Wyoming beekeeping takes money, time and a love of nature

Ask Woody Taylor whether his honey tastes better than the store-bought variety and he'll scoff. Then he'll hand you a chunk of raw honeycomb.

The sticky-sweet nectar clings to fingers like pollen on bees. It oozes from a chewy wax center and glides over the tongue.

The "good stuff" can be consumed in seconds, but Taylor said a substantial investment of about $400 to $500 goes into each honey-producing hive.

"With no guarantee that your bees will survive," he added.

A healthy hive

On a day in early May, hardy Carniolan bees are just beginning to venture outside their hives near the North Platte River west of Casper. Taylor watches the bees enter the three boxes from the southeast, the only side not insulated by hay bales, as they carry blobs of basketball-colored pollen on their legs.

It's a good sign, but he suits up to take a closer look. Taylor removes the hay and a faint hum grows louder. The lid takes effort to remove.

Bees stay in their hives for most of the winter, keeping the internal temperature about 88 degrees. They eat honey reserves and only leave to defecate, sealing any open spaces with propolis, a sap-like residue.

Taylor filled Mason jars with sugar water, another bee food source. He pumped the bellow handle of a smoker over the open box and began removing frames, bending over each to examine the mountainous honeycombs.

"I'm checking to look for honey reserves, how much honey they have left through the winter, make sure they have enough," he said. "As I get toward the center, I'll be looking for brood, for the indication that there's still a queen and that she's laying."

The hive is thriving. Flat-capped worker brood on the frame's center and bumpy drone brood on the outer edges are proof of a healthy

egg-laying queen.

Taylor pokes a maggot-looking drone out of an egg chamber to check for mites. Drones are the only male bees in a hive and cannot sting. Their only job is to mate with a virgin queen.

"The mites are tiny, and they'll attach themselves to the drone brood first, usually," Taylor said. "If my brood is full of mites, I know I've got a problem."

Parasitic mites such as the Varroa mite are a constant threat because they can only be controlled, not eradicated. They feed off honeybees, spreading viruses and weakening the insects' immune system.

A host of other problems can also plague bees, making it difficult to maintain a hobby or commercial business. Taylor's 50 Wyoming hives made it through winter, but he lost two thirds of his bees in Oregon. He operates T bee S with Ron Stark, of Oregon, and they sell honey and pollination services.

Then 10 of nearly 50 packages of bees Taylor received in late April were killed by a resurgence of cold weather.

While the occasional loss of a bee colony is not unusual, the phenomenon of a large number disappearing has become known as colony collapse disorder. Beekeepers began reporting losses of 30 to 90 percent of their hives in late 2006 for reasons that are still largely unexplained, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"It's just really hard these days to keep them all alive," Taylor said. "Most guys lose, on average, 30 percent of their hive every year."

Reaping the rewards

After checking the first hive, Taylor moves on. He listens to the buzzing and tries to determine if the colony is

aggressive before opening the second box.

"This was a swarm some friends of mine captured in Saratoga," he said. "They had a late start, so they're not nearly as big."

Still, they've managed to fill most of the frame with beeswax and honey. A hive's productivity is affected by living conditions that are largely dependent on the queen, Taylor said, as he spread a protein mix that resembled peanut butter on top of the frames.

Bees can fly between three to five miles in search of plant life, but Taylor said they are lazy and prefer the closest source of food. This time of year, dandelions are the only plants in bloom. There will be cherry and apple trees and then wildflowers later, but he said the majority of Wyoming honey is produced from alfalfa.

"As the summer progresses, I'll add supers. Honey supers," Taylor said. "Stack them as high as the bees will add honey to them."

A super is a box of wooden frames placed above two deep hive boxes. The bees collect nectar and convert it into honey, which they store in wax combs on the frames. The supers are then removed to collect honey, and the combs in the boxes below are left to the brood.

An empty frame may only weigh a pound, but a full one can weigh between eight and 10 pounds. Taylor said he harvests honey in mid-summer.

"If you're lucky," he said. "Some years you make nothing. Some years you make a lot."

Bee bodies are built for pollination. When they fly, Taylor said they create friction that allows pollen to stick to the hairs on their legs. They pack the pollen into egg chambers to feed larvae with what's known as "bee bread."

Growers across the country seek these adept pollinators, and Taylor sends his Oregon bees to almond and berry farmers. Almonds depend solely on honey bees for pollination, and bee pollination directly or indirectly produces one out of every three bites of food, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For love of nature

The bees fly about the hives aimlessly, in a sort of circular way. Like planes looking to land. And sometimes they do – on a sleeve or pant leg.

"You're going to get stung," Taylor said.

He's felt their stings hundreds of times and said there's no secret to avoiding the occupational hazard. There are basic precautions, such as opening the hives from the back, wearing protective gear and avoiding black – the color of bees' natural predators. But Taylor said most unfriendly encounters are the result of rushing or carelessness.

Dealing with bee hives one night, when the insects crawl instead of fly, Taylor forgot to put Velcro straps around his ankles to close off the pant openings.

"They went all up my pants leg," he said. "That wasn't good, but you just got to keep working through it."

He was first drawn to the practice after visiting a friend's hives in Oregon. Getting started was fairly easy because of his beekeeping connections, but it took work to build the boxes, pallets and other hive parts.

Taylor said it's an expensive venture that isn't for everybody, but the more he learned, the more his interest grew. If the city of Casper approves beekeeping in city limits, as the City Council is considering, he said it could only improve the ecosystem.

"It just takes a love of, maybe nature, everything," he said. "Because you're not just looking at bees."

Many assert that bees are the first indicator of the overall health of the environment, and Taylor agrees. Because the insects leave their hives to collect pollen, they bring everything in from the outside, both good and bad.

"When you're a beekeeper, you see every bloom out there," Taylor said. "You're always thinking, 'Oh, my bees would love to be on that.' And so maybe you become more aware of a lot of things."