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Beekeeper Shelley Armstrong works, without gloves, around hives holding tens of thousands of bees.
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Farming
A big buzz around beekeeping
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The Day of the Honey Bee shines a spotlight on the smallest domesticated animal in B.C.
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by Matthew Claxton mclaxton@langleyadvance.com
The low hum of honey bees in flight hangs over Shelley Armstrong’s rural Langley property. Her path to becoming one of Langley’s growing number of beekeepers has passed from family tradition to hobby to full-time profession. Now she passes on her expertise, and provides more hives to an industry that’s been hard hit over the past few years. On a warm weekday in late May, Armstrong was at work in her yard, checking out hives for queens and drones, pulling away excess wax comb, and preparing to rebuild hives to create nuclei for new hives. She worked calmly, picking up the rectangular frames with her bare hands. While she wears a beekeeper’s hood, she prefers to work bare-handed to get a better feel for the hives, so she can be gentler. She also uses smoke to keep the bees docile. The smoke works in two ways,
Armstrong said. First, bees instinctively retreat from smoke, and move to eat honey in case they have to flee from a hive-destroying fire. Secondly, it blocks the spread of the chemicals bees release when they’re alarmed or have just stung someone. A sting on her thumb doesn’t slow Armstrong down, as she calmly scrapes it out and keeps working. Thursday, May 29, is the Day of the Honey Bee in B.C., marking 156 years since the first domesticated bee hives were brought to this province. Bees are an ancient domesticated animal, and many people have beekeepers, or apiarists, in their family tree. Armstrong’s work with bees started with her grandfather, a beekeeper in England. “As a really young child, I loved the smell of his honey house,” said Armstrong. She studied biology at university in Ontario, including bees, but it wasn’t until 2006, when she and her husband bought their Langley home, that she felt ready to start keeping a few hives. It started with a few, but the numbers increased.
The Langley Advance is proud to be a sponsor of the upcoming Spirit of the Coast journey…
“It’s hard to stop,” Armstrong said. It had been 10 years since she had worked with or studied bees in university, and Armstrong said even as a hobbyist, she had some catching up to do on the field. She took courses at the Honeybee Centre in Surrey and through SFU’s Bee Master course. Then in 2009, she lost her job and her first son was on the way, and she was looking for something she could do closer to home. Expanding her hobby to a job beckoned. “It just sort of happened,” she said. She wanted to do something she genuinely loved with all her heart, Armstrong said. Now Armstrong keeps 50 active hives on her property, with between 60,000 to 100,000 bees in each hive. Some beekeepers raise bees for the honey, others truck them from farm to farm to provide pollination services to the many berry farmers in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley.
continued on page A4…
A team of canoeists, including Fort Langley’s Brandon Gabriel, departs Sunday on a 90-day expedition to Alaska. The trek’s aim is to bring awareness of the life that exists along the B.C. coastline, and awaken people to the need to preserve it. See story on page A3.