Greg Klimes
The next time you are in the garden and you chance across buzzing bees, stop to introduce yourself. It is quite possible that your visitors hail from one of Greg Klimes’ hives. After all, bees travel from three to six kilometres, suggesting Greg’s bees touch down in gardens throughout the Fairwinds community and beyond.
Although Greg has had a long-time interest in bees it was not until he retired that he was able to immerse himself in beekeeping. His interest grew to a passion – which was clearly evident at our meeting on September 8.
His presentation was full of interesting information, much of which was new to many of us. For instance, while bees are active from roughly February to October, there are peaks and ebbs of ‘harvesting’ driven directly and indirectly by the effects of weather on local vegetation. It is for this reason that there will be an abundance of honey on the Island this year. The heavy rains in April followed by the intense heat throughout the summer caused blackberries to thrive, much to the joy of Greg’s bees. As of August, the bees started to lay back food for the winter, and to prepare their hives for the cooler, wetter, winter weather.
Greg talked to us about honey. The purest honey is comb honey, from which floral notes can often be detected. The purest honey is wet in texture and white in colour. With time, the honey starts to turn yellow, then evolves to darker tones of yellow and brown. Honey aficionados may be disappointed to learn that the change in colour is in part because of drying, but mostly because the honey is getting progressively dirtier from little bee feet repeatedly dragging pollen and dirt across the honey’s surfaces. Greg advised us to ‘buy local’, and particularly not to buy foreign-produced honey because some products are known to be manipulated with colouring, sugars and syrups to maximize profit.
Perhaps one of the most interesting of the many interesting subjects Greg touched upon dealt with the Queen Bee.
Greg described the Queen as huge, and beautiful, with long shapely legs – BUT she is NOT royalty. Far from it! She is the busiest bee in the hive, forever active, even as other bees rest. She is nothing less than a hyper-active egg-producing machine, popping out as many as 6 or 7 eggs per minute – 1,000 to 1,500 eggs each day. For five, six, maybe even seven years. When her rate of production slows, she is “voted out of the hive” and replaced by another Queen, chosen and nurtured to continue the production of eggs. And who makes these choices, you ask?
Greg explained there are a group of elders who work collaboratively to manage everything related to the growth and survival of the hive: daily housekeeping duties; reproductive activities; decisions regarding foraging; and eventually, the life and death of the Queen. But before we feel too sorry for the apparently heartless decisions regarding the Queen, let us not forget the life of the drone. He is there to reproduce, which he can do exactly once in a lifetime. (I’ll spare the male readers the agonizing details of a drone’s last seconds after mating!) And if he chooses not to reproduce? He is ushered out of the hive. He perishes. As Greg said early in his presentation: “everything about a bee’s life is about survival”.
For those of you who thrive on interesting and unusual facts, here are a few things I jotted down during Greg’s presentation:
- The harvesting of wild honey dates back to ancient times, and is still practised to this day. Bees need space to create their hives and produce their honey, and in a pinch, they’ll settle for a hollow in a tree, a discarded wooden box, even a mail box. Let them be, and they will produce wild honey.
- It is not unusual for large commercial operations to include 4,000 hives which will produce as many as 350 45-gallon drums of honey. The hives are sometimes loaded on flat beds so operators can relocate them and “follow the flowers”.
- Smaller commercial producers often have from 25 to 50 hives.
- It takes approximately seven pounds of honey to produce one pound of bees wax.
- Don’t stand in front of a beehive. That’s where the “door” is located and the bees will view your position near the aperture as a threat. They are much more tolerant of your presence at the rear of the hive.
- Bees are highly dependent on smell – for reproduction, the identification of enemy species, the determination of attractive blooms, etc. This is one of the reasons smoke can protect beekeepers from being stung. Smoke impedes the detection of smells, causing the bees to be disoriented and passive until they can figure out what’s going on around them.
Greg enjoys sharing his interest in bees. He would be very pleased to help people who wish to start some hives, or to make their properties more ‘bee-friendly’.
Greg can be contacted at greg522@live.com
Report by Terry Kelly