that the workers feed the queen bees), there is money to be made renting bees out to pollinate crops. There is a whole industry of migrant beekeepers who follow the spring bloom and charge farmers to park their trucks (loaded with beehives) near fields of crops. Without honeybee pollination, we would have no fruit, no beans, no tomatoes. Albert Einstein once prognosticated that if the honeybee were to disappear, man would have only four years before succumbing to starvation. It’s food for thought.

Photos: Beekeeper/expert, Serge Labesque tends to the bees at the hive and checks the supers that hold the honeycomb. Photos by Bobby Winston.