As I pulled on my long-sleeve, collared shirt and pants and tied the laces to my sneakers, I suddenly felt very vulnerable in my attire. Not because I was underdressed (I wasn’t going on a date), and I was obviously covered head-to-toe. Instead, I was going to spend the day in the honeybee yard at the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in Loveladies, with local beekeeper Michael Long.
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| Photo by Ryan Morrill Working in the honeybee yard at the LBIF requires wearing the proper safety attire. |
Of course I was a bit nervous about getting stung. (I once stepped on a bee in a friend’s backyard in elementary school, and my foot blew up like a balloon.) But really, I felt honored to be in the presence of such vitally important pollinators, both bee and man, and I wanted to make a good impression.
Long, who operates Uriah Creek Apiaries in Parkertown, took up beekeeping in 2007. He enrolled in a course at Rutgers University with the New Jersey Department of Agriculture after he suddenly experienced major trouble producing vegetables and fruits in his garden. It was not until he came across a picture of misshapen apples that resembled his own that he realized the problem was that he no longer had bees in his backyard.
“It was always weed, water, sunshine, fertilizer, harvest. I never gave pollination a thought,” he said. “You planted, and the bees would come. Now it doesn’t happen that way.”
Pollen must be moved from a flower’s pistil to its stamen. Otherwise, it will produce ill-formed fruit, or nothing at all.
“It’s flower sex, basically. Pollen is male sperm,” said Long.
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| Photo by Ryan Morrill Some of the hive's frames are covered in honey, which is almost ready to be harvested. |
Long started with five hives at home in the spring of 2007, and by September of that year he also had a bee yard at a pig farm in Brookville (Barnegat Township) that has been in existence since the 1940s. Brookville never needed beehives up until 2007, Long said, when the area also began experiencing the same pollination issue. He realized it was not a localized problem at his farm, considering the two farms were 15 miles apart.
By the end of that year, Long also picked up a bee yard at Cloverdale Road in Barnegat.
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| Photo by Ryan Morrill Standard Langstroth hives, where bees build combs into frames, are easily removed. |
He currently has anywhere from eight to 14 apiaries throughout Southern Ocean County, each of which has anywhere from two to 20 hives. The hives are all in different stages. Some are used for raising bees, others for honey production.
Long maintains eight bee yards and has access to another six.
“I don’t need the farmers as much as they need bees,” he said.
Long had hundreds of bees in his backyard prior to 2005. The only thing he had done differently that year, he said, was plant corn.
In recent years, beekeepers and environmentalists have called on the government to prohibit the use of some of the country’s most used pesticides, neonicotinoids, which became popular among farmers during the 1990s. Neonics, as they are called, are used to coat the seeds of many agricultural crops, including the biggest crop of all: corn.
Organic food also does not mean pesticide-free, Long noted. (According to organic labeling laws, naturally occurring chemicals may be applied to crops.)
“That’s why I do this. People need to know what’s happening,” he added, referencing the public seminars he hosts at the LBI Foundation every Friday in July and August.
He brings participants to the apiary, where the hives remain closed. He also utilizes a single-frame observation hive for the benefit of those who don’t want to go near the bees. It is not practical to keep the bees in the observation unit, so they are later transported back to their original hive.
During the past few decades, bees have been hard hit by habitat loss and by disease, such as those caused by such parasites as varroa mites. It takes about eight months for varroa mites to kill a beehive; pesticides can kill a hive within weeks, Long said.
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| Photo by Ryan Morrill Pollen collected from the hives shows a clear difference in the bee's flower prefernce. |
“The mites are a problem, but not the problem,” he emphasized. Bees’ “immune systems are being compromised; the virus isn’t getting stronger.”
“The problem is the new class of pesticides introduced in the early 2000s. The problem has increased ever since,” he added.
This is bad news for humans because bees are critical to our food supply.
“We need to have beekeepers. They (bees) will not survive without us,” Long said. “There must be something to it because the president took action,” he added.
According to an Obama administration estimate, honeybees alone add $15 billion in value to agricultural crops each year by pollinating everything from blueberries to squash. To reverse the bee decline, also known as colony collapse disorder, the administration has introduced an action plan that includes restoring 7 million acres of bee-friendly habitat that have been lost to urbanization, development and farming.
Although many environmentalists say restoring bee habitat is a good place to begin, they are critical of the fact that the administration has not done more to limit the use of neonicotinoids.
Long also pointed to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, a widely used weed killer. Studies have shown that the chemical adversely affects honeybees’ survival instincts.
But the bees were buzzing away last week at the Foundation, where Long cares for two fully matured hives, with 20 frames each.
I expected the hives to be traditional skeps, conical-shaped baskets usually made of coiled straw. But skeps are illegal to use in New Jersey because beekeepers cannot inspect the comb for diseases and pests, and because honey removal often results in the destruction of the entire colony, Long said. He uses standard Langstroth hives where bees build combs into frames, which can be easily removed. This hive type revolutionized beekeeping in America, Long said, when invented in the 1850s by Philadelphia native Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth.
The north hive at the Foundation suffered from a mite infestation earlier in the season, but it was treated and has recovered well, Long said. It currently has about 40,000 bees in it. The south hive has around 60,000 to 70,000 bees and is close to being ready for harvesting honey.
“Summer usually separates the beekeepers from the bee-havers,” said Long.
Just one side of a hive frame had more than 1,000 bees on it, Long pointed out. The other side had over 2,000 in a sealed brood waiting to be hatched.
“The size gets very large. The amount of bees can be daunting and intimidating,” he said, adding that they can sometimes form a cloud.
Long expects to harvest about 30 to 60 pounds of honey from each hive this season.
“Give it a sniff. Smell the sweetness,” he insisted.
Although I felt a bit claustrophobic with the bee veil covering my face, I bent down and stuck my nose toward one of the frames covered in honey (and bees).
“This is money. This is Island honey,” Long said, grinning.
Aside from using bees for pollination, he also generates income from their honey. He harvests only a portion of the honey because it is important to make sure the bees have what they need to eat so they remain healthy, he said.
As a beekeeper, he is always listening to and smelling the bees to make sure they are not ill. It takes a long time and a lot of money to renew a hive.
“It’s easier to make money when your bees are not dead,” he said. “It’s a lot of work; there’s a lot to learn,” he added.
It is also important to be aware of the bees’ activity. They tend to get louder when they are annoyed, which is why we were wearing a veil, Long noted.
“We’re going directly into their house and tearing it apart. Bees sting,” he said.
To keep the bees at bay, Long lit small coal embers to create smoke, which covers the bees’ alarm pheromone. He uses this tactic only in the presence of other people because he normally wants to see the temperament of the bees.
When Long first started beekeeping, he said, he would get a small, localized reaction to bee stings. Now if he is stung, he has no reaction. He believes his body has built up a tolerance to melittin, the venom released during a bee sting.
The best time to gather honey and pollen is during the middle of the day, when most of the bees are out collecting, Long noted. He started collecting pollen from the hives at the Foundation a few weeks ago. Since then, he has noticed a clear difference in the bees’ flower preference. The pollen collected by the bees in the south hive is much darker. Long is conducting a study to determine the Island’s flowering season.
“There’s more than dune grass here,” he said.
A honeybee hive’s inhabitants are divided into three types. Workers, which are females that are not sexually developed, forage for food such as pollen and nectar from flowers; build, clean and protect the hive; circulate air by beating their wings; and carry out many other communal tasks.
The queen lays eggs that produce the hive’s next generation. Larvae are fed from the stores during the winter until they are fully matured by springtime and can begin to produce honey.
There is only one queen in a hive. If she dies, workers create a new queen by feeding a fellow worker a special diet of royal jelly, which enables her to develop into a fertile queen. The queen also controls the hive’s activities by producing pheromones that direct the actions of the other bees.
Several hundred male bees, called drones, live in each hive during the spring and summer. They are barred during the winter months, when the hive goes into survival mode.
I was not nervous going into the apiary until Long warned that the bees should not get “too rambunctious” – should and too being the operative words here.
Eventually, SandPaper Photo Editor Ryan Morrill was stung on the hand and thus marked. So we flew on out of there like expelled drones, never to come back to the hive again.
What a job.
— Kelley Anne Essinger
This article was published in The SandPaper.
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