Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Yes, sometimes she gets stung. That’s the answer to one of the more popular questions for beekeeper Jane Sueme, proprietor of Isabees (Isabees.com) honey and beekeeping-supply emporium. This month she’ll speak at the Heartland Apicultural Society's (heartlandbees.com) annual meeting, bringing beekeepers from across the Midwest to UMSL.
• When you’re first starting out, one way to get your bees is to actually catch your own swarm. What you do is you build your equipment and start talking to other beekeepers and get the word out that you’re interested in a swarm. When you find a good one, in a tree or a bush, if it’s not 40 feet up in the air, you bring a box, and you shake the branch that they’re on, and the bees fall into the box. As long as the queen makes it into the box, the swarm will follow.
• When the queen bee first emerges from the hive and goes on her mating flight she will fly up to five miles to a drone-congregating area, where the guys hang out. (laughs) She will mate with between a dozen and 20 drones over a day or two. When a drone mates with a queen, it rips his heart from his body and he dies. Then she comes back to the hive, her eggs develop, and she becomes too heavy to fly. So, in theory, she never leaves the hive again. She lays eggs and her attendants feed her and remove her waste. She’s taken care of her entire life.
• In a colony, a group of individual bees communicate and work in harmony to provide for the colony as a whole. They’re always working for the best interest of the colony, not the individual. So a lot has been written about democratic societies trying to emulate the honeybee.
• Colony Collapse Disorder was identified in 2006. Honeybees are disappearing all over the globe. What they’re looking at now is pesticide exposure. They’re finding huge amounts of pesticide and fungicide in the wax and the honeycombs. A lot of research is going on now about what bees can tolerate and what they can’t.
• Early on in my experience, I tried to work with the bees on my lunch hour from my full-time job. I was told that I needed to do this one test to look for a mite, so I came home on my lunch hour, and the weather was horrible, it was going to storm. The bees were not happy, and I had a bee climb under my veil and into my ear. It happened twice, and the third time I got so frustrated I pulled my veil off, and I got swarmed. I put my fingers into my ears. My boyfriend saw what was happening and he pushed me into the garage and shut the garage door. He told me to brush the bees from my hair, which was so full of bees it was buzzing. I finally got the bees out of my hair and got back to work. I ended up pulling about a dozen stingers out of my scalp, and I probably got stung about 20 times. Every beekeeper has at least one of these stories.
• I get stung most times when I do an inspection of the hive, and it’s usually on my finger, right through my glove, because I’ve got my hands on the hive. I’m messing around with their house; they have a right to defend it. After eight years, my body has built up a defense to the poison. By the time I get my equipment off, I can’t even see where I’ve been stung. But some areas are more sensitive, areas with fluid like the inside of the elbows, the backs of the knees, and the eye sockets.
• Support your local beekeeper—it’s a good thing to buy local. We actually have a “honey hutch” on our property that people can drive up to and buy honey any time of day. There’s a little slot where you can put your money in, here in the Sappington/Melville area. People really like the honor-system aspect of it, too.
• I got into beekeeping about eight years ago, when my significant other Scott and I were discussing our garden. We were trying to grow vegetables, like tomatoes and cucumbers. We noticed that there weren’t any pollinators—we didn’t see any insects. I know from reading that we’ve lost a lot of habitat for the pollinators. A lot of beekeepers have told me they had the same experience; that’s how they got started, too. We learned how to provide a place for them to nest, and pollen or nectar to eat. And it has made a huge difference to the garden have pollinating insects there, not just the honeybees. We have butterflies, wasps, and moths, too.
• We started by going to a local beekeeping club. I was the only female there that wasn’t somebody’s spouse! They immediately got me involved, and I eventually became vice president of the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association. We used to meet in a small room at the Kirkwood Community Center, and now we’re at the Powder Valley Conservation Center. The club has grown from 35 to at least 250 people. We have more than 100 people at each monthly meeting, and we have spinoff clubs, too.
• The first step to becoming a beekeeper is to start making some connections through a club, and talk to other beekeepers. They offer beginners’ workshops. And read—read and learn what is involved.
• To start, you’d need what we call “wooden ware” and “wax foundation”—that’s the frames and foundation that go in boxes that stack on top of one another. We call the boxes “supers.” And you’ll need a top and bottom for those, and a high stand, and that’s your hive. Then you need protective clothing, be it a hat and veil, or coveralls or a coat, too. Basic tools include a smoker, a bee brush and a hive tool. That’s the beginners’ kit. Then you’re ready to get bees. There are three ways. You can purchase a package of three pounds of live bees – that’s 10,000 bees. The suppliers actually ship that through the U.S. mail. Or, you can buy a nucleus colony, which is a smaller version of the hive, including an egg-laying queen is laying eggs. The third option is the most fun, I think, and that’s to catch a swarm. What you do is you build your equipment and start talking to other beekeepers and get the word out that you’re interested in a swarm. When you find a good one, in a tree or a bush, if it’s not 40 feet up in the air, you bring a box, and you shake the branch that they’re on, and the bees fall into the box. As long as the queen makes it into the box, the swarm will follow.
• The queen is very elongated, and her thorax is enlarged and hairless. When I’m looking for the queen, I look for a large, shiny thorax. She often runs away from you because they don’t like light. They live in that hive, in the dark, protected for virtually their entire lives. When she first emerges from the hive and goes on her mating flight she will fly up to five miles to a drone-congregating area, where the guys hang out. (laughs) She will mate with between a dozen and 20 drones over a day or two. When a drone mates with a queen, it rips his heart from his body and he dies. Then she comes back to the hive, her eggs develop, and she becomes too heavy to fly. So, in theory, she never leaves the hive again. She lays eggs and her attendants feed her and remove her waste. She’s taken care of her entire life.
• In a strong hive, there are about 60,000 female worker bees, one queen, and about 1,000 male drones. The bees’ lifespan is about six weeks, and for the first three weeks they’re inside the hive doing chores. They do it by age – as they get older, they graduate from one chore to the next.
• When people become beekeepers, they have to know what’s in their immediate environment. Among other things, they learn what trees are in their yard. They get back to nature; it’s a wonderful thing.
• We pump smoke into the hive to distract the bees. The majority of beekeepers believe that the smoke subconsciously is an indicator to the bees that their tree is burning down, and their involuntary response is to go to the bottom of the hive and start feeding on honey, because they’re preparing for the trip they think they’re going to have to make to find a new home. So they do that, rather than turning on you.
• In warm weather when I’m working with the hive, I prefer to wear just a long-sleeve button-down shirt, jeans, a hat with a veil, gloves, and straps around my ankles.
• If you get stung by a bee, it’s female; the drones do not have stingers.
• The bees can be irritated for any reason. Queenlessness is one of the situations where they’re very defensive. You might have a dozen of them hanging on your veil, and if there was no veil they’d be in your face.
• Early on in my experience, I tried to work with the bees on my lunch hour from my full-time job. I was told that I needed to do this one test to look for a mite, so I came home on my lunch hour, and the weather was horrible, it was going to storm. The bees were not happy, and I had a bee climb into under my veil and into my ear. It happened twice, and the third time I got so frustrated I pulled my veil off, and I got swarmed. I put my fingers into my ears. My boyfriend saw what was happening and he pushed me into the garage and shut the garage door. He told me to brush the bees from my hair, which was so full of bees it was buzzing. I finally got the bees out of my hair and got back to work. Then I realized that was the hugest adrenaline rush I had ever had, and I probably should not have been driving. I ended up pulling about a dozen stingers out of my scalp, and I probably got stung about 20 times. Every beekeeper has at least one of these stories; like, you move a whole hive and something goes wrong and you drop the boxes. It takes one of those experiences to understand the risks and then to do it by the book.
• I think most people who get into beekeeping are a little nervous about getting stung, but that’s one of those things that gets answered pretty immediately. I get stung most times when I do an inspection of the hive, and it’s usually on my finger, right through my glove, because I’ve got my hands on the hive. I’ve got my hands in there, and I’m messing around with their house; they have a right to defend their house. After eight years, my body has built up a defense to the poison. By the time I get my equipment off, I can’t even see where I’ve been stung. But some areas are more sensitive, areas with fluid like the inside of the elbows, the backs of the knees, and the eye sockets.
• Honey is a mixture of regurgitated plant nectar and fluid from the honeybees’ bodies, placed in a cell in the honeycomb. They fan it, and when it gets below a certain temperature, it becomes honey. It’s their food, their carbohydrates to live on through the winter.
• I harvest honey about three or four times a year. You extract the honey out of the comb by centrifugal force. Old-timers used to call it “robbing the bees.”
• There are a great abundance of fun recipes that people use honey in, and are modifying to use honey in to showcase it. People use it in breads, pies, cookies, dips, salad dressings, and glazes for barbeque. We have a few chefs who have become beekeepers now, too. And of course you use honey in your coffee, yogurt, cereal, toast…
• I’m really pleased to be involved in a beekeeper mentoring program and to help customers. I don’t think I’d still be doing this now if someone hadn’t helped me and show me everything in a hands-on way.
• In a colony, a group of individual bees communicate and work in harmony to provide for the colony as a whole. They’re always working for the best interest of the colony, not the individual. So a lot has been written about democratic societies trying to emulate the honeybee.
• Honeybees have been on this planet for 30 million years, and man has had a relationship with honeybees for about 10,000 years. There are cave paintings of people climbing a ladder for the honey harvest. The honeybee is what it is because we’ve been managing them for thousands of years. We have a symbiotic relationship.
• Colony Collapse Disorder was identified in 2006. Honeybees are disappearing all over the globe. What they’re looking at now is pesticide exposure. They’re finding huge amounts of pesticide and fungicide in the wax and the honeycombs. A lot of research is going on now about what bees can tolerate and what they can’t.
• Support your local beekeeper—it’s a good thing to buy local. We actually have a “honey hutch” on our property that people can drive up to and buy honey any time of day. There’s a little slot where you can put your money in, here in the Sappington/Melville area. People really like the honor-system aspect of it, too.
