With fingertips scarred and swollen from years of bee stings, Gene Woller, 63, pries open wooden hive boxes to expose individual frames of honeycomb covered with writhing masses of gnarled insecta. “These are primarily worker bees,” he explains, grabbing one of several tin cans piping out solid plumes of smoke. He quickly waves the smoker — a beekeeper’s friend — over the workers to calm them and reduce stinging.
Bee stings, though, are nothing more than a hazard of the job, and after working with the insects since 1965, the owner and beekeeper at Gentle Breeze Honey, Inc. in Mount Horeb takes it all in stride.
He points to the lone queen bee in the center of the frame. Easily noticeable with a dab of green paint on her head to indicate her age (last year’s color was red), the queen is much larger than the other bees.
Given all the buzz that surrounds him, sting or no stings, Woller is clearly where he wants to be in life.
“I retired 19 years ago,” he laughs, referring to the day he left a job working at the UW department of entomology to take on beekeeping full-time. It was a dream he had kicked around since 1965, when he was first introduced to the socially-complex and fascinating world of bees. Barely 20 years old at the time, the Marathon County, Wis. farmer was — in bee terms — in his pupa stage then, preparing to emerge as an adult.
He received a scholarship to attend a “farm short-course” offered through the University of Wisconsin, designed specifically for agricultural students who were unable to leave behind farm responsibilities for an entire year. After his beekeeping class took a field trip to Madison, where Woller was first introduced to the insects, he was hooked.
Through the years, bees remained Woller’s hobby. Though his day jobs changed from electronics to plastics, culminating at the UW, the 12 to 20 hives he maintained constantly beckoned.
Emmett Harp, Woller’s friend, co-worker and bee mentor, helped persuade him to pursue beekeeping full-time. These days, Harp, 82, is very much the respected elder at Gentle Breeze Honey, faithfully donating his time toward the production and sale of queen bees (about $20 each), and helping with Woller’s hives. “I’ve been keeping bees for 75 years,” Harp states, and his dedication and knowledge is not overlooked by the protegé, who credits his own success to the wisdom of his good friend. ÃÂÂ’Emmett helps me out and calms me down,” he says.
Together, the two bee experts and a cadre of part-timers, including Woller’s wife Donna (who happens to be allergic to bees), keep the company’s 600 colonies healthy and the honey flowing. “My goal,” he said, “is to produce honey that tastes exactly as it does when it’s in the hive.”
Beekeeping is a very labor-intensive job. Woller works about 60 hours a week, particularly in the peak seasons of spring and summer, checking on the health of the hives, feeding the bees only when necessary, and working to prevent swarming, a natural process of reproduction that can be devastating to a beekeeper. It is often compared to a cattle farmer losing his cattle, because half a colony could suddenly abandon the hive.
Bees will swarm when they sense an intrusion, or when they become overly crowded, and Woller says he can discern the early signs of distress from the pitch of the buzz. To avoid swarms, a beekeeper sometimes splits the hive into smaller colonies, or “nucs.”
The money Woller earns as a commercial beekeeper is adequate, though not excessive. In a typical year, the business grosses about $130,000. His wife, who works full-time at CUNA Mutual Group, provides their insurance coverage. “We’re making a living,” he said, “but [more importantly] we’re doing what we want to do, and enjoying it.”
They’re also helping the human condition. Consider this: Nearly one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the honey bee is responsible for 80% of that, contributing nearly $15 billion to the nation’s food supply. Connoisseurs of almonds, apples, avocados, blue and blackberries, cantaloupe, cherries, cucumbers, peaches, pears, pumpkins, raspberries,
soybeans, strawberries, and watermelon — among other crops — should root enthusiastically for the honeybee’s survival because without pollination, the crops would be devastated. Almonds would disappear entirely.
In a forested corner of Woller’s property, hives (or colonies) are stacked in varying heights amid the constant hum of — literally — very busy bees. Each stack, or colony, will contain up to 60,000 bees.
A colony usually consists of one queen, thousands of workers, and hundreds of drones. A queen bee is a fertile female whose sole purpose is to mate, produce eggs, and control the hive. Queens are typically replaced within two years by younger queens capable of producing more eggs. A hive cannot exist without a queen, and the only thing that determines whether a bee will develop into a worker bee, a drone, or a queen is the amount of food, or “royal jelly,” it is fed in the larva stage.
Worker bees are sterile female bees who do all the work in a colony — cleaning, caring for and feeding larvae, collecting nectar, making the wax honeycomb, guarding the hive from intruders, and fanning their wings to keep the hive cool. Workers are not affected by cold and spend winter in the hives, but because their life cycles are conversely related to sunlight, their lives are the shortest when our days are the longest. Hence, in summer, a worker may rarely live long enough to taste the fruits of its labors.
Drones are stinger-less male bees whose sole purpose is to mate with the queen. Their task, though noble, also is suicidal. Only the strongest drones will perform that duty, in mid-air and only when the temperature surpasses 70 degrees, and they will break their backs and die in the process. The queen will mate with a handful of drones over several days, collecting enough sperm cells to last the rest of her life. In the hive, she lays between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs a day.
As colonies expand, wooden boxes, or “supers,” are added to allow for more honey production and to give the colonies room to expand. The energy created within the brood chamber (the lower area of the hive where the young are reared and honey is stored for food) keeps the temperature at about 95 degrees in summer, and at least 72 degrees over the winter months. Temperature is an essential aspect of keeping a queen fertile.
Woller’s 600 hives are divided between 20 locations that are regularly monitored. Farmers appreciate the placement of hives; some businesses pay Woller to locate his hives on their premises for pollination purposes.
Any honey that bees produce through June each year is consumed or used for the sole purpose of brood-rearing and winter food storage. Excess honey used for retail sale is only produced and collected in July and August. A typical colony produces 80 pounds of excess honey annually.
Through a process of spinning, filtering and extraction, Woller harvests 73 barrels (650 gallons each) of honey a year. Most of the company’s revenue comes from grocery store sales throughout the area, and he says a typical Saturday farmers market generates between $500 and $700 in sales.
Woller’s fascination with bees is guarded by reality. Recent reports of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), where worker bees mysteriously abandon their hives, have perplexed experts worldwide. Harp, the purist, believes CCD is caused by “sloppy beekeeping.”
To a certain degree, Woller agrees, saying, “bees are just like livestock. They have to be fed and tended to.” He also thinks mite infestations and a common practice of transporting colonies of bees across the country for pollination purposes might be somewhat problematic.
Yet there is a more immediate concern. Dairy farms are disappearing, and with the farms go many of the hay fields that provided an abundance of floral sources that bees used to pollinate. “Emmett remembers getting as much as 150 to 200 pounds of honey from a hive. Now we struggle to get 70 to 80,” Woller said. “This, I’m afraid, is a profession that is dying out.”
Woller inspects his fingertips. “I only got stung twice today,” he remarks, as he hops in his 4-wheeler and heads back to the hives.
