The Secret Life of Beekeepers

The Secret Life of Beekeepers

DARING AND A LITTLE DANGEROUS, A PROFESSION IN PURSUIT OF GOLD

Story and photos by Jason Vowell

She moves slowly, methodically; her long abdomen adorned with the most extravagant bronze. A flurry of servants buzz around her, tending to her every need: cleaning her, feeding her, protecting her. She is the beating heart of an entire colony that couldn’t exist should she fall ill; a thriving distillery that produces an invigorating and nutritious elixir—a condiment born of golden sunshine, floral and sweet. In her lifetime she will have up to thirty male suiters, and her unmatched fertility will produce nearly two thousand offspring a day. When she becomes old and infertile, the servants who have slaved so tirelessly their entire lives to protect her will turn on their queen, exiling her and those who choose to stay loyal to her rule. Or, they will kill her and replace her with a new, younger, and more fertile Empress. Without her, and her brood, a large swath of plants and animals, including humans, would starve. She is one of the most important organisms on the planet. She is the Queen Honey Bee.

Jason Vowell

Often, the first thing most people think of when they hear phrases like “swarm” or “hive” is getting stung. But to a beekeeper, these words elicit pure joy. Wonder. Excitement. Love, even.

Getting stung was certainly the first thing I thought of when Nick Usner, owner of Wild Woods Apiary in Waldheim, Louisiana, turned around and placed a large queen bee directly in my hand. He instructed me to hold her gently between my ungloved fingers and not let her fly away—a task easier said than done.

“Drones cannot sting you,” Usner told me. “Worker bees can, they have little barbs that catch in the skin and stay when the bee flies away. A queen, though? They have smooth stingers, but most beekeepers are never stung by queens.”

As Usner walked away to fetch a “queen cage”—a small clip used to keep a queen safe while transporting her to a new home—the world suddenly came into sharp, distilled focus. I stared down at this beautiful, regal insect trying her best to wrestle free, but—to my surprise—not attempting to sting me. Thousands of drones whipped around my body like a buzzing tornado, their sole purpose in life to protect their Queen in my hand. Exhilarated, I found myself intensely aware of my surroundings, filled with adrenaline. In that moment, I realized why some people fall so deeply in love with the tradition and craft of beekeeping.

Jason Vowell

Bees have five eyes: three that perceive fluctuations in light, and two compound eyes that specialize in recognizing complex shapes and patterns. Their vision is perfectly attuned to ultraviolet light. This serves to direct them toward the brightest, most nectar-rich flowers. They can easily differentiate between hives to find their own. Research has shown that they can even recognize human faces. If that is true, a vast majority of the honey bees in St. Tammany Parish must be familiar with Nick Usners’ impressive beard and kind eyes.

Usner has collected and relocated hundreds of feral swarms into hives across the Northshore; each one a thriving community of social insects. “When you look at a bee hive, you are looking at a living dehydrator,” Usner says. “By fanning their wings, primarily at night, the bees dehydrate the collected nectar to make honey.”

Each hive has the potential to yield nearly sixty pounds of honey each year. For those doing the math, that’s over seven thousand pounds of the sweet stuff. Usner primarily sells his bees’ honey at farmers’ markets, but it has started to find its way onto the shelves of health food stores like Sacred Earth Company in Mandeville, Abita Coffee Roasting Company, and even small groceries like Nur’s Kitchen in Covington. As a farmer, Usner quickly developed a symbiotic relationship to his hives: they help pollinate his crops in their endless quest for nectar and pollen, and the honey is a delicious byproduct of that process.

“I’ve never bought bees,” Usner said. “All my colonies are feral swarms. I really appreciate the wild cycle and roll with it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely in it for honey production, but at the same time I keep my bees in a more holistic fashion than most beekeepers would. It’s really important to exist hand in hand with bees instead of trying to completely control them.”

For Usner, this means no treatment, no chemicals, no mite control or pesticides, and no pasteurization of the honey. “When you pasteurize, the heat destroys the nutrients and enzymes. What you are left with is a sweetener. It’s not honey.”

Jason Vowell

Usner took the queen from my hand and gently placed her in the clip. “I can’t explain my fascination with them or why I love beekeeping so much,” Usner said. “You’ll get a different answer from every beekeeper. I hate to use the word addiction, because it has a negative connotation, but I’m really addicted to the swarm. Watching fifty thousand bees move into one of my traps and relocating them to their new home—it’s just really satisfying.”

Most reproductive swarming activity takes place in the spring, between March and May. Generally, swarms occur when a hive gets too crowded, and they will split in two. Bees will also swarm if their hive becomes uninhabitable due to predators, lack of food or water, parasite infestations, or weather.

For Usner, beekeeping is not just about conservation and cultivation, but also education. “I understand why people view a swarm as something negative. But it’s actually when the bees are most docile. They don’t have a home to defend. They don’t have any reason to be aggressive.”

Usner sets around fifty swarm traps in St. Tammany Parish every spring. His traps are wooden boxes with a bit of brood comb inside, saturating the space with bee pheromones. “As long as it fits the criteria, bees will naturally set up shop in one of these traps and start drawing comb within a day,” Usner said. “It’s perfectly natural for them to swarm. As a beekeeper, it’s my job to control that. And if they set up shop in your barn or in your walls? It’s my purpose to relocate them safely.”

The bees may like these rigid enclosures, but Usner likes to think outside of the box. “It’s wild, no one has really had any new ideas when it comes to beekeeping. As humans we have been doing it for ten thousand years, but it’s still mostly just wooden boxes in a field. We haven’t evolved much. I’m really into trying new things.”

Jason Vowell

The taste, color, and quality of honey is directly influenced by the nectar sources in the bees’ environment. It can be rich, dark, and smoky, or light and floral. Usner compares the variations in honey to a good wine. “A lot of beekeepers will plant different fruit trees and flowers around their apiaries to influence the flavor and quality of their bees’ honey. I thought, why not just take the bees to the source?”

So, he did. By building rows of bee hives onto a carefully remodeled trailer, Usner can transport his bees to different nectar sources—like Blue Harvest Blueberry farm, a pick-your-own fruit farm in Bush, Louisiana. “It’s a win-win for everyone,” Usner said. “A honey bee hive on a farm like this one can [make the farm] yield three times more fruit due to better pollination. And the bees produce more honey because of the abundance of nectar.”

As Usner walked me through the daily process of hive maintenance at Blue Harvest, his focus trailed off to a large, dark mass about twenty feet above us in the tree line. Eyes wide, a wave of excitement washed over him as he yelled, “Look! What are the odds? THERE IS A SWARM MY MAN!”

Surely enough, dangling precariously just steps away from us on the limb of a laurel oak, was a massive cluster of honey bees. Without skipping a beat, Usner scaled the tree to assess the situation.

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“How lucky could we get? It’s beautiful!” Usner yelled down to me as I climbed up a nearby deer stand to hand off a large plastic container. In one fascinating, forceful movement, Usner shook the cluster of bees into the tub. “This swarm is in a really good mood today!” Usner howled as he passed down the vibrating box of bees to me. He gently slid a lid across the box and looked up at me with a completely straight face. “I’m going to need you to put these bees in your car.”

I laughed, assuming it was just another beekeeper joke. But Usner was dead serious. “If I put them in the back of my truck, they could overheat in the sun and die,” he told me. “Just put them in your backseat, turn on the AC, and crack the window in case any get loose. Don’t worry, they are completely docile right now. They won’t sting you.”

And that’s how I found myself cruising down Louisiana Highway 21 with fifty thousand bees buzzing away in my backseat, en route to their new home at a satsuma orchard down the road, where they would help pollinate next fall’s citrus.

Jason Vowell

Beekeeping isn’t just for farmers or large scale honey producers. There has been an explosion of DIY beekeepers in it for the love of the craft. Over the last few months, I have had the pleasure of tagging along with some on a handful of removals and relocations.

“It’s one part science, and three parts art,” said Sara Fiorenzo, a DIY beekeeper who goes by Michigoddess Apiary in Central City New Orleans. “It’s like having kids. There are no set guidelines or completely right or wrong way to do it. You have to listen to the bees, observe them, figure out what they need, and help them thrive.”

Fiorenzo pulled a hunk of glistening honeycomb straight from a hive she had just carried precariously down an old ladder from a roof removal and handed it me. “Of course, environmentally, it’s important to protect the bees. But these are the perks of the job.”

I took a bite out of the intricatelydrawn wax and could instantly feel the pleasure center of my brain awash with endorphins. It tasted like blooming jasmine and the pine needle smoke used to calm the bees: a complex and exciting combination on my palate.

Everyone has a favorite way to eat honey. Usner prefers it straight from the hive, but also loves it on a peanut butter and banana sandwich (creamy peanut butter, he stressed.). Fiorenzo prefers hers fermented in homemade mead. Personally, I have never experienced a better way to eat honey than right there, chewing the drenched wax in the soft afternoon sun, with the oscillation of the very bees that made it swirling all around me.

For more information on Wild Woods or Michigoddess apiaries, visit their social media pages: facebook. com/wildwoodsapiary or @wildwoodsapiary on Instagram. facebook.com/ MichigoddessApiary Or, if you have a swarm that needs relocating, call or text Nick Usner at (985) 373-3016.