Keeping Bees

At Elf Creek Bee Yards

Kevin Elfrink pops the lid off of a beehive at his home near Jackson, Missouri, where he and his wife, Lisa Elfrink, founded Elf Creek Bee Yards. He already has used the smoker filled with pine needles to calm the bees, and now he uses a hive tool to unglue the lid, pulling out a frame of honey from the hive and dipping some out with the hive tool. This hive is one of 37 the Elfrinks have throughout Cape Girardeau County; each hive can make from 20 to 100 pounds of honey, depending on how established it is, the weather and the honey flow.

Kevin Elfrink pulls a panel of honey from a beehive Friday, Sept. 7, 2018, in Jackson.Ben Matthews ~ Southeast Missourian

The bees are humming around him; even standing a little distance away, I can hear them. “If you’ve never had fresh honey, that’s about as fresh as it gets,” Kevin says, offering me the honey on the end of the tool.

It is warm. It is sweet. It is smooth, smoother than honey from the store, and smoother, even, than other local honey I’ve had that already has been poured into a jar. It is one of the most delicious foods I’ve ever tasted.

Kevin and Lisa began keeping bees five summers ago, before Kevin retired. When he was a child, his grandfather kept bees, which motivated him to have bees of his own.

Canned honey sits next to a jarred honeycomb at Kevin Elfrink's home Friday, Sept. 7, 2018, in Jackson.BEN MATTHEWS ~ bmatthews@semissourian.com

“We could eat all the honey we wanted from him when we went to visit, and I liked that. I liked that a lot,” Kevin recalls. “Then I was getting closer to retirement, and I thought it would be something really neat to do when I retired, because I don’t like to do nothing a whole lot, and I thought it would be something good to do part-time.”

Kevin works with the bees and does most of the heavy lifting when the frames become full of honey. Lisa works on the production and marketing side of things, bottling and labeling the honey and making candles and hand lotion from the beeswax.

“People think having bees, you don’t do anything,” Lisa says. “Oh no, they’re like any other pet. You have to take care of them, you have to feed them.”

“They’re more like livestock,” Kevin adds. “Even with all these bees here, we seldom see one at the house.”

And that’s saying something, because the Elfrinks estimate there are half a million bees behind their shed.

The Materials Needed

Kevin recommends getting two hives when first starting out, that way each hive can be compared to the other, and resources can be pulled from one hive to assist the other. Local beekeepers, Kevin says, sell starter sets of bees called nucs — short for nucleus hive — that include five frames. As the bees fill these frames, you can add another box on top of the boxes for the bees to move into. The amount of time this takes is weather-dependent, Kevin says.

Bees forage over an 8,000-acre radius, Kevin says, so being in an area that has diverse plant resources is key to having a successful hive. In the spring as the bees raise their broods, the Elfrinks feed their bees a one-to-one sugar solution that replicates nectar. If the autumn is dry with not much honey flow, the Elfrinks feed their bees to help them prepare for winter.

The Elfrinks leave honey in the bottom two boxes of each hive for the bees’ winter supply. It takes approximately one year for a hive to start producing harvestable honey. The Elfrinks use an extractor to spin the honey out of the combs when they harvest.

During the spring, Kevin says it is important to check the bees at least once a week, and in the fall, every one to two weeks, to ensure the hive is properly preparing for wintertime, and to be treated for any mites harming the hive. In the winter, Kevin says bees do not require much maintenance.

That’s why for those planning to start beekeeping, the winter is the ideal time to start gathering the materials. Kevin estimates the startup cost is between $300 to $350 per hive.

“The time to buy your stuff is before you need it,” Kevin says. “So if a person wants to get bees next spring, sometime between now and February is the time to get all this stuff, get it together and get it in order. Because you’re probably going to get bees from somebody in April.”

Benefits

Bees have many more problems now than they did 20 years ago, Kevin says. This is partly due to pesticides and herbicides used in agriculture, and also varroa mites and hive beetles. Reading books and articles online, watching YouTube videos and going to the Jackson Area Beekeepers meetings are how the Elfrinks have learned — and continue to learn — about beekeeping.

The hobby has changed their perspective.

“You look at roadside ditches and banks different after you have bees,” Kevin says. “You kind of quit thinking, ‘Man, somebody ought to mow that.’ I think, ‘Somebody ought to mow that this winter, after the bees are done with it.’ That’s what I think now.”

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The life of a bee

"All the worker bees in a hive are females. The difference between the worker bees and a queen bee is how they started from an embryo. They’ll build a bigger wax cell around that [queen] egg, and feed it extra. What they feed it’s called royal jelly; it’s a substance the worker bees create, and she’ll grow bigger, a lot longer abdomen. When the queen hatches out, she’ll eventually fly out one time, a mating flight, and mate with several drones on this one flight. The more, the better. That’s the only time she’ll be bred, and then she’ll come back and lay eggs for the rest of her life, however long that is.

The worker bees last six or seven weeks. The first three weeks of their life, they’ll be nurse bees inside the hive. They stay in the hive all the time, and they take care of the brood that’s coming on. After they mature a little more, they’ll spend a couple weeks as field bees. Then they work themselves to death, coming and going.

The queen can lay up to 1,500 eggs a day. So that means there’s probably that many bees dying out of that hive every day, as well. So they go out, and they get too big a load of nectar to carry anymore, and they go to the ground and die.

The male bees are drones. Their only purpose is to breed a queen. They generally all get kicked out in the fall. They die then. They don’t make honey, they don’t sting. All they do is live off the hive and try to mate a queen bee."

— Kevin Elfrink, local beekeeper