The Sunnyvale Sun

Cover Story

Bee Happy

Beekeeping is more than a hobby; it's become a necessity

By Chris Vongsarath

Before the lid came off the top of the jar, the buzzing had already echoed across the room. Timid at first, one of the bees made its way out of the jar and was buzzing overhead.

With a drop of honey on her index finger, Helen Shaw did her best to entice the bee to take a landing and pose for pictures.

The scene is a polarizing one; with most people instinctively running away from bees, and beekeepers, like Shaw, playfully managing them.

"They're fascinating creatures," Shaw says. "I'm interested in their intricacy and the complexity of how they build their hives and store honey. To me, they've got a lot of human qualities."

Shaw, a Saratoga chiropractor, is one of several beekeepers in the area who have taken up the part-time gig. Some are looking for a hobby, others are interested in honey and a select few are hoping it will help pollinate their gardens.

As a kid, Shaw had an interest in bugs, and after reading up on beekeeping she decided to follow up on her fascination with bees, she said.

In March, she was called out to a Sunnyvale home where a woman reported a wild hive of bees on her property. Secured in a beekeeper's suit, Shaw captured two-thirds of the hive. A couple of days later, she returned to get the rest of the bees, including the queen.

The operation was a success, though Shaw admits she was less than fearless in her first swarm-capturing adventure.

"The bees start landing on the suit and you're cool with that. But when they start landing on your veil, crawl around and stop right between your eyes, you're thinking, 'If that's on my face right now, that'd be freaky,' " she said.

But just two months after the experience, Shaw has gotten to the point where she is completely comfortable holding a bee.

"They're actually amazingly gentle," she says. "If they sting someone, they die, so they only sting people when they are threatened and feel they have to."

Tom Rice of Los Gatos got into beekeeping much the same way that Shaw did.

Seven years ago Rice took up beekeeping after his wife, Debby, attended a lecture about how bees were being squeezed out by urbanization. He bought a couple of books and a starter kit and was on his way.

Rice, who has given talks on beekeeping, says getting started as a beekeeper isn't difficult. The hardest part may be getting the bees themselves.

Typically, bees are obtained from other beekeepers or by capturing wild swarms, as Shaw did.

Rice said Carrier's Beekeeping Supplies in San Jose is the main stop for beekeeping supplies in the South Bay. Franklin Carrier, a beekeeper for more than 50 years, sells everything bee-related, from beekeeper's suits to bee figurines to candy made from honey.

Carrier also keeps a "swarm list," in which beekeepers can sign up to find out about the latest reports of swarms in their neighborhoods.

After getting the bees and all the necessary supplies and equipment, the day-to-day operations of being a beekeeper are fairly simple, Rice said.

The bees collect on a plastic sheet sprayed with beeswax enclosed by a wooden frame. Several frames are then stored in a wooden box called a "super." The supers are stacked on top of one another with a trap hole in between each, allowing the bees to move up in the hive--which is simply a stack of supers. A "queen excluder" keeps the queen in the bottom two supers, which are used for laying eggs or "brooding."

After set up is complete, the bees do the rest of the work.

A hive can hold anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 bees, depending on the number of supers. Beekeepers recommend keeping the larvae in the bottom two supers to avoid getting them mixed up with other supers when it comes time to harvest honey.

Carrier said harvesting honey, done once a year just before the winter season, is the most time-consuming part of being a beekeeper.

The process begins by removing a couple of supers at one time, waiting two days to allow the bees to vacate the honey supers or enter the bottom two brooding supers.

The frames of the honey supers are then taken out and "uncapped" with an electric knife, releasing the honey-filled cells. The frames are put in a motorized or hand-powered extractor that spins the frames at a rate of 150 revolutions per minute, extracting the honey into the bottom of the cylinder.

Carrier says it takes about 10 minutes to extract the honey from eight frames. On average, three supers produce seven to 10 gallons of honey every year.

Bees produce honey, but they also pollinate fruit trees and plants, providing one-third of the food people eat. They also carry with them an unshakeable public stigma. Most people tend to swat at bees when they see them, but not beekeepers.

Beekeeper Suzanne Buerchner of Campbell says she has her bees stored at her mother's home in Menlo Park because her neighbors can't stand bees.

"On one side [of my house] they're allergic and on the other side they're terrified," said Buerchner, former president of the Santa Clara Valley Beekeepers Guild.

Buerchner says she's been stung about 40 times since she became a beekeeper in 2002 and she remembers the feeling well.

"It hurts every time," she said.

Education about bees and their importance to agriculture has been an integral part in public awareness, Buerchner said. The beekeepers guild routinely goes to elementary schools, educating younger students before they develop a fear of bees.

Often times, honeybees get confused with wasps or their Africanized counterparts--the killer bee. The mix-up invokes images of a swarm of bees relentlessly attacking humans without cause or discretion.

"People see the Africanized killer bees in movies and on TV. It's like what happened with the movie Jaws, but how many people die from shark attacks every year?" said beekeeper Timm Thompson, who first got involved with bees 20 years ago.

While others are keeping bees as a hobby or for practical purposes, Thompson has bigger ideas.

When the 58-year-old retires from his window cleaning business in a few years, he plans to move to Bridgeport, a rural town situated near the Sierra Nevada, and become a full-time beekeeper.

"The big idea is that I can take [the bees] up and collect the mountain honey, which seems to be a popular honey for people," Thompson said.

In order to make his plans a reality, Thompson said he has to collect about a dozen hives. Thompson currently has two hives stored on 18 acres of land at a friend's house, since his apartment just outside Campbell obviously can't hold them, he said.

"Getting started is the important part and that's what I'm doing now," Thompson said. "It's a hobby with a future of going into production."

But what started out as a hobby for many people may become a crucial endeavor.

With spring in full bloom, bees are busily pollinating flowers and trees, but their population has been shrinking at an alarming rate in recent years, making beekeeping not only a hobby but perhaps a necessity.

Carrier said he has been seeing more business this year than in years past, sadly, as the result of the bee deaths. He estimates about one in every 2,000 households in the Bay Area keeps bees, judging by the people registered in his store's computer.

"This looks like it's been a [busier] year than we've had in the last four or five years. People are beginning to realize the importance of the bees," Carrier said. "Some people are just beginning to keep bees for themselves, but they're doing everyone with a garden within a 2-mile radius a favor. The bees are going to go out that far and pollinate everything in that area."

The sudden bee deaths are a worldwide phenomenon that has been covered in national and global media, but it has sparked only speculation and not very many solutions.

"Just like everyone will tell you, we really don't know what's happening," said Dr. Eric Mussen, extension apiculturist at UC-Davis, one of the leading research facilities in the country on the matter.

Mussen said the bee death phenomenon is known as colony collapse disorder, in which the bees mysteriously leave their hives and die off.

Several local beekeepers have reported seeing their bees lying dead on the ground or in the hive with the queen off to the side--unusual since bees naturally protect the queen by surrounding it.

"You never see dead bees in the hive," Rice said. "Bees are neat; they would [normally] push them out."

In 2001, Rice had seven hives to begin the year. After the first winter, he was down to four. The next year, he lost another three hives. He then bought another package of bees, giving him two hives, but this past winter another hive collapsed and he was left with one, which is stored at a friend's home in Saratoga.

"What happens is that the hive would taper off, leaving fewer and fewer worker bees," Rice said. "The hive can't sustain itself and then it would die."

The bee death phenomenon has even made an impact on the ice cream industry.

Haagen-Dazs has recently launched an online campaign with information on CCD and what the company and others can do to help.

Haagen-Dazs ice cream relies on fruits from fruit trees pollinated by bees. According to website, bees are responsible 40 percent of Haagen-Dazs ice cream flavors.

Mussen believes the cause of CCD to be linked to a parasite called nosema ceranae, which is unrelated to the mites that have plagued bees historically.

The parasite infiltrates hives and affects the digestion process of honeybees, limiting their ability to produce honey and reproduce.

Nosema ceranae is believed to have originated in Asia, but somehow managed to spread to Europe and eventually the Americas.

Although nosema ceranae is a leading theory in many schools of thought, Mussen maintains that it cannot be exclusively attributed to CCD.

Rather, a variety of factors, from malnutrition to drought to pesticides, could be responsible.

"There are a significant number of stresses out there today, and when they come together they gang up on the bees. The combination of negative factors are hitting them at one time and it's just overwhelming," Mussen said.

Moreover, Mussen added that bees are not getting the same variety of pollen they used to get.

"Crops are down, so the honeybees are down," Mussen said.

In the Bay Area, Mussen said that if CCD continues at its current rate, it could potentially affect the average home garden.

But Rice has reason to remain confident.

In a span of just over a month, Rice was called out to West Valley College for two swarms, which added to the package of bees he picked up from Vacaville on April 19. Currently, Rice has nine hives--three at his Los Gatos home and six others at homes of friends who requested bees to help pollinate their gardens.

Rice says he's already noticed a difference in his new hives.

"They're really vigorous. They're drinking the sugar water at double the rate they were last year," Rice said. "They came out real strong, so it feels like I've got the right genetic mix."

As scientists continue researching CCD, trying to find a resilient breed of bees, Mussen said the growing number of beekeepers will certainly help slow the dwindling bee population.

"It's a big deal, and we as hobbyist beekeepers just hope we can make a difference," Buerchner said.

For more information on the Santa Clara Valley Beekeepers Guild, visit www.beeguild.org.
For more information on
beekeeping supplies, visit www.carriers bees.com. For more information on Haagen-Dazs' online honeybee campaign, visit www.helpthehoneybees.com.

Bees' crucial role in valley's agriculture

By Cody Kraatz

Bees once played a crucial role in the orchards that covered the West Valley.

In Sunnyvale, lifelong farmer Charles J. Olson, whose family owns the C.J. Olson Cherries fruit stand at 348 W. El Camino Real, has been around bees his whole life.

"My father always had bee hives on the ranch," he said of Ruel Charles (R.J.) Olson and the ranch he owned where the Cherry Orchard shopping center and apartments now stand.

"When I was a boy I got stung, I remember that."

The bees continue to play an important role. Los Altos Hills beekeeper Mark Jensen removed his hives from the city-owned cherry orchard near the Las Palmas Tennis Club one week ago now that the cherries are ready to harvest and there are no more flowers.

"Bing cherries are the most popular cherries, but they have to be pollinated with pollinator types of cherries or there won't be any cherries," said Olson.

Bing trees do not produce the pollen that bees and other pollinators move from flower to flower, producing fruit. But there are other cherry trees--such as Black Tartarian, Ranier and Republican--that can do the job.

"Every four or five trees you put in a pollinator [tree] in a Bing orchard," said Olson.

Olson may have to look for a new source of bees, as Jensen is moving his hives closer to home in Los Altos Hills to reduce his workload and keep a closer eye on the bees as he gets older. Jensen, who has been in the bee business for nearly 40 years, also said he is not sure his bees make the contribution to the cherry crop that Olson thinks they do.

"My operation is getting smaller and smaller as time goes on," said Jensen, who once had 200 hives but now keeps them only in five locations near his home. "As time goes on we've had more and more problems with keeping bees alive, and now we're down to about 100 hives."

He added that the distance was causing him to lose more bees to the parasitic varroa mite, which has annihilated colonies for more than 20 years. Or, he couldn't keep track of when colonies swarmed, leaving an overpopulated nest and dying when they didn't find a new hive.

Others, such as Dr. Eric Mussen, extension apiculturist at UC-Davis, think there may be a new parasite, nosema ceranae, at work. He thinks this parasite may be causing the colony collapse disorder, in which the bees mysteriously leave their hive and die off.

But researchers also point to a variety of other viruses, malnutrition, drought and pesticides as possible causes and are not certain about what to do to save bees.