Along with gardeners tilling soil, spring also brings a time for beekeepers to revive their apiaries after winter losses.
The Four Corners Beekeepers Association distributed 190 hives brought in from Orem, Utah, to an eager line of beekeepers that grew to at least 40 yards outside the distribution point at Zuberfizz warehouse in Bodo Industrial Park on Saturday afternoon.
Tanner Duff, who lives near Hermosa, said he was looking to expand his apiary to three hives after his first year of beekeeping. He currently has two hives that came from swarming, or capturing a feral hive.
He prefers swarming.
“It guarantees your bees are acclimatized,” he said.
Neil Sebestyen, a member of Four Corners Beekeepers, said the bees were carefully brought from Orem to avoid excessive heat, which will kill them. Every time the truck stopped for gas from Orem to Durango, the precious cargo of 190 hives would be misted down with water, an important task given the temperature Saturday in Moab was 85 degrees.
Each hive, contained in a white box, had a queen and 3 pounds of worker bees. Sebestyen said the queen is in her own little cage locked up with cork plug keeping her in place, and she is tended and fed by the workers.
Peggy Morris, secretary for the club, said four types of honeybees – Carniolan, Italian, Russian and Saskatraz – were available for $135 and up for a queen and 3 pounds of workers. A queen by herself was $37.
When the beekeepers get home, they will carefully replace the cork with a sugar-honey plug, which the worker bees will chew through in three days – freeing the queen.
The three-days containment gives the queen enough time to spread her pheromones, her chemical calling card, to ensure the worker bees accept her as their queen and work to support her and build the hive.
Jess Hamill, who raises bees in Three Springs, said her brother-in-law, a more experienced beekeeper, is going to help her replace the cork with the sugar-honey plug – to ensure it’s done adroitly enough to keep the queen from escaping.
“Every year, we get calls from beekeepers, ‘Oh, my queen escaped,’” Morris said.
John Stephenson, a Bayfield-area beekeeper, said he had one hive make it through the winter this year, the first hive to survive the winter since he started beekeeping four years ago.
He is unsure what has killed his hives in past winters, but he has a suspect.
“From talking with other beekeepers, I believe it was varroa mites,” he said.
Varroa mites are parasites that attack honey bees and the brood, sucking blood from both often to the point where the hive is killed.
But in Southwest Colorado, hives can be lost to much larger predators – bears.
Jason Morrow of Mancos came to collect his first hive.
He became interested in beekeeping while serving in the Peace Corps in Gambia, and if he’s lucky, he said he would like to make mead, wine made from honey and sometimes called the drink of the gods.
In Gambia, Morrow said, the hives didn’t come packaged and shipped in.
You got your hive by breaking off a chunk of bark on a tree containing a hive.
“That’s old school,” Stephenson said.
parmijo@durangoherald.com
