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Local Beekeepers Hope Rainy Winter Means a Honey of a Year
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Local Beekeepers Hope Rainy Winter Means a Honey of a Year
by Linda Fridy
When it comes to making honey or pollinating crops, bees are not the only ones who are busy.
The beekeepers who move them from orchard to field, help them battle parasites and sometimes even feed them are just as much abuzz.
Santa Cruz County is home to several beekeepers who practice harvesting different types of honey based on the type of nectar their bees eat, while keeping up with modern challenges.
Greg Walls is one, and he's responsible for introducing two more local beekeepers to the business.
Greg's life work started by chance, when he was coming home from junior high and saw a swarm of honey bees. He approached a local beekeeper to learn what to do with it and ended up with his own hive.
Beekeeping started as a hobby and after trying some other lines of work, Greg decided to try it full time.
Jeff Walls, one of Greg's four children, followed in his father's line of work.
"I was the only one [of the children] who didn't swell up [when I was stung], so I'm the one who took it up," said Jeff good naturedly.
He recalled how when he wanted money to buy a motorcycle as a young teen, his father made him earn it helping out with the beehives.
Decades later, both Jeff and Greg Walls are still in the beekeeping business, each with his own company but often working together trucking the bees across the state to pollinate crops and bringing them home to harvest honey.
Greg Walls' influence extends beyond his family.
He started Bob Miller in beekeeping back in 1971 when they were both volunteer firefighters.
Miller now has 1,200 or more hives in South County and has been active in the state's beekeeping association.
Taking the Bees Where They're Needed
In February and March, the local hives can be found in the almond orchards of the Central Valley, along with bees from as far away as Florida.
"There are not enough bees in California to pollinate them all," said Jeff, and beekeepers fetch their best fees for this early season work.
Greg Walls has been working with some of these ranchers for 40 years. They've never needed a formal contract, he said, and occasionally they call to make sure the bee business is surviving.
After the almond pollination season, the hives will move closer to home, pollinating cherry trees in Gilroy and Morgan Hill.
"It's amazing how well they travel," said Miller.
Bees return to their hives every night and each worker bee has an outstanding, much-studied sense of direction. To move hives, the bees are "locked" in their hives after dark and moved.
The bees need air, so nets are all that cover them as they are trucked across the state or the country. They adapt quickly to new surroundings.
As the weather warms and the queen bees begin to multiply, they form new swarms. Typically, one queen rules a hive, and to survive, young queens must forge a new home.
The young queen off-spring are the result of special feeding and grow sexually mature, unlike worker bees. The worker bees result from a the high-sky mating ritual of a queen to a male (drone) bee. Queen bees can also be purchased.
Jeff explained that he often buys queen bees from out of state. A new queen is put in a cage, then surrounded by about four pounds of bees. The worker bees for the new hive are gathered in a process called "shaking." Eventually, the queen will bear hundreds of her own children, implanted in special sections of the hive quarantined from the areas used to harvest honey.
It takes the bees several days to accept the new queen and begin to form a new hive. Sometimes they don't and simply kill a new queen.
His current 850 hives can nearly double during the swarming season.
Rain Now Means Honey Later
Warmer weather also means the bees begin honey production, but how much they can produce varies widely.
Walls and Miller both said they hope this rainy winter helps the honey crop. The last three dry years have meant less moisture and nectar, which caused honey production to plummet.
Jeff Walls said his production in 2005 was 250 drums of 55 gallons each. By 2009, he was only able to harvest 26 barrels worth.
Miller measures output by colony. He gets anywhere from 40 pounds to as much as 230 pounds per colony in an outstanding year. Last year, his bees produced only 10 gallons a hive.
"We're looking forward to big numbers this year with the rains," said Walls.
A wetter winter also improves the chance of a good sage bloom in the hills of Monterey County, where the bees spend part of the summer. Sage is a favorite flavor among the beekeepers.
In a good season, the sage honey in the hive is nearly as clear as water, said the Walls.
In the fall, the hives move to Sierra foothills to feed on tarplant, which results in a strong, dark honey. It's not popular with many people, but it builds up the stores that the bees feed on through the winter when nectar is scarce and flying weather unpredictable.
If the beekeeper doesn't leave enough honey in the hive, or as has recently been the case the bees can't produce enough honey because of dry conditions, the beekeepers have to supplement their food supply with sugar syrup.
The Walls and Miller brought in three tankers of the syrup for the current winter.
Fighting Mites and More
Beekeepers need to love their work, because it isn't easy.
"People say bees do all the work. I wish that were true. Just keeping them alive is a tough job," said Miller.
Massive die-offs in honey bee hives grabbed headlines and research money as scientists looked for answers to what became known as colony collapse disorder. The current theory is that several factors affect the health of bees, much of it traced to mites that infect them.
The most common for local beekeepers is a parasite called, aptly, varroa destructor that spreads nine different viruses or more.
"They're a basic tick-type critter that bites you and feeds on you and then moves on to the next one," said Miller.
That's what spreads viruses from sick to healthy bees.
The mite is large enough to be seen on the bees or in the hive by beekeepers. It's as if a human had a tick the size of a dinner plate.
"Mites have been a headache to us forever. Trying to kill an insect on an insect – it's really difficult," Jeff added.
His father recalled that when he started beekeeping, he would lose at most 15 percent of bees over a winter. Now that number can be as high as 45 percent.
The latest threat coming from the East Coast is the hive beetle, but it has not been seen locally yet.
Not All Honeys Are Created Equal
Unlike large-scale, commercial honey producers, beekeepers like the Walls and Miller still separate their types of honey, rather than creating a generic blend. During a recent visit, the Walls had jars of dark buckwheat, light sage, local wildflower (which can include nectar from eucalyptus and poison oak) that had already begun to form granules and a sage-wildflower blend, each with a distinctive color.
The flavors vary as well.
Darker honey comes from buckwheat and alfalfa and has a strong flavor and aroma.
"If you like dark beer, you're going to like dark honey," said Jeff.
He said one of his favorite honeys comes from the blue curl flower, a member of the mint family.
"It comes up late in the fall and not very often," he said.
Another favorite is star thistle, but since that plant is unpopular with just about everyone but beekeepers, the honey has become rare.
While honey color indicates the flavor, the wax lets beekeepers know if the bees are doing well.
"White wax means they're making lots of honey," said Walls.
When Miller sees that, he knows he's in the right business.
"What keeps me going is the bees themselves. They're an amazing little insect. When they're doing well and you open up a hive, it does something to you. ... It turns your whole outlook on life."
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