Beekeeping interest grows in southern Illinois, St Louis MO
The number of bee colonies and beekeepers in Illinois is on the rise, yet the bees are in decline. And getting started as a beekeeper would cost about $300. Or maybe it’s a lot more. Like many other bee-related questions, the answer depends on whom you ask.
“If you ask 10 people you get 10 different answers, there’s no hard and fast answers,” laughs Scott Wesemann, 54. Wesemann and his brother, Mark Wesemann, have been keeping bees at Scott’s Collinsville home since about April.
They are helping increase the ranks of beekeepers in Madison, St. Clair and Monroe counties, which was at 349 in 2016, up from 171 in 2012.
The Wesemann brothers spent about $700 on the hive boxes, bees, beekeeper suits, smokers and the like. While they hope to get some honey by next year — “honey next year, or — I love ’em, but otherwise I’m out,” says Mark — other beekeepers just like the insects. Scott plans to keep the hives regardless of the honey output; he enjoys watching them.
One time I didn’t have everything zipped up very well, opened up the top of the hive and they saw that little bitty hole, quarter of an inch, and they went straight for it.
Tim Schartung’s stinging story
“It reminds me of the ant farms I had as a kid, just on a grander scale. ... I find it very relaxing,” Scott said.
Jordan Dollar, 34, of Glen Carbon, agrees with that sentiment. He’s a hospice chaplain in St. Louis, and says the theological component “gave me the shove to buy some bees.”
He was in Romania on a short teaching trip and was told that under the communist regime, one was allowed to be a pastor but could not have that occupation on an identification card.
“So all the pastors kept bees on the rooftops of their apartment buildings, and got ID cards saying they were beekeepers,” Dollar said.
He’s fairly new to beekeeping, and has found other beekeepers just everywhere. His neighbor has 10 or 12 hives; his postman keeps them, also.
Callum Dollar, son of Jordan Dollar in Glen Carbon, has his own bee protection suit to help his dad check the colony. Callum can easily fit into Jordan’s veil as well.
Provided photo
Bill Koopfenstein, 81, of Edwardsville has been beekeeping for a few decades, and does so purely for the pollination. He keeps three hives at Willoughby Farm in Collinsville, both to educate and to pollinate, and another two hives at home, just to pollinate.
Beekeeping on the rise
“Everybody knows – incorrectly – bees are on the decline,” he said, citing the increasing number of registered keepers and colonies on the Illinois Department of Agriculture website.
There, again, lies a difference of opinion.
According to the Illinois Department of Agriculture, which tracks apiaries and colonies, there are 481 active colonies in St. Clair County.
Beekeepers must register with the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and that data clearly shows the number of hives and those keeping the hives is increasing over the last five years.
A colony can “live fovever,” Koopfenstein said, but individual bees do die.
“The queen has to be laying eggs to keep reproducing,” Koopfenstein said. “Let’s say 90,000 bees (in the colony), that 2,000 bees die per day” in the summer that have to be replaced.
The bee death rate in Illinois is higher than the bee birth rate, according to the department.
“The (annual) loss is variable around the state,” says Steve Chard, a supervisor with the Illinois Department of Agriculture specializing in apiaries. “Some don’t lose any, some lose 50 percent. ... Probably 25 percent around here.”
Why do bees die? They get too hot. Too cold. They launch an insurrection against their queen. The dreaded varroa mites, invisible to the human eye, and the small hive beetle wipe them out.
The varroa mite “gets on the bee and sucks the body fluids out,” Koopfenstein said.
How much does it cost?
Koopfenstein strongly recommends both taking classes and getting to know beekeepers such as himself through Willoughby Farm or the county beekeeping associations on Facebook to learn more.
“And get new materials, not used,” Koopfenstein said. “You don’t know what’s contaminated; it’s not worth the savings.”
I went out there to put some sugar water in, thought, ‘Oh I don’t need to smoke em,’ ... I wasn’t wearing a suit or anything, which is really stupid. Popped the lid off and the second I did one flew out and stung my arm.
Scott Wesemann’s stinging story
If one wants bees in 2018, the time to start looking is December, says five-year beekeeper Tim Schartung, 52, of Mascoutah.
“If you wait ’til April or May, you’re going to miss the boat. ... Most of the time the bees are sold out, there’s such a high demand.”
Right now he has six hives, down from seven earlier this year.
“I don’t know what happened, they swarmed or something and never made a new queen, now I’m down to six hives,” Schartung said.
Derik Holtmann dholtmann@bnd.com
“I tell you what, it is not a cheap hobby. Had I have to do it over again… it’s like a lot of things… they tell you you need two hives, so there’s $500 right there. Then you’ve got to buy the beekeeping suits” of $50 to $150.
“Your initial investment for two hives is $700 to $800,” Schartung said. Some people are lucky, “they’ll buy a hive and wait” for a swarm.
Packages of bees, with a queen, are about $130. A nucleaus, or “nuc”, is already a small hive that is being productive and costs about $180.
Schartung started keeping bees in part to encourage his wife to go to their property in Lebanon, which is about three acres of firm land “and 45 of swamp.” It’s where he first encountered a swarm of bees in a tree in 2013.
“We’d go up to that hollow tree and see what they were doing. Course you get five feet from them and they looked like they’d kick your butt,” he said. He soon made contact with the St. Clair Beekeepers.
One of the keys to avoid bothering the bees is to stay out of their flight path, the Wesemann brothers said.
“You can stand to the side and they won’t bother you. If you stand in the flight path, you could get in trouble,” Scott said.
Getting “in trouble” happens to every beekeeper. Koopfenstein doesn’t keep track of the number of times he’s been stung, but it’s “always if I do something stupid.”
Dollar found what he calls “the number one rule of beekeeping” the hard way.
“Don’t drop the box of bees.”
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