Local beekeepers play important role in maintaining world’s food supply
Will Woolever
sports@thefranklinpress.com
From large commercial operations to local hobbyists keeping a hive in their back yards, beekeepers across the county have been hard at work this spring maintaining their bees and harvesting honey. For the largest commercial beekeeping business in Western North Carolina, now is the time of year when it collects its liquid gold.
“Right now I’ve probably got right at 1,200 [hives]. Here in about a month, we’ll be up over 2,000,” said David Kirkland, owner of Macon County’s Appalachian Apiaries. “There’s about 600 pounds [of honey] per barrel, and last year I pulled about 30 or 35 barrels.”
Between selling his honey in bulk, beekeeping supplies, three different types of bees and ‘renting’ his hives to farmers in California to pollinate almonds, Kirkland and his father Ron, founder of Appalachian Apiary, have built their business into a one-stop shop for other businesses and hobbyists alike. With more than 1,000 colonies split between Macon County and South Georgia, one of the apiary’s main issues is ensuring their hives have enough pollen and nectar. They offer local landowners a year’s supply of honey in exchange for hosting a colony on their property. In addition to being a major commercial supplier from its warehouse/workshop right here in Macon County, the apiary also offers a full complement of supplies for anyone interested in starting their own hive.
“If they have [kept bees before], I’d generally recommend a package for them because they’ve already got frames with drone comb on it for the bees to start laying eggs and storing food,” said Kirkland. “If they’ve never had bees before, I’d recommend a five-frame nuc [a wooden box with bees included] because it comes with five frames that have already been developed, and it’s a good starter colony if they’ve not handled before.”
While Appalachian Apiaries has beekeeping down to a science, Macon County’s smaller beekeepers are also hard at work this season. With several native plants in bloom throughout the summer, beekeepers will have a chance to harvest multiple different types of honey.
“Around here, we mostly get tulip poplar right now, and they just finished that up,” said Larry Cooper, owner of Franklin’s River Birch Bees apiary and vice president of the Macon County Beekeepers’ association. “You get that, you get some of the cherry, but I’m not sure they get a whole lot out of that, and privet comes out and they get a little bit of that. There’s a bunch of little things that come out, but tulip poplar is one of the biggest ones. … I’ll pull honey right now, and then we’ll get supers [boxes containing frames the bees use for hives] ready and put them back on at the end of the month for sourwood. … We get lucky in this area. We get two flows a year here, and they can be very good flows.”
As bees collect nectar from plants throughout spring and summer, their honey takes on distinct flavors based on the types of flowers they use to produce it. Between wildflower honey, made mainly from tulip poplar in spring/early summer, and sourwood honey, a sought-after variety made in late summer from trees native only to the Appalachians, River Birch offers a wide range of honeys in which no two are exactly alike. With so many different plants providing nectar for local honey, Western North Carolina’s bees can yield a first-class product.
“[I won] the Macon County Fair, the Mountain State Fair and the State Fair, and I’ve been doing that for about six years now,” said Macon County Beekeepers president Katie Wall. “If you make a jar of honey, you have to take this really powerful flashlight, and you have to be able to see anything in there and get it out, if you see a bee leg or an eyeball or something like that. The moisture content has to be perfect, you have to know the level of the jar, and it’s just all these things [that go into it]. Sometimes it doesn’t happen, but sometimes it does.”
In just nine years of harvesting honey from her home in Macon County, Wall has produced a first-class honey capable of besting all comers throughout the state.
While Wall credits help from Cooper and Macon County’s ideal conditions for helping create her exceptional honey, she says bees play a much more important role in stocking our pantries.
“I guess the biggest reason that we should try to encourage beekeeping is that every third bite of food, the bee is responsible for,” she said. “The almond is 100 percent [pollinated] by the honeybee. Other crops are done in percentages by honeybees and other pollinators, [like] tomatoes and squash. … Honeybees are so important, and it’s not just the commercial beekeepers, it’s us – it’s every backyard beekeeper. It’s all the beekeepers put together that maintain the world’s food. It’s so important to keep bees, not just for the honey.”
With more than 70 percent of the world’s plants pollinated by bees and other pollinators, much of the world’s food supply is directly dependent on nectar-eating fauna. Of the 100 crop varieties that provide 90% of the world’s food, 71 are pollinated by bees. Many crops such as almonds, avocados, apples, and cranberries are pollinated exclusively by bees. Given the extreme importance of bees to the global food supply, as well as beekeeping’s value as a hobby with homemade honey as a byproduct, Macon County Beekeepers is passing down its knowledge to a new generation of apian enthusiasts.
“We do a lot of other stuff in 4-H, so we thought it’d be cool to do something like this. This is one of the most fun things I’ve done in 4-H,” said Morgan Simpson, a member of Macon County’s 4-H youth development program. For the past few months, Simpson and her brother, Isaiah, have visited River Birch Bees on a regular basis to learn the art of beekeeping from Larry and Katie. During Morgan and Isaiah’s visit on June 16, the pair removed the lids from several supers and “diagnosed” the hives inside, assessing the state of the colonies and what if anything they might need. The MCB–4-H partnership is part of an ongoing effort by the association to educate local residents about the hobby and uses of beekeeping, an effort that includes the group’s Bee School class for beginning beekeepers. For Isaiah Simpson, part of the fun is observing bee’s unique “personality.”
“It’s really interesting how they’re pretty much like people, except their way of doing things seems to be a lot more efficient,” he said.