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The buzz about bees

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Photo by Sydney Cromwell.

Each of the white boxes in George Baldwin’s backyard has a distinct personality inside — about 30,000 of them, in fact, and they’re always changing. And to successfully collect the honey in his hives, Baldwin has to understand each of these personalities by heart.

“You think you know what bees are going to do, and next thing you know, they’re gone,” Baldwin said.

At his Meadowbrook area home, Baldwin keeps between 40 and 50 beehives. He started out with two hives in 2010 to help his under-pollinated garden, and the hobby grew from there. Baldwin is now a master beekeeper, an achievement that took him three years of learning.

Beekeeping is a retirement project for Baldwin, a 28-year teacher who spent the last 10 years of his career at Chelsea High School. He taught biology, environmental and earth sciences. Now, Baldwin uses his teaching background to pass on his beekeeping knowledge to others through the Shelby County Beekeepers Association. 

“I like teaching, and so I’m teaching classes about bees now,” Baldwin said. “If you ask 10 different beekeepers the same question, you’re going to get 10 different answers. But they’re all probably going to be correct.”

Baldwin was one of the handful of people who founded the Shelby County Beekeepers Association, which he said now has about 200 members across the county. Neal and Doris Snider, who live on Highway 119 and have kept bees since 2000, were also among the first members of the association.

The Sniders also started out with beekeeping to improve their garden, and are now teaching other beekeepers, as well as church, student and garden club groups. Neal recalls how his first pair of hives were quickly joined by around 35 more when a friend decided to get rid of his hives. “All of a sudden we were into it big time,” Neal said.

Baldwin and the Sniders sell their honey at honor system stands on their properties, as well as beeswax candles. The Sniders also make beeswax moisturizer and lip balm and honey soap, and Baldwin sells nucleus colonies to beekeepers who are starting out. 

“The first year… we had 35 gallons of honey and what in the world are we going to do with this stuff? And we let a few people know we had it, and poof! It was gone,” Neal said. 

Even when the Sniders had 90 hives producing about 340 gallons, the jars of honey would fly off the stand on their back porch.

“It hasn’t even gotten cooled yet and they’re buying it,” Neal said.

“Our honey sells out by October,” Doris added.

Since the bees quit making honey when the weather gets cool, they can’t sell any more until the spring.

“After that if you sell out, you don’t get any more until the next year,” Baldwin said.

Baldwin collects his honey twice per year, around Memorial Day and Labor Day. Collecting and extracting the honey takes three to four days. He’s learned through mistakes that he needs to gather the honeycomb frames on a “clear, bluebird day” with no wind or rain, primarily in the middle of the day when most bees are out foraging, to reduce his chances of being stung.

“I do get stung every now and then, but it’s usually my fault. I didn’t put my gloves on or I took my hood off and was walking around somewhere and a bee decided to sting,” Baldwin said. “They’re working and they’d rather do their work than be aggressive.”

The Sniders, on the other hand, collect small amounts of honey about once per week from their hives, before the frames get too heavy. That way, they have a small but constant stream of honey from spring to fall.

“We put that honey in jars and put it in the stands because people are just begging for honey the first week of May,” Neal said.

Keeping bees can be therapeutic and enjoyable, Doris said. She and Neal are both cancer survivors, and she is retired. However, they don’t keep the bees because it’s a moneymaker.

Recently, beekeeping has become much more difficult for keepers. There are new viruses, pests and a list of honeybee diseases “as thick as the Bible,” Doris said. While bees are producing honey, pesticides can’t be put in the hives or the honey will be inedible. Combined with cold winters, it has become a lot harder to keep a hive alive.

This winter, the Sniders lost about 10 of their hives. In winter 2014, they began with 72 hives and only 27 survived.

“The old normal was losing 15 percent. The new normal is losing 50 percent. Even the state head beekeeper … he came to the state meeting this spring and said he’d lost half of his bees,” Neal said.

“It’s not good, but it happens. Diseases, queen failures, there’s multiple reasons,” Doris said.

Beekeepers across the nation are seeing increased numbers of hives failing. According to the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, U.S. bee colonies experienced about a 42 percent loss from April 2014 to April 2015. Since bee pollination is crucial to commercial production of fruits, many types of produce and animal feed, the decreased population could have critical consequences at the dinner table.

“We’re losing our bees,” Baldwin said. “If the bees leave, we don’t have but about three or four years on Earth.”

That’s why Baldwin and the Sniders are active in teaching classes and mentoring newer beekeepers in hopes of growing Alabama’s honeybee population. Doris said she will talk to “anybody that will listen about bees” in the community to let people know how important they are.

“We decided to stay into bees because we studied and realized bees are in trouble… we feel like we’re doing our little part, our little share of trying to keep the bees alive,” Doris said.

If you want to purchase local honey, the Sniders are located at 6112 Cahaba Valley Road, and Baldwin’s stand is at 6726 Bear Creek Road. To learn more about beekeeping, visit shelbybees.org.

Want to benefit bees?

To support bees in your backyard, consider planting some of the following species:

SOURCE: Gardener’s Supply Company

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