Hartford Courant, August 6, 2024

Beekeeping is burgeoning in CT. Here’s why so many people are flocking to the science and honey

There’s quite a buzz across the state with beekeepers, or apiarists, as they like to be called, watching over what they say are continually fascinating honeybees.

And according to the president of the Connecticut Beekeepers Association, the hobby is drawing in people of all ages.

“Younger people are coming on board and are interested in beekeeping,” said Bill Hesbach of Cheshire. “There’s lots of young volunteers that come to the yard and help me. … Cheshire has open space which is designated … for agricultural sponsorship. And of course, beekeeping is agriculture, so they’ve allowed me a nice plot of land up there where I can put in a teaching yard for the Connecticut Beekeepers Association.

“When I started the room was filled with gray-haired guys,” he said. “But that has changed completely. The complexion of it has changed.”

While Hesbach is 74, he said, “In the last two years. I built the following for the Connecticut Beekeepers Association up to 670 members. Of those, I seem to be attracting young people and women beekeepers. And also, I have a YouTube channel, which people are watching. So no, I don’t think it’s an age thing, especially. I don’t feel it.”

“The whole thing about beekeeping is, it’s a combination of science, but what I’m finding out more and more, an art, trying to figure out what they’re trying to tell you they want you to do,” said Bill Riecker of Orange. “And that’s part of the fun. So it’s a science and art combination.

“And that’s what’s so hard for new beekeepers, because you’re coming in with no knowledge whatsoever, and like a lot of us have, they’re looking on YouTube and they’re reading books and they’re reading articles and they’re reading all this kind of stuff, and sometimes the bees don’t read the same thing.”

Riecker, 73, a retired dentist, who’s been tending to his bees for six years, has six hives. Beekeepers recommend starting with two, but the colonies tend to grow and, in order to prevent them from swarming — that’s when half of the colony leaves the hive — Riecker splits his hive and starts a new one.

“It’s more than I want, but it’s what I found that I had to do to keep everybody happy,” he said. “When the hives become too crowded, they get nasty. And they start to swarm and my neighbors don’t want to deal with swarms.”

Besides upsetting his neighbors, if a hive swarms, Riecker loses half his honey production.

“If you have 50-60,000 bees in there and you lose 20-30,000 of them, you’re going to have half the bees working to produce honey, and they don’t produce much honey,” he said. “So it’s advantageous to try to keep your population up so as to increase the number of workers so that they will make more honey.”

All those bees tend to just one queen, Riecker said. It’s all part of an exquisitely designed system, in which each bee has its own role.

“Each one of those 50-60-70,000 has a job,” he said. “Each one has a specific purpose of what they do within the hive. It’s amazing how the system works for them. But they’ve been doing it for millions of years. So I mean, who am I to tell them what to do?”

Riecker said the hobby does more than fill time in retirement. “It gives me something to investigate, something to research, something to learn about,” he said. “It fits all the needs that I have. Plus the opportunity to meet with other people.”

He’s a member of the Connecticut Beekeepers Association and the Backyard Beekeepers Association. Each group has hundreds of members.

Riecker decided to get into the hobby as he was easing into retirement and watching National Geographic specials on TV.

“I just happened to see this thing about beekeeping,” he said. “I said that sounds like something that’d be cool to do, and so I started researching it.”

Then a tornado came through town and wrecked one side of his property, tearing down his trees.

“I found it a perfect area for me to put my beehives,” he said. “They don’t bother anybody. They don’t bother me. They don’t bother my neighbors. So it worked out well.”

Like many new beekeepers, Riecker didn’t have a great start.

My first year was a total failure,” he said. “I got the hives in April and they grew during the summer. They did very, very well. And I was overwintering them. They made it through the winter mostly until the end of March. I went out to find out both of my hives were dead. And then it’s a process of, like I said, trying to figure out what happened: what you did, what you didn’t do to try to figure out why they died.”

What Riecker realized was he hadn’t treated his bees enough for mites.

“It’s not the mites themselves that kill the bees. It’s the viruses that are in the mites,” he said. “Oh, these viruses will be picked up by the hives and by the bees and then they’ll develop some diseases that they just cannot overcome. And so what I’ve done is, I’ve become a little bit more aggressive as far as how I treat my hives as far as the mites are concerned.”

His bees generally yield about 120 pounds of honey, though this year he may get 160 pounds under the “Bill’s Bees” label. He sells some and gives away the rest.

The hardest thing about beekeeping is “trying to figure out what they’re telling me that they want me to do,” Riecker said. “Honestly, that’s the hardest thing.”

And what are they telling him to do?

“Leave me alone,” he said. “In the beginning, you want to go in there, you want to learn as much as you can. And the the only way that you can really do that is by by first-hand knowledge of getting in there and getting your hands in the hive and looking to see what they’re doing, looking to see how they’re reacting, looking to see how healthy they are, and that’s why the advantage of having more than one hive.”

That way, he said, the beekeeper can compare the hives to “compare the growth and the behavior of one hive to another, because unless you happen to compare it you don’t know what normal is.

“There are some times when I’m out there and and then I’ll have one hive that’s really really, really nasty and the other ones are so calm, they don’t care what I’m doing,” Riecker said.

He said he’s only been stung twice.

“Most times they don’t really care what you do,” he said. “I find that most times when I get stung, it’s because I did something wrong. I moved too quickly, I didn’t place my hands correctly so that I allowed the bees to get out from underneath my fingers. I mean, there are times that I’ll go out there and I’m wearing shorts and a T-shirt and they don’t care.”

Riecker’s advice to new beekeepers is to “try to establish a network of other beekeepers that you can talk to. One of the organizations that I belong to, we’ve established a mentoring system where we have people who have a few years of beekeeping under their belt, and they help out new beekeepers who are just starting out.

“I enjoy the idea of teaching and helping newbies, new beekeepers with their hives. It’s enjoyable for me,” Riecker said.

Hesbach does a lot of teaching as president of the Connecticut Beekeepers. He’s certified as a master beekeeper by the Eastern Apicultural Society and has a master beekeeping certificate from the University of Montana. He also writes for the American Bee Journal.

Hesbach said beekeeping has a lot more to do with science now.

“I think it’s changed in that the old school beekeepers who kept bees with a lot of no science and a lot of bee lore, so to speak, dominated the landscape, pretty much,” he said. “And their ideas were what was passed down to them from maybe their father or their uncle that kept bees, or whatever it was.

“But that’s no longer a viable way to keep bees,” he said. “You can’t rely on the historical bee lore to keep your bees alive, because we’ve got some active pests that now are way different than when your grandfather, so to speak, was keeping bees. So now you have to have a scientific approach.”

The main problem is the varroa mite, which jumped from the Asian honeybee to the Western honeybee, which was imported from Europe to North American in the 1600s.

“There was no natural defense, no balance, so it brings down and kills colonies,” Hesbach said. “So our job as beekeepers now is to make certain that we always are vigilant about that mite count in our colonies, and that as pretty much backyard beekeepers we treat accordingly to keep that pest out of control. But it is not easy.”

He said beekeepers need to understand the “very complicated biology of honeybees.”

“And the learning curve is very long,” he said. “Before you’re even feeling comfortable and proficient with bees, you’ve got to go through about seven seasons of beekeeping, and then your bees die, and you slowly learn more about the art of beekeeping.”

Hesbach said the best attitude for a beekeeper to have is one of observation and open-mindedness “and how you are led by the bees.”

“See, the wonderful part about beekeeping is bees, in many ways, display behaviors that all you really have to do is observe, and then act accordingly, and the action that’s required after your observation is something that we the club and other experienced members know and can help you with.”

He said some seek a prescription for whatever issue they may be having with their colonies.

That doesn’t work, because every colony has its own biological distinctions,” Hesbach said. “And every area, every environmental area, is a little bit different. We have many small climates in Connecticut and microclimates, and bees act and behave differently in all those circumstances. So if you could actually teach a beekeeper to observe what’s going on in the colony and then act according to your observation, rather than looking for a prescription all the time, your attitude has to be, let the bees lead you.”

Hesbach advised those who are thinking of getting into the hobby to join “a bee club that offers a mentorship before you buy your bees and you participate in that mentor program … and then, of course, for CBA, we have open field days at our bee yard where we teach beekeepers.”

It costs about $500 to get started, he said, in order to buy the bee boxes. Some will buy kits they can put together and paint themselves.

He said it’s also a way to learn about the natural features of the area in which the beekeeper lives.

“It’s an interesting, beautiful hobby that can broaden your perspective on everything,” he said. “You get to work with a wonderfully studied animal, which we know a whole lot about, and it broadens your perspectives. It brings you out into the environment that the bees are in, because the biology in the colony follows the bloom schedule in your area.

“Plants are blooming, nectar is coming out. Different biology occurs. So it really can connect you really deeply with the ecology of your area. And I think that’s rewarding.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com.

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