Friday, May 1, 2009 10:13 PM CDT
Beekeeper enjoys raising bees and eating homemade honey
By Bonnie Clark, Features Writer
bclark@jg-tc.com
Beekeeper Mike Benslay of rural Stewardson said he hasn’t been stung once this year... “yet.”
An apiarist for about four years, Benslay is knowledgeable about bees, although he says he’s still learning.
“There is so much to learn,” he said.
“A few years ago, there was a show at the mall and someone had information on honeybees,” he said. “I started reading and found that everything about them interested me.”
Benslay, the former owner of J&T Rentals in Mattoon, and his wife, Debbie, a Mattoon Middle School science teacher, purchased the wooded property where they now live a few years ago. After they moved there, he got out the bee books and read some more.
Today, both are involved in beekeeping and are firm believers in the benefits of eating honey.
“A lot of people eat it for health reasons,” Benslay said. “Mostly — around here anyway — they take it for allergies. The bees collect the pollen from the flowers that are giving people stuffed up heads and headaches.
“Honey kind of acts like a vaccine. They say the secret is to eat a little every day.
“Bee venom is also good for you,” he said. “It’s good for arthritis.”
Beekeeping is an intense interest for Benslay, a school bus driver who often talks to classes in area schools about the bee business.
“The bees do take some time, but probably not as much as I spend,” Benslay said. “Debbie always tells me if I’d leave them alone, they’d probably do a lot better than when I’m messing with them. After all, they’ve been doing this for a long time.
“Debbie helps me with the hives, but the queen stuff is really her baby,” he said. “She raised queens for the first time last fall. She actually raised 15 queens. We gave some away and kept a few for ourselves.”
Benslay said the queen is the hub of the hive.
“Without a queen, it will die,” he said. “She’s the egg layer, and can lay 1,000 to 1,500 eggs a day. That’s not unusual for a good queen.
“The queen puts off a pheromone — a scent — and the other bees all know it. They feed her and take care of her. And, when she’s old and weak, they know that, and they’ll start making a new queen.
“The hive takes some regular eggs that the queen laid to become worker bees, and they feed those eggs differently than the others.
“They feed them what is called royal jelly,” he said, “and they all get the good stuff for a few days, but then they start slacking off and only feed ones they intend to become a queens.”
Benslay said there may be as many as half a dozen to a dozen queen eggs, but when the first one hatches, it goes around and kills the rest of them.
“It’s amazing how a hive operates,” he said. “They do so many things. It’s unreal.”
When bees first hatch, they start right in cleaning the hive, he said.
“They start working right away and they stay in the hive for several days. That’s their job, to clean the hive.
“Then they go to where they feed the eggs and larvae and then they’re called nurse bees. When they graduate as nurse bees,” he said, “the last thing they do is become foragers. They go out and get the nectar, pollen, and water for the hive. It’s pretty amazing.”
At the front of the hive, where they go in and out, are the guard bees.
“There may not be very many — I suppose it depends on how threatened the hive feels — but, the guard bees check every bee that comes in and out,” he said.
“There are times they’re grouchier than other times,” Benslay said, “but most of the time, you can go out there and they won’t bother you because they have things to do. They’re busy.”
Benslay said when a nurse bee graduates to forager, she will come out and fly around the hive, “getting her GPS figured out so when she leaves, she won’t have any trouble getting back.”
The Benslays’ bees produce wild flower honey, which they keep for their own use and sell, although he said they don’t have enough to sell in stores.
“Usually the honey in the spring is largely from dandelions and a lot from clover. It will be a real light color,” he said. “Later on there will be a lot of wildflowers and that honey is darker.
“Personally, I like the darker. It’s a little stronger and it has a little more flavor.”
May is the season when bees may swarm, a way for the colony to reproduce. The old queen will leave the hive and take half the worker bees with her. The buzzing group of bees is the swarm or cluster.
Scouts from the new group seek a home for the swarm. The old queen (there’s already a new queen in the hive) is in the middle of the swarm.
The scouts are looking for a hollow tree or a house that has a hole in it. They’re looking for a dark place to start a new home, and when they find it, they’ll come back for the rest of the bees in the cluster.
“If you have a swarm in your back yard or wherever, you don’t have to do anything with it,” Benslay said, “because eventually the bees will fly away.
“What is nice is if you call a beekeeper to come and get it because it’s really just a mini hive. It’s got everything he needs to start a new hive.”
One of the eight hives at the couple’s home was started after a contractor called to say there were bees in the wall of a house being torn down on 15th Street in Mattoon.
“We got the bees and brought them out here,” Benslay said. “It was a four- or five-hour ordeal.
The bees were between 2-by-4 studs.
“Of course we had to get the queen,” he said. “Once you get everything in the hive, especially if the queen is in there, the rest of them will go right in and you just seal the hive and bring it home,” he said.
The contractor called Benslay back later that day to tell him there was a small swarm on the ground.
“‘There can’t be,’ I told him. ‘We got the queen.’ But I went back and sure enough, there on the ground was this little, bitty swarm of bees about the size of a coffee cup.”
Benslay said he got a box, then sat down and watched.
“All of the sudden they started taking off, and I thought, ‘Well, they’re leaving.’ But I watched real close and there was the queen down at the bottom.
“I put her in the box, and one by one those bees started coming back.
“That little swarm, really just a handful of bees, is now a hive with probably 60,000 bees,” he said. “We call it the 15th Street Hive.”
Contact Bonnie Clark at bclark@jg-tc.com or 238-6847.
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