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“lgggHK7~ten you stop by the Booger HHl Bee Company
\ stand at the Athens Farmers Market at Bishop .
Park on Saturday mornings, you'll find assorted jars of wild-
flower honey, bottles of honey vinegar and beeswax candles.
It's bucolic Calm. Sweet
The land around Booger HiU Bee Company just outside of
Athens in Danielsville, GA is also bucolic, calm and sweet
But trying to keep up with owner Dan Harris talking about his
bees is like trying to keep up with a bee itself: speeding in
one direction, then ripping in another direction, then hanging
momentarily before returning to the original destination. And
like the bees, he knows what he's doing.
Nervously anticipating walking
around bee hives, I'd done my Internet
research and arrived at his apiary wear
ing protective long-sleeved and long-
legged light-colored clothing. I wasn't
there 10 minutes before he had me
holding a frame of honey bees, bare
handed. The bees were as relaxed as he
was.
"I talk to my bees," says Harris.
'The beekeepers rule used to be when
a beekeeper passed away, it fell to his
best friend to tell the beesihat he's
passed on. You tell them what you're
doing. When people are buying my bees
and I'm moving frames, I'll be talking
to them and telling them these are your
new people. I just talk to them. I had
a lady who bought bees from me one
time, and she got them home and she
had them for a month. Then she called
me and said, These bees are just mean.'
I said, 'Well, they never were mean here'
And she said, 'Welt they're mean.' So, I
went over and I smoked the hive and I
opened it up, and they were just as calm
as they could be. And she was mad. She
said, Those bees remember you!*”
At 50 years old, Harris quit his
job with General Electric, moved to
Danielsville and went to UGA for a
degree in horticulture, where he fell in
love with bees. It was, in his words,
"a tangled path that blossomed and
bloomed." He now owns approximately
200 hives, which he manages with his
assistant Christian Hoadley, a graduate
student in Forestry at UGA. In addi
tion to selling bees and honey, Harris
teaches a course for beginning beekeep
ers at the State Botanical Garden of
Georgia in Athens and the Smith-Gilbert
Gardens in Kennesaw one Saturday a
month from December to June, with one
more class in late summer to show his
students how to get their hives ready
for winter.
"May and June is when people want
to get bees, and that's the end of the
nectar flow," says Harris. "Starting
classes in December [teaches] people to
be prepared and have equipment ready
in the spring, and have the bees ready
when the cold weather arrives." His experience has shown him
being unprepared leads new beekeepers to failed hives and lost
enthusiasm. "There's room for anybody who wants to do it. but
you have to have passion."
When Harris explains the inner-workings of the bee com
munity, it's no wonder he has passion. Bees are fascinating
creatures, especially when he talks about them. There's the
biological side, like the queen bee having the power to lay
unfertilized (male) or fertilized (female) eggs on command,
since males are only required for springtime mating and year-
round females handle all the other jobs. And there's the way
the bees communicate with the rest of the hive, like the dance
of the honey bee.
"Scout bees come back to the nest and tell the other for
agers where the pollen and nectar is. It's a dance that they
do, and the motions have significance in regard to direction,
distance and quality," says Harris. "It's an amazing thing. They
do a little figure eight, and it's called a wagged-tait dance. And
the angle to vertical that their dance occurs gives direction.
So, if it's perfectly vertical, what they're telling the audience is
you go out of the entrance of the hive, look directly at the sun
and go toward the sun. If the direction of the eight is down,
they're telling the audience go out and look at the sun and go
the other way. Or if its 30 degrees to the right, go 30 degrees
right The speed that they travel this figure eight tells them
how far it is. The faster they go, the closer it is. And then the
vibration of their abdomen, which is why they call it a wag-tail
dance, the vigortells the quality."
In addition to an early spring speeding up his schedule by
three weeks, this past mild winter also presented Harris with
some interesting challenges. "Bees flew most of the winter, so
they consumed a lot more honey. I bought two tons of sugar
last year that I would not ordinarily buy, just to keep them
alive all winter long." On the other hand, he continues, "A cold
winter is physically hard on bees, so coming out of a hard win
ter, it's not uncommon to Have a 10 or 15 percent loss. And I
probably had a 5 percent toss f u is year, so it balanced out."
But going to the store for two tons of 25-pound bags of
sugar was a first-time fluke in his 10-year beekeeping career.
"As a beekeeper, it's our task to encourage their hoarding
instinct so they'll put up more than they need, and we can take
some and leave some," says Harris. "You give them room to put
it or you give them wax combs. If they have empty wax combs,
they have this instinct to fill them. Another thing you do is
try to keep them from swarming. In the spring, they'll want to
swarm; it's theft instinct.
"There are a gazillion different techniques (to prevent *
swarming), most of which keep beekeepers pretty busy in the
spring," says Harris. "You can remove
the queen, and they'll suddenly be
queenless, and they'll start making
emergency queens. You interrupt the
brood cycle—that just sets them back.
You can also give them more space. If
they're really crowded and congested,
they're more likely to swarm. So, you're
constantly trying to make sure they
have space without giving them too
much. If you have too much space, they
can become demoralized. It's like a lot
of people I know: if you give them too
many jobs, they don't know where to
start and they'll quit doing anything.
Well, bees are kinda the same way. You
give them all these empty boxes, they're
like, uhhh, they don't do a thing."
Newer techniques with DNA research,
like at the UGA Bee Lab headed by his
friend, entomologist Jennifer Berry,
have resulted in huge leaps in bee
behavior and parasitic pressure studies.
"It's that kind of stuff that we didn't
know five years ago that may give clues
to some of the massive bee failures,"
.says Harris.
But for the rest of the community,
it's about the honey.
"I like to put light honey and dark
honey on the table," says Harris about
his Athens Farmers Market stand. "It's
good for conversation. I'd like people to
think about what they're buying—that
it's not that homogenized stuff that
they see at the grocery store that's all
the same. Different things bloom, and
different shades result and different fla
vors result"
Grocery store honey "has been pres
sure filtered, so they've gotten all
the pollen out of it. It's been boated
hot enough that any of the proteins
or enzymes or anything else of con
sequence are denatured. And if it's
made in this country, 90 percent is
clover honey. Which is not bad if you
like clover honey, but it's kinda like a
McDonald's thing. It tastes the same no
matter where you get it, whereas real
honeys have a diverse range of flavors."
'So, how is honey made?
"The moment a forager ingests nectar
from a flower, and she's carrying it back
to the hive," explains Harris, "she's actually adding enzymes to
it at the same time. She transfers that to one of the house bees
at the door so she can go forage again, and when it hits that
second bee's stomach, she continues to add those enzymes.
They put that nectar in cells, and they move air around those
cells to reduce the moisture content. So, it's a team effort."
And in the beekeeping world, Harris is definitely a team
player.
Marilyn Estes
For more information on Dan Harris and Booger Hill Bee Company, visit
www.boogerhiiibee.com.
Beekeeper Ban Karris pulls out a frame ofiiis DanieisvtHe bees.
26 FlAGPOLE.COM-JUNE 27,2012