11 minute read
To bee or not to bee
To bee or not to bee
Why you want honeybees in your yard
BY JANET WHITMAN
Like many backyard beekeepers, Catherine Dempsey got the bug from another honey farmer.
She was running a series of heritage shops in Newfoundland and Labrador and started selling honey, lip balms, beeswax candles and other honeybee by-products from a family-run bee business on the island’s East Coast.
“When I retired from fulltime work, I thought, ‘I’d like to try it,’” recalls Dempsey. “I’d always really liked bees and I have a big garden and a lot of fruit trees. I thought maybe some beehives wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
That was June 2011. Dempsey soon learned it was too late to get everything ready to start that year but ended up glad for the delay.
“Everybody thinks this is going to be just as easy as putting a birdfeeder in the backyard,” she says. “I realized it was a lot more work than that, but also a lot more rewarding.”
Catherine Dempsey tends to one of her honeybee hives in Newfoundland.
Greg Locke
She spent a year reading up on beekeeping, putting together equipment for the hives, getting her husband onside and making sure her neighbours knew about her plan.
The next July, she bought two nucleus colonies. Each “nuc” as they’re known in the bee-farming world is a partially developed colony with frames of comb, worker bees and an established queen.
“I settled them in, and they did really well,” she says. “Then one of them died and I started to learn.”
By 2015, beekeeping was catching on in the province and the Newfoundland and Labrador Beekeeping Association was launched, with Dempsey as a founding member and later president.
“It became very fashionable,” says Dempsey. “People suddenly caught on to the whole idea of ‘Save the Bees,’ and for some reason, they think that honeybees are it.” But honeybees are more like a farmed animal. “We protect them in the winter,” she says. “We put then in good spots. We plant special crops for them. We treat them if they get diseases.”
While not in danger like wild bees, honeybees do play an important role. In addition to producing honey, they’re a vital pollinator of crops like wild blueberry fields and orchards.
Atlantic Canada now has about 40,000 beehives, and the number is growing.
Tim Purdy first started dabbling with honeybees to pollinate his family’s wild blueberry fields in the Portapique area of Nova Scotia.
“I really got serious about it when I took over the small blueberry operation and looked at the bottom line of where I might be able to make a difference, without buying a quarter million dollars’ worth of tractors or something of that nature,” he says.
Country Fields Beekeeping Supplies owner Tim Purdy and manager Mark MacKay.
Steve Smith/VisionFire
One hive per acre can generate an extra thousand pounds of blueberries. Purdy added hives with limited success until he enrolled in Dalhousie University’s first Modern Beekeeper extended-learning program.
He was buying bees from the only bee store in Atlantic Canada at the time, Country Fields Beekeeping Supplies outside of Moncton. He noticed that the owners were at an age that they might be looking to retire. “One thing led to another, and I bought them out and decided to move the business here to Nova Scotia.”
He operated Country Fields out of his garage for five years before opening his storefront in Fall River just as COVID-19 hit. He didn’t get the grand store-opening he was hoping for, but with people looking for new hobbies to ride out the pandemic, business has been busy.
“We’re definitely seeing way more hobbyists,” he says. When he first came to Nova Scotia and registered as a beekeeper 16 or 17 years ago, the province hovered around 215 registered keepers. Now, there are nearly 900.
Commercial-scale beekeeping is backbreaking work. “It’s tremendously physical,” says Purdy. “The hives themselves are the better part of 125 pounds. You’re moving the bees at night so the bees are in the hive, and you can take (all the bees) with you. It’s usually down a lonesome, dusty road with no cellphone signal.It’s not a lot of fun.”
Greg Locke
His retail business is now successful enough that he’s able to contract that work out.
He keeps bees in his backyard in Waverly and has carted them to his kids’ classrooms in observation hives. “Beekeeping for a hobbyist is tremendously fun,” he says. “I love it. They can keep you mesmerized for a long time.”
The average hive in the Maritimes produces around 55 or 60 pounds of honey a year, a small amount compared to more than 300 pounds per hive in Saskatchewan and Alberta, where bees feast on fields of seed-oil crops like canola and sunflowers.
“There’s not a huge amount of forage in certain areas for bees,” says Purdy. “If you put bees in a pine forest, don’t expect a lot of honey.”
Petr Kopet of Randolf Island, near Saint John, N.B., was going to give up his beekeeping hobby after his backyard bees didn’t make it through the winter.
“I thought I’d just take a break. It can be fairly time consuming,” he says. He put the empty hives up for sale. He was getting lots of interest when he noticed heavy bee traffic around the hives. “When you have frames with leftover pollen and wax, other bees can use it. It’s easier for them to collect instead of hopping from flower to flower.”
He thought the bees were just coming and going. “When I found a free moment, I opened up the hive and saw I had a really healthy colony living in there. I started observing them and it brought back the reason that I got into it.”
Greg Locke
A FORCE TO BEE RECKONED WITH
While fascinating to observe, anthropomorphizing them doesn’t provide much insight, Kopet says.
He recalls coming across a book by a new-age beekeeper who concluded humans could find world peace if they’d only learn from bees. “The world of bees is interesting, but it’s far from a fairy tale,” he says.
Unlike other bees, honeybees are social insects that live in highly organized colonies with a single queen, hundreds of male drones and tens of thousands of female worker bees.
The environment isn’t exactly hospitable. Honeybees “rob” weaker colonies to take their honey. The workers can turn on their own queen and kill her if she’s not up to snuff. The only purpose of the drones is to mate with the queen. The roughly one in a thousand that manage the feat dies immediately after, their abdomens and “mating equipment” are ripped away as they fall from the queen. The remaining drones are pushed out of the hive to die as winter approaches. With flowers scarce for foraging, they are hungry mouths to feed with no purpose.
NOT ALL IT’S CRACKED UP TO BEE
Thinking of getting into beekeeping? “It’s not like getting a goldfish,” says Purdy.
Doing research is key. Visiting a beekeeping operation before taking the plunge is also recommended. It’s not an inexpensive hobby. Setting up the first hive can cost about $1,000.
Troy Fraser, president of the Prince Edward Island Beekeepers Association, started an introductory course for beekeepers this year and had 60 people enrolled. The Zoom course also includes four field trips for some hands-on learning.
“You can read until you're blue in the face. You can watch videos all day long. But just like drivers ed, you don’t really learn how to drive until you get behind the wheel and do it yourself,” says Fraser.
A hobby beekeeper with a dozen or so colonies can expect to spend a morning a week inspecting the hives, he says. “There’s not a lot you need to do during the honey flow, which is in July and early August. You want to let the bees work.”
In the spring and fall, there’s much more work, including adding treatments to guard against varroa mites, which attack and feed on the bees, weakening entire colonies. Newfoundland and Labrador is one of the few places in the world free from the pest.
The off-season, December through March, is a good time for reading up on bees, learning from other beekeepers and building more equipment for the next year. “As a beekeeper, you’re always one season ahead,” says Fraser. “Time commitment really comes down to how much you want to invest in the bees yourself. Is it just going to be a hobby or are you going to get into pollination or bottling and selling honey, so you need more of a honey crop?”
Fraser, who started beekeeping in 2018 after a life-long fascination with bees, went into winter with 77 hives and is aiming to have 200 or more by next winter.
“I’m a diabetic; I never got into it for the honey,” he says. “It’s a way to keep myself busy. Why do people do quilting? Why do people make model airplanes? It’s something that they enjoy … The sound of buzzing in the air is actually quite soothing.”
It’s also a chance to connect with his three daughters, ages eight, 10 and 13. “Each one of them has their own bee suit,” says Fraser.
A BEE-AUTIFUL STORY
When Dempsey saw a growing number of younger people getting interested in honeybees, she decided to write a children’s book. “All of the Brownie troops wanted us to come and talk and it got me thinking,” she says.
Daphne’s Bees tells the story of a 10-year-old who learns beekeeping from her grandmother. “When I first wrote the book, it was very straightforward,” says Dempsey, a former elementary school teacher. “I realized it needed a little bit of drama. There is lots of drama with beekeeping. So, she had to get stung. Then robber wasps came and tried to steal the honey.”
Catherine Dempsey wrote a children’s book featuring some of the drama involved in beekeeping.
Greg Locke
Dempsey says her own honeybee hives are in “a silly place” in her backyard only 15 metres from the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Flatrock, a small community near St. John’s.
“It’s not a good place to keep bees because they don’t eat salt water,” she says. “But it’s good enough for my garden.”
Beyond the honey she collects, she likes the feeling of being in touch with nature.
“On a really nice warm day (in early spring), a little plant called Rock Cress comes out in my neighbour’s yard. She comes running over and says, ‘Catherine, the bees are at my Rock Cress.’ Then I’ll sit up by the hive and watch ‘the girls’ coming and going,” she says. “They’ve got their little pollen packs on the side of their legs. It looks like they’re wearing little yellow socks. The queen is in there, laying 1,000 to 1,500 eggs a day and that hive is starting to grow.”
Facts worth buzzing about
HONEYBEES ARE NOT NATIVE TO NORTH AMERICA
Thought to have originated in Africa, honeybees were originally imported to North America by European colonists in the early 1600s to provide a sweetener for early settlers.
BUSY BEES
In addition to producing pots of honey, honeybees are now the main pollinator for flowering crops such as wild blueberries and orchards. The critters are responsible for one in every three bites of food we take.
EFFICIENCY
They’re a lot less efficient than native bees, however. It takes six visits by a honeybee to pollinate a blueberry bush. A bumble bee can take care of business in just one trip. The problem, though, is there aren’t enough native species around to pollinate for the expanded agricultural industry.
INDEFINITE SHELF LIFE
Honey is one of the only foods that doesn’t spoil. Acidic enzymes from the honeybees’ stomachs and a fanning action from their wings that brings moisture down to 17 per cent creates a liquid that’s inhospitable for bacterial growth.
PRODUCTION
One worker bee will produce around 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. It requires 556 worker bees to gather a pound of honey, the equivalent of flying once around the world. Two million flowers must be tapped to make a pound of honey.
BEARS A CONCERN
Those cartoons of Winnie the Pooh with a pot of honey are no joke. Honey attracts bears. They’ll also gobble up the bees and larvae, which are good sources of protein. Raccoons and skunks also raid hives and cause damage.
NOT VEGAN
As an animal-derived food, honey is not vegan. Some vegans are also concerned about the treatment of honeybees, which are managed like livestock.
