From Bucks bee-vangelist, the buzz on keeping hives healthy

Mark Antunes drove his Tacoma pickup down a dirt road near Spring City in Chester County to the tree line at the edge of a farm field, where nine of his 100 honeybee colonies awaited his inspection.

The hives looked like weather-beaten wooden filing cabinets that had seen too many winters. A few bees entered and left through narrow slots at ground level, but there was no hint of the thousands inside until Antunes pried off the roof with his hive tool - a nine-inch steel crowbar - and exposed the vast army of female worker bees, too busy at their day jobs to notice the intruder, much less sting him.

He wore netting over his face but worked barehanded, using a paper-fueled smoke blower to confuse the bees. He then calmly scraped away the winter's waxy buildup as hordes of the female workers crawled over his fingers.

"The females tend to the queen, clean the hive, take out the dead, forage for nectar, feed the young, store the pollen, do all the work," Antunes said, "leaving nothing for the male drones to do but have sex and then die. . . . If somebody calls you a drone, it could be an insult."

Suddenly, he winced. "Ouch!" he said. "I'm not getting stung by the bees. I'm getting stung by ants." He evicted the harmless intruders from the hive.

Antunes, 63, a concrete-standards construction adviser from rural Bucks County, is past president of the 450-member Montgomery County Beekeepers Association, and travels both counties to check on his hives.

He keeps up to 50 colonies, of 50,000 bees each, on his property, and chooses his outlying sites for similar virtues: seclusion, nectar resources, the owner's desire to host bees.

After a winter of monthly hive checks, Antunes drives 100 miles each through early July, devoting evenings and weekends to inspecting each hive every 10 days, strengthening weak colonies by importing healthy bees from strong ones, raising queen bees that lay 1,500 eggs daily.

Every month, he delivers the honeybee gospel to beginners at the Montgomery County 4-H Club in Creamery, a fervent bee-vangelist on a mission from Mother Nature.

He preaches constant vigilance in destroying the disease-carrying parasitic mites largely responsible for wiping out 60.6 percent of the 20,000 to 30,000 managed honeybee colonies in Pennsylvania from April 2014 to April 2015, the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show.

Miticide strips, similar to flypaper, help. But no weapon is foolproof.

"You're trying to kill an organism on an insect," Antunes said.

He sterilized his hive tool with alcohol before prying open each of his Spring City hives. "One hive could have a disease," he said, "so not sterilizing the tool would be like a surgeon going from patient to patient and not cleaning his scalpel."

In some hives, the bees had emptied a plastic bag of liquid pollen substitute that Antunes had installed to sustain them through the winter. He put in fresh ones, saying, "Here you go, girls! Château Ha Ha '59. I think you'll enjoy this immensely."

His summer harvest probably will come to several hundred pounds of honey, which he'll sell at Peace Valley Winery in Chalfont and Froehlich's Farm & Garden in Furlong. It represents sweat equity without bounds.

On April 2, he was relaxing at home when he saw a late-night forecast for 60 mph winds. He knew they would knock over his five double-decker hives.

"I dashed outside to strap them together on the hive stand," he said. "There I was, getting soaked with rain, pelted with hail, in a gusty thunderstorm with bolts of lightning that were momentarily blinding as I worked to save the bees. It was not exactly the casual pastime endeavor of enjoyment in pastoral environs that I portray to my beginner students."

All of the hives survived.

Antunes' passion for beekeeping started on the farm where he was raised, near Silverdale in Hilltown Township, Upper Bucks County. His dad, George, tried beekeeping in the early 1960s, but gave up when a bacterial disease decimated his hives and most had to be burned. He could save only a couple.

Antunes grew up, went away to college, returned to the farm in 2001 to help his aging parents - and discovered his dad's hives. "That was the triggering point for me," he said. "I thought, 'I love honey. I'll keep bees.' It was like someone saying, 'I really like milk, so I think I'll buy dairy cattle.' "

The honey he produced, he said, "was vastly more expensive than I could have bought. But beekeeping connected me to a wide range of people I enjoy. Beekeeping has expanded beyond the practical limitations . . . but I'm pressing onward."

Honeybees pollinate a third of the fruits and vegetables people eat, Antunes said, and that's reason enough to try to save them. But he is also motivated by the emotional tug of his rural roots.

"When I was growing up, we lived down a dirt road," he said. "Hilltown Township was full of small-scale farmers who had 30 or 40 head of cattle and 100 acres or so of tillable ground.

"Now, there are two or three housing developments going on simultaneously. There are three farmers who actually operate in the township. I am trying to catch the last wave of agricultural open space and get some beehives in this area. I like being in a rural place."

He said he plans to be a full-time beekeeper when he can afford to retire. He laughed. "It's a hobby that got a little out of control. As my daughter said, 'If you gave up bees, Dad, you could retire now.'

"Someday," Antunes said, climbing into his pickup packed with beekeeping essentials, and driving off to check more hives.

geringd@phillynews.com

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