Saugahatchee Beekeepers Association sponsors beekeeping workshop

By William White

Published: May 31, 2008

It’s a sweet deal, bees make honey from pollen and flying from plant to plant provide the pollination for the fruits and vegetables we eat along with the flowers, shrubs and trees we like to grow.

Crops like almonds are 100 percent dependent on bees for their pollination, along with alfalfa hay, apples, onions, broccoli, carrots and sunflowers.

Bees play a role as pollinators with apricots, avocados, blueberries, cherries, cranberries, grapes, kiwi fruit, macadamia nuts, olives, peaches, pears, nectarines, plums, strawberries, asparagus, cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, watermelon, vegetable seeds peanuts, canola and sugarbeets.

About 30 people who want to start, or were new to backyard beekeeping, learned the how-tos, tricks and techniques at the Spring Beekeeping Workshop sponsored by the Saugahatchee Beekeepers Association. Classes were at the Lee County Cooperative Extension Service Office and a field demonstration at local beekeeper Ben McGehee’s BenMac Apiary in Opelika.

The honey bee, Apis mellifera, hasn’t been domesticated, so beekeeping is like managing an organization. In the hive the colony of social insects has a single queen; about 1,000 drones or male bees; 30,000 to 40,000 worker or female bees; along with three stages of brood - egg, larva and pupa.

“If you are just interested in keeping bees, a couple of hundred dollars will get you started,” said Damon Wallace, president of the Saugahatchee Beekeepers Association. That includes the hardware and protective equipment. Extraction equipment to collect the honey will add to that cost.

But, ordering the hives and all the parts and equipment you need isn’t enough.

“You have got to get bees, and the bees are highly seasonal,” he said. “You can’t go to Wal-Mart and get them.

“You can order them and get packaged bees, or bees in a box. You order those in December, and you get them in March and install them in there.

“You can make arrangements with another beekeeper like myself or Ben and come to their hive, take some out, and you are in the bee business. You can go with a beekeeper when they get a call about a swarm and go to the woods together to get them.”

He said, typically, early spring and early fall is when you can get bees without any trouble.

Shelley England, an Auburn University student studying fisheries, helped McGehee by keeping the smoke going as he demonstrated the process of introducing a new queen to a hive in his apiary.

“I met Ben at the farmers’ market on campus,” England said. “I have always wanted a bee hive, but my mom wouldn’t let me have one. I want to start a hive to help increase the bee population.”
Wallace said people are always saying they don’t see bees anymore.

“The feral (wild) bee population is almost non-existent,” he said. “They are not there anymore because they die.”

He said when the bees do swarm, if they aren’t put in a box, they will go to a hollow tree or someone’s house.

“But with the diseases and pests that are out there, they will be dead in two years,” he said.

For more information about keeping bees, call the Lee County Extension Office at 749-3353.