Year 4 October - Anomaly? 🖊️

-Just an anomaly or is it time?

I visited my Wyoming hometown yesterday, the place where I first started beekeeping so many years ago. My brother Don, who used to be a commercial beekeeper himself, was also in town from Colorado. It was a time to prepare the family home for winter.

Did I say winter? Yes, my other brother Tom, living in western Wyoming, reported the season’s first hard frost. I’m anticipating a cold blast flowing down the mountains anytime now, and it’ll likely finish off my squash.

Don, being a connoisseur of good honey, won’t settle for anything less. I’ve been his honey supplier for decades. But now, without bees, we’re both without fresh honey.

So, armed with the knowledge of most commercial beekeepers back home, we set out in search of some honey.

• Phone calls yielded stories of dying bees and poor crops.
• Hoping for a miracle late honey flow, one beekeeper might start extracting in a week.
• No one had been at the largest beekeeper’s honey house for weeks.

Not exactly what I had hoped for, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. I remembered a smaller sideline operation run by a retired teacher. Couldn’t recall his name, but I knew where his small honey house was. Was he still there?

Much had changed in the decade since I’d been there. The area was now an industrial park. Driving between the buildings, we found it. The honey house was still there, and the moment we saw it, we remembered the beekeeper’s name. The door was open, the screen door surrounded by hundreds of bees following that delightful scent trail to the extracted treasures inside.

My brother’s eyes lit up. Those scents brought back his dormant memories, and he smiled. Got fresh honey? No need to ask! We knocked on the door and yelled a few times. There was no response. That’s not uncommon in a honey house. A beekeeper is surrounded by noise and preoccupied with the processes. And there are few visitors, as the screen door bees keep the curious and the idle away.

Not so for two ex-beekeepers in need of honey. We wandered in.

There we met John. He’s a wiry, 70-year-old retiree who throws supers and works commercial bees. And he was smiling and happy. After last year’s disastrous season, John’s worst season ever, this season more than made up for it:

• The migratory bees were healthy and looking great.
• Honey production was better than his best year.
• He still had another 30 drums to extract before shutting down.

It was like the good old days as we recalled and shared memories. And we bought some honey. I last purchased honey in 1976, so it’s been a while.

Why the contrast between John’s beekeeping season and the rest of us? Was he doing something different? Did he have a management secret? Were his bees lucky? Or was his experience an anomaly? I don’t know. His bees pollinate almonds and work Wyoming alfalfa. He runs bees in a conventional way.

Visiting John sure infused me with hope. Maybe CCD or disappearing disease, as it was called in the past, has run its course. I hope it will quickly disappear like when I encountered it 30 years ago. And maybe then, my beekeeping can get back on track. ✨

-Cheers, D 🍂🐝