June 2013 | Section A
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Ron and Alma Myers reap the rewards of keeping their honeybees healthy
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By Ed Wenck photos by Josh marshall
Ron Myers checks on his bees at his home in Greenfield. Right: The rewards of beekeeping, Myers' honey.
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The sign’s almost impossible to see — a tiny black-and-yellow placard that reads “Honey For Sale.” In fact, it’s less prominent than the “RV For Sale” sign that marks the front yard of Ronald and Alma Myers, the source of some of the most renowned honey around Greenfield. While Alma handles a small bit of the process, it’s primarily Ron who tends to the insects. A quarter-century ago when he was working as a lab tech, a co-worker handed him a frame of honey, the wooden structure upon which the combs are built, and Ron admired it so much “I went out and purchased two hives from the same beekeeper,” he says. Ron’s speech is measured. He has the demeanor of a scientist: quiet, inquisitive, a man who cherishes precision. He is clearly an Indiana farm boy by birth, however, completely comfortable in work boots and a Carhartt jacket. Ron’s bees are, according to him, “mostly mongrels … you can start out with a pure line, but as it mates, it becomes a mongrel.” And for those mongrel bees, the Hoosier heartland is prime honey-making country. As far as Indiana pollen goes, Ron says that “all (sources of pollen) are good, and the bees will choose the flower that has the best nectar.” So it seems there’s nothing to it: Build a hive near a field of blooming clover, let the bees buzz off and collect their nectar, then wait. A simple process, correct? “It would be,” cautions Ron, “if our bees weren’t like pigs and chickens and other farm animals. You must keep them strong and healthy.” And how does one tend to the health of a bee? Keep the colony thriving through proper reproductive practices. “In this day and age, you must help your bees reproduce or they’ll die out,” he explains. Ron makes sure that a portion of his bees winter in warmer climes. Last year he kept half his
bees here and let the balance ride out the shorter days in South Carolina. (His bee population drops by a third when exposed to an Indiana winter; numbers in the Carolina colony only drop by about 10 percent.) In winter, a bee’s life span is six months, says Ron, but in the summer that expectancy drops to six weeks. Bees will, quite literally, work themselves to death. So overexertion and cold can shorten the lives of these insects, but there’s a darker issue concerning not just beekeepers but anyone who needs bees for pollination. It’s called Colony Collapse Disorder, the sudden disappearance of a colony of honeybees. (See related story on pg. A2.) While the reasons for large die-offs are certainly complex and varied, Ron has been closely following research from Greg Hunt, an entomologist at Purdue University. Hunt thinks that a
Left: Ron and Alma Myers at their Greenfield home and honey farm. Inset: Some of their 50,000 to 60,000 bees. Above: They rely on an honor box to collect money for their jars of honey that they sell from the front porch of their Greenfield home.
specific kind of seed coating used to protect crops from pests may be having a deleterious effect on some bee populations, and the symptoms described by Hunt match up with some of what Myers has been seeing over the last few years. “What we see is a farmer within a quarter-, half-mile planting his corn, and on that day, or a couple of days after, we’ll see dead bees outside the hive.” While the colony can recover, there’s concern that the treatments might work their way into pollen fed to baby bees over the winter, poisoning the young in a way that can ultimately lead to disaster for a particular colony. When all’s going well, however, there are normally 20 to 30 frames in a hive in the peak of summer housing 50,000 to 60,000 bees. That’s when the hives are most efficient. Those white boxes need to have their frames replaced every four or five years, though; pesticides from other ag operations and suburban lawns can build up inside the structure and pollute the comb, harming the colony. see Myers on page A2