Bees can inspire wariness, outright fear, or even panic in some people. But for
Sarah Maki and Les McBean, bees inspire a very different reaction: respect, and even a certain amount of affection.
Maki and McBean are pretty different themselves; the former is a hobbyist beekeeper in Marquette County, while the latter runs the largest apiary, or beekeeping business, in the Upper Peninsula.
"I'm by no means an expert, I'm just a novice," says Maki while checking on her backyard hive on a sunny May day. She is just starting out, having purchased about seven pounds of bees in late April, and now has them comfortably snug in a cottage-style hive that she's already needed to expand.
Maki is just one of hundreds of hobbyists who have started to crop up across the Upper Peninsula. McBean said that he's seen a dramatic increase in interest in the hobby over the past few years.
"All over the country, bee supply companies are having trouble keeping up with the orders," McBean says, noting it might be an accompaniment to the national increase in gardening. He's also seen an increase in interest in the Michigan State University extension office classes he teaches on beekeeping. There were 104 people who attended two classes last year, up from 80 attendees the previous year.
It's not a cheap hobby; two pounds of bees cost Sarah about $70, and the kit including the equipment and bee suit she needed cost $500. But despite the financial barrier to some, independent home beekeeping is rising in the U.P., and McBean can tell you so. He brought in $27,000 worth of bees from California this spring, and sold more than half of them to home hobbyists.
McBean has seen his own honey sales go up, too, so there's an increased interest in honey, not just in bees – and the rise of home beekeeping hasn't hurt his White Birch Apiary business at all.
"I sell all that I can produce, and I had to turn down sales the last few years," he says.
He's seen a big sales jump recently, and he's got the business longevity to know when a peak is real, having run the apiary for 24 years.
"People are becoming more aware of their health, honey being the healthiest of all sweeteners," McBean says. "and are also more interested in buying locally made or grown foods."
Others become interested for reasons that aren't nearly as well defined. Take Maki, who became interested in bees as a kid growing up in Flint. Sarah remembers finding a wild hive of honeybees living in a tree a few feet off a bike path that ran along the Flint River.
"It wasn't a scary thing at all; I really just thought it was cool," she says. She kept that original positive impression of bees, and even signed up for a class with the extension office several years ago.
"Eight years ago I wanted to have bees. I met someone who kept bees and was interested in it," Sarah says. But she wasn't able to attend the class, and then, family life just got in the way.
But she finally got the chance, and now their home is being graced with the addition of not only the bees, but an extensive garden to counterbalance them. Greg has considerable gardening and landscaping talents, so the couple is working on bee-friendly plantings, including foliage near the hive and an apple tree in the yard.
"Greg likes to garden, and I wanted the bees," Sarah says. The bees don't have any arguments; they were already checking out the garden plants as they went one by one into the ground.
It could take until next year before Greg and Sarah see any return on their bee investment and gather some honey. Until then, they still have locally-produced honey they can buy, such as that produced by White Birch Apiary. It's the largest apiary in the region, producing 15,000 pounds of honey from about 250 colonies of bees each year.
U.P. honey -- whether from an apiary or a home hive -- is some of the sweetest in the country, and it's due to the wide variety of plant nectars the bees use. Fields of birdsfoot trefoil, used for hay, make up the bees' main diet, but dandelion, basswood, aster and goldenrod all add to the sweet, pure taste.
Each spring, the bees emerge from their hives and head for the early dandelions, using their nectar to build the hive up for honey production later.
"They eat as much honey as they make until about July 1," McBean says. That's when honey season starts, going from July until September. The bees keep busy making and storing honey for the fall, and they don't require any help from their keepers.
After that, the annual fall honey collection arrives, the biggest work season of the year. It's a demanding, time-consuming and hot and sticky job, although McBean has the process down to a science after his years in the business. When the beeswax and honey are prepared for sale or for further processing, his year-round work begins; bottling honey and selling it, packaging and selling beeswax, and making beeswax candles.
He creates ornate, decorative molded candles, and plain beeswax votives, among other things, as well as handmade "treasure" candles that conceal charms and semi-precious stones in their layers. Even leftover beeswax can be molded into discs sold to quilters, sewers and woodworkers, all of whom use beeswax in their crafts.
If McBean's White Birch Apiary sounds familiar, take a look at the honey on your kitchen shelf – his products can be found in grocery stores, natural foods stores and food co-ops across the U.P. and northern Wisconsin.
He produces different kinds of honey for different markets. Raw honey, which isn't heated above 110 degrees, is sold to the Marquette Food Co-op and other health or organic food stores. It includes wax flakes, live enzymes and pollen flakes, and is sometimes desired for health reasons or because it is less processed. Several of his customers swear by raw honey as an antidote to pollen allergies, stimulating an appropriate immune response to pollen rather than an allergic one. Other, more processed, honey goes to mainstream grocery stores, including Econo Foods in Marquette, Houghton and Iron Mountain.
Beekeeping may be going the way of the hobbyist and small apiary, McBean says.
"Commercial beekeepers (outside of the U.P.) are dying, and wild bees are dying too," he says. Parasites called mites have plagued commercial beekeepers in the last decade, arriving from Europe. They're the main problem for beekeepers, and they spread easily from bee to bee, destroying both kept and wild hives in an area quickly.
But, at least in the U.P., honey production is thriving for apiaries and home beekeepers are starting new hives all over the area. That's a good thing and nothing to be afraid of.
"Bees are like livestock; you have to be careful around them and be aware of them," McBean says.
To get more information about White Birch Apiary and where to purchase honey produced there, contact McBean via email.
Kim Hoyum is a freelance writer based in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Her credits include contributor to Geek Girl on the Street as well as a regular writer for Marquette Monthly. Hoyum is a graduate of Northern Michigan University where she obtained a Bachelor's Degree in writing.