Lexington, KY - Centuries before they found their way to North America by way of the early European settlers, honeybees had cemented a role in ancient cultures and classical mythology as a powerful emblem, symbolizing royalty, divinity and immortality. While not as commonly regarded today as a symbol of status and wealth, bees continue to hold a high degree of allure and fascination among the human race - including a well-established population of bee enthusiasts in the Lexington area.
"I never knew why beekeepers were so fanatical about their bees until I became one," said south Lexington beekeeper Abigail Keam. "This is an insect that is really something special and different. There's something magical about it."
Keam is among the estimated 3,000-5,000 beekeepers in the state, and like many of the others, her bees have come to play a central role in her life. Over a decade ago, Keam started her own business, Abigail's, which produces a line of natural products made with honey and beeswax, including natural soaps, hand and lip balms, peppermint foot rub, and cuticle butter, and she has maintained a presence in the Lexington Farmers' Market since 1999. The beekeeping hobby also serves as the backdrop for Keam's mystery novel series, which started with 2010's "Death by a HoneyBee." The second book in the series, "Death by Drowning," came out in March, and Keam is currently working on a third; the series revolves around Josiah Reynolds, a Kentucky beekeeper who sells her honey at the local farmers' market.
And while honey is the nectar that tends to initially attract beekeepers to the hobby, beekeeping can be very rewarding for many other reasons, and
it is common for a somewhat inexplicable bond to develop between beekeepers and their insects over time.
"Bees can definitely be addictive," said Reg Campbell, president of the Bluegrass Beekeepers Association. One of more than 40 beekeeping associations in Kentucky, the Bluegrass Beekeepers Association serves Fayette County and the surrounding areas, acting as both a social and informational hub for the local community of beekeepers. The club attracts an average of 70 bee enthusiasts to its monthly meetings, which take place at the Fayette County Extension Office.
As for what exactly it is about these insects that has historically made them such a point of fascination for humans, Phil Craft, Kentucky's state apiarist, points to the social nature of bees, as well as the fact that, much like with gardening, it is a nature-based activity where humans can get a lot of hands-on involvement. Craft, whose role as state apiarist is to assist individual beekeepers across the state, says he comes across many who aren't very interested in honey -
they just love to observe the bees.
"I know that every spring when it gets nice, I just can't wait to get out in the hives and see what's going on in there," Craft said of his own beehives.
Indeed, bees have developed some very intriguing behaviors over time, with the "worker bees" (i.e., non-queen female bees) often taking on a succession of more than a dozen roles over their brief lives (the male bees, or drone bees, don't do much other than mate with the queen). At any given time, based on the time of the season and the needs of the colony, a worker bee's role could include feeding the young, molding the hexagonal cells that make up the honeycomb, guarding the hive, grooming the queen, removing the dead bees from the hive, and scouting for pollen and nectar sources.
As Tom Webster, an apiculturist with Kentucky State University, points out in a guide for beginning beekeepers that he produced in 2007, no description of honey bees' behaviors would be complete without mentioning the unique and complex routine that worker bees use to communicate the location of nectar and pollen-bearing flowers. Coined the "waggle dance," scouting bees move about the honey comb in a small, figure-eight movement - the nuances, direction and duration of which are all closely correlated with the direction and distance of the hive to the food source. As Webster writes, the dancing bee sometimes stops to offer a taste of the nectar she has collected, "as further information about the quality of the food" - if the rest of the bees are interested, they will seek it out using the detailed set of directions she gave them with the waggle dance. Bees will fly within a two to three mile radius of the hive to seek food.
"They're no different than we are - they'll go after what they like," said Phil Clark, a retired electrical engineer from LexMark who has kept beehives in his suburban backyard for nearly 20 years. "Clover, cantaloupe, whatever the most dominant nectar source is. Most people don't realize that over a third of their food comes from pollination of honey bees."
Cucumbers, apples, pears, watermelons, broccoli, blueberries and squash are among the long list of crops pollinated by honey bees - the pollination helps raise the yield and quality of many of these crops, and is essential for others. Because of the symbiotic relationship between bees and these crops, a mysterious phenomenon called colony collapse disorder, which causes entire colonies of bees to curiously disappear, has been a cause for alarm among many bee enthusiasts in recent years. The disorder, which has been observed across the United States and in Europe in increasing measures over the past five years, was the subject of the recent film "The Vanishing of the Bees," and could potentially put many of the crops that rely on the pollination of honey bees at risk.
While Craft assures that colony collapse disorder has not affected Kentucky bees (it typically affects large, migratory beekeepers with at least 5,000 hives - the largest beekeeping operation in the state is under 1,500 hives), the threat has given many local beekeepers pause ... as well as an additional reason to promote their hobby to potential beekeepers.
"How we're going to survive is by lots of people having little hives - you're going to have some people like me, that have 30 hives, and another beekeeper that has 300 hives. You're going to have people in the city having two to four hives," Keam said. "Everyone has got to do their part - we've got to spread the bees around the state; we've got to bring them back into the city and the suburbs."
Beekeeping has a long history in Kentucky, and while it was initially more of an agricultural component to farmlands, urban beekeeping has been on the rise across the country, to the effect that a growing list of cities, including New York City, Denver, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City, have all lifted beekeeping bans in the past two years. Backyard beekeeping can be very successful, but there are definitely a number of considerations to take into account, including how your neighbors might react if a swarm of your bees ends up in their yard. Even though swarms could just as likely come from the wild, and they typically don't pose a danger to humans (bees tend to only be defensive in the vicinity of their nest), Craft says he has definitely known the neighbors of beekeepers to panic at the site of their insects.
"There are things that you need to do in town to be a good beekeeping neighbor, and to minimize any interference with your neighbors," he said, adding with a smile, "You either talk to them and be straightforward, or you hide the bees."
Most neighborly precautions with beekeeping are common sense -
keep the hives sitting away from the fence, turn the entrance to where it's not facing your neighbor's yard, for example. And, of course, sharing your honey is one of the best ways to satiate their concerns.
Obviously, there are other factors to take into consideration when deciding whether or not beekeeping is for you, including the amount of time (up to 10 or 20 hours a week during the initial set-up and honey-extracting stages) and money (up to a few hundred dollars a year) the hobby can require.
But as any beekeeper will tell you, the rewards can last a lifetime.
"It has ended up being a very interesting hobby to get into," Clark said. He initially got into bees after reading an article about a mite infestation that was threatening to wipe out a large percentage of the bee population in the '80s. Now, he has gotten his 80-plus-year-old father into the hobby.
"After 17 years, there's always something new that I'm learning."