Olivia Hrehoruk’s journey to become one of St. Albert’s first bee queens started innocently enough.
“I’ve always been really interested in nature’s processes and insects,” she said at her Oakmont home, and she had done a study on pollinators for her biology degree at the University of Alberta. Hearing that St. Albert’s urban beekeeping bylaw had kicked in, she decided to put her research into practice.
A few months later, she was one of St. Albert’s first licensed urban beekeepers, and was hurtling down the highway from Bee Maid Honey in Spruce Grove with two long, brown tubes containing four pounds of buzzing bees in her car.
“I was like, oh goodness, what did I just get myself into?” she recalled, smiling.
Alberta produces some 43 per cent of Canada’s honey, reports Statistics Canada. While most of it comes from rural areas like Sturgeon County, some of it has started to flow out of cities like St. Albert, which now has five licensed urban beekeepers.
Many urban keepers get interested in beekeeping out of concern for declining bee populations, said Sturgeon County’s Craig Toth, president of the Edmonton District Beekeepers Association. Others, like him, think it’s an interesting hobby.
For Paul Greidanus, bees are a way of life. The co-owner of Greidanus Apiaries near Legal is a second-generation beekeeper who manages some 250 hives in Sturgeon County that typically produce some 2,000 drums of honey a year.
“In peak season, we’ll do a hundred drums a day,” he said.
He grew up around the smell of honey and the buzz of bees, and remembers getting swollen eyes from the stings. (He’s immune now, having been stung several thousand times.)
A home for bees
Unlike other bees, honeybees horde honey so they can have food to survive the winter, Greidanus said. Beekeepers can exploit this to get some sweet treats.An urban beekeeper can expect to invest about $1,300 starting out on bees, a hive, training and safety equipment, Toth said – less if you build your own hive. Keepers can either import their bees, as Hrehoruk did, or buy some from a local keeper.
A hive consists of several boxes, each of which contains wooden frames in which bees build wax combs for honey, egg and pollen storage. While some keepers use hollow frames, some use ones that contain plastic sheets with raised hexagonal patterns on them to give the bees a base to build upon, as that reduces the amount of wax they have to produce.
“It takes (the bees) eight pounds of honey to make one pound of wax,” Greidanus said, so less wax means more honey for the beekeeper.
A typical hive consists of two brood boxes on the bottom (where the queen lays all the eggs) and any number of “honey supers” up top, where workers store honey. An urban hive like Hrehoruk’s is about three boxes tall, while commercial ones like Greidanus’s go up to six.
While you can make a hive using plain old wooden boxes, Hrehoruk’s are fancier models with peaked roofs and automatic honey extractors – you turn a knob and honey comes out a spigot.
To get her bees into her hives, Hrehoruk simply opened one end of their transport tubes over the brood boxes and shook them out, which left her briefly surrounded by thousands of flying bees.
“It was kind of this magical moment (where) you’re standing there and they’re surrounding you completely. It was pretty cool.”
Life in the hive
Greidanus said a commercial hive like his contains up to 100,000 bees at the peak of honey season (mid-summer). Those consist of thousands of female workers, a handful of male drones and one queen.The queen’s job is to lay eggs, Toth said – up to 1,500 a day.
Hrehoruk said she’s named her two queens Khaleesi (a Game of Thrones reference) and Freddie Mercury (lead singer for Queen).
The workers have different jobs depending on their age, Hrehoruk said. Some will haul corpses, others feed larvae or build combs, and a few guard against wasps. Only the oldest bees get to leave the hive to forage.
Bees raid flowers for pollen and nectar, storing the latter in a special stomach for transport, Hrehoruk said.
Once they find a good source, they return to the hive and give other foragers directions through dance, reports North Carolina State University entomologist David Tarpy. If the flowers are within 150 metres of the hive, they dance in either a tight circle (under 50 m) or a sickle pattern (50-150 m).
If they’re more than 150 m away, they dance in a squashed figure-eight pattern while buzzing and waggling their butts – the famous waggle dance. The number of waggles the bee does during the dance conveys distance to the flowers, while it’s heading during the straight middle part of the figured-eight conveys direction relative to the sun.
Once bees have collected nectar, they return to the hive, spit it into a wax cell and start fanning it with their wings, Greidanus said. Once they get it to about 16 per cent moisture, they’ll cap the cell with wax for storage. The reduced moisture plus enzymes from the bees is what turns nectar into honey.
The colour and taste of that honey depends on its source, Greidanus said. Most Alberta honey comes from clover, alfalfa or canola, and is light yellow and sweet. Early in the season you get dandelion honey, which is dark yellow and tart. Hawaii’s honey is red, Tasmania’s is green while New Zealand’s Manuka honey is thick and black.
Sweet harvest
If you want to harvest that honey, you first have to get it away from the bees. Greidanus said this is done by “tipping” the hive, where you take the honey supers off the top, set them down a few metres away, then come back after a few hours. By that time, any bees in the supers will have flown back to the main hive. Smoke helps mask the attack pheromones bees release while this is happening, reducing your risk of stings.Workers ship the 70-some-pound honey supers back to the warehouse, which is filled not with the buzz of bees but of machinery – any bees that are still in the boxes kind of chill out in clumps by the windows. They don’t have a hive to defend, so they’re so laid back you can actually scoop up a handful of them, Greidanus said.
Beekeepers cut the wax caps from the combs and put the frames in a centrifuge to spin the honey out. The centrifuge Greidanus uses is so powerful that it hurls honey across the warehouse if he forgets to close the cover. The now-empty frames are returned to the hives so the bees can fill them again.
Greidanus further purifies his honey with a second centrifuge and a settling tank before he pumps it into storage silos. When he’s ready to ship, he hits a switch and golden goodness pours out a pipe into a waiting drum. That honey can then be sold raw or filtered and pasteurized to extend its shelf life.
Winter break
Honey season is now over, and keepers are now preparing their hives for winter. That means feeding them plenty of sugar syrup and pollen patties to replace the honey that’s been taken from them, monitoring them for disease, and wrapping the hives in blankets, Toth said.Anyone who likes honey should look into beekeeping, Toth said. Start by taking a course and joining your local beekeeping association.
Hrehoruk said beekeeping has made her more aware of the plants, weather and nature around her, as she’s always thinking about how they will affect her bees.
“They’re one of the most efficient pollinators,” she noted, and more pollination means more greenery for us.
“The more we take care of them, the more they’ll take care of our environment.”
