A HONEY of a Hobby

With apologies to André Previn, certain stories just cry out for puns. So in a tale about beekeepers, one can’t help but borrow from his “Jesus Christ, Superstar” tune and ask, “What’s the buzz, tell me what’s a-happening.” The little buzzers, hard-working and clannish, aren’t much on people’s minds most of the time.

But when a semitruck carrying millions of honeybees overturned in Whatcom County last May, spilling its load and creating a giant swarm, news stories gave readers a stinging reminder that bees are very much necessary, even, perhaps, to our very survival. A few years earlier, an unknown number of Asian giant hornets traveled uninvited into Washington. Honeybees were on their menu, causing widespread alarm in the agriculture community.

A male specimen was found near Marysville in 2021. But the state launched a sting operation, and there were no confirmed sightings in either 2023 or 2024, so officials declared the hornets eradicated from North America. Bees and their keepers hummed a sigh of relief. Except for the occasional headline buzz about bees, the pollinators and their keepers quietly do their thing.

Here are some numbers:

• There are about 2.99 million managed colonies of bees in the United States; the managers number from 115,000 – 125,000. Most of them are hobbyists.

• A typical colony ranges from just under 20,000 bees in the wintertime to 50,000-60,000 in the summertime. So, at peak, an estimated 150-180+ billion honeybees are racing in and out of managed hives, collecting pollen and pollinating.

Closer to home, there are about 100,000 managed honeybee colonies statewide, and they’re regularly moved about to pollinate orchards and crops. They love apple blossoms. And then there are the hobbyists. Bee-lieve it or not, we found a few locally who agreed to explain how they came to bee keepers.

A Flow Hive

For Don and Candi Doran of Mukilteo, their beekeeping adventure started by accident. Their youngest son, Sean, a grown man, still has some of that boyish charm in him, Don said. “Sean came to me and said, Dad, I’ve got a great idea. All I need is your yard.” He wanted to get a beehive. It was a variation of that well-known child’s plea, “Can I have a puppy? I promise I’ll feed it and walk it and pick up its poop!”

Don said no way. For starters, he’s allergic to bee stings. Candi, separately, gave Sean the green light. Guess who prevailed? Sean showed them a video of a beehive invented in Australia, called a Flow Hive, and it comes with a tap at the bottom that you simply turn and, voilá! Honey!

It’s popular with beginners, but expensive. And, like most products that sound too good to be true, it was. All three Doran children chipped in to help buy the $1,000 Flow Hive, Candi said. But then, as Don recalled, a couple of weeks later, they said, “The beehive is gonna be here, and we’re gonna need to put it together. Well, there’s about a billion parts. I looked at my two sons, and thought, yeah, they’re not putting this thing together.”

Don came to admit the Flow Hive was a pretty cool invention, but it was plastic, and was designed differently from traditional hives, neither a feature that the bees particularly like. “So technically, Sean was right,” he admitted. “However, Australia is not Washington. We have a relatively short growing season where bees are able to fill that Flow Hive.” And it wasn’t true that you just had to set it up and wait for the honey to begin flowing. It needed maintenance, just like all hives do.

The couple began doing their due diligence, watching YouTube and attending classes. And they were beginning to get to know their bees. Even seemingly little things, like the color of their “house,” make a difference. “They’re very particular,” Candi said. “If they don’t like something, they just leave.”

Learning curve

In the early going, the learning curve was steep. “The first couple of years, we were working pretty hard on this,” Don said, “and I was getting more and more resentful because the kids said they were going to help. They were going to be full partners in this.” But, of course, Don and Candi ended up “walking the dog.”

The school of hard knocks (honey knocks?) included learning about the plague of mites, which wiped out their hive one year, and the curse of yellowjackets, which like to feast on bees. And Don, despite his allergy, had to get used to being stung on a regular basis – more than a dozen times so far this year.

But a funny thing happened on the hell road to honey heaven: Don and Candi came to love their beehive. They propped a couple of lawn chairs nearby to watch as thousands of bees come and go all day long. Don, using a pair of heavy-duty gloves, de-stresses by pounding yellowjackets into oblivion. And this year the couple has reaped a generous supply of honey. Sean, who does help out occasionally, gets an honorable mention for naming their sweet product “Bee-tchin’ Honey.”

Unlike the Dorans, Julia Fiene Bowman of Edmonds had long wanted to be a beekeeper. She grew up in Wisconsin, went to many a state fair, and was drawn to the bee booths where she asked questions and marveled at the exhibits. But it wasn’t until Covid, when everyone isolated at home, that she finally had an opportunity to jump in.

“I was a teacher, but in-person teaching stopped, and I was home-schooling my three kids,” she said. “We had property on Lake Roesiger where there’s not a lot or people. It’s pretty rural, so it’s a great place to keep bees. So it started as a home school project with my son and two daughters, and I just fell in love with it. I read ‘Beekeeping for Dummies,’ cover to cover, taking notes.”

She joined a local club, attended online meetings, and bought her first two hives. Today she has 10. She loves the work, being outdoors, and giving back to the environment. “We need bees for survival, and other pollinators, of course. They actually pollinate about one-third of the food that we eat.” Her children are still at home, so she enlists their help, too. “I love that I can do it with my children. I love getting the honey and being able to share that with friends and family. There are so many things I love about it.”

Like other beekeepers, she’s well aware of the challenges bees face today. Washington state’s winters, for example, are hard on bees. “It’s difficult to get them through the winter,” Bowman said. “And partly that’s because of a mite that’s very difficult for the bees to handle.”

Known as the Varroa destructor mite, it poses a massive threat to honeybees, beekeepers and honey producers, and agricultural sectors that largely rely on bees to pollinate crops worldwide. They reproduce and feed upon developing baby bees, and can also spread potentially lethal honeybee pathogens such as deformed wing virus.

Suburban sprawl is taking its toll, too. Contrary to popular belief, Bowman said, honeybees don’t take nectar from any old flower. “That’s sort of a myth. They prefer specific types of flowers. So the place we have in Lake Roesiger is becoming more difficult for my bees because a lot of that farmland is now housing.”

In town, homeowners can help by minimizing or eliminating the use of pesticides and insecticides and, in general, keeping their property as natural as possible. If you want to help honeybees in particular, plant sunflowers, lilacs, and marigolds. They love apple trees, too, and – big surprise – blackberries.

And if you want to eat the real thing, don’t buy honey at the big box stores. Some of what they pass off isn’t even honey, or a poor substitute. Honey from China, for instance, comes from bees that are fed sugar water rather than obtaining nectar on their own. And then sweeteners may be added. The real deal is at the farmers’ markets. It’s local, more flavorful and healthier.

Bowman doesn’t plan to quit her hobby anytime soon, despite the challenges – even putting up with the stings. She’s allergic. “A few years ago, I got stung. It was just one bee sting. I had been stung in the past, obviously, but this one sting I had a reaction to, and my whole face blew up, including my eyes shut,” she said. “I couldn’t work. I couldn’t do much for several days. It was scary. My choice at that point was either to quit beekeeping or continue with treatment.”

Not willing to give it up, she regularly gets bee venom shots to help with the reaction. “So it’s kind of a story that demonstrates how sort of crazy I am to continue doing something like this.”

If some readers are attracted to that kind of crazy, a good place to start would be at one of the state fairs. During a visit to the recent Evergreen State Fair in Monroe, journeyman beekeeper Tim Ade of Snohomish showed visitors the various exhibits, including a mesh-sided bee tent where he placed one of his 10 hives for viewing. He’ll go in without a protective suit and pull out the frames on which the bees build their honeycombs to show visitors.

Like Bowman, Ade is a Wisconsinite transplant. He had a great uncle who was a commercial beekeeper, sparking his interest. “Also, I had an uncle with a hive box who gave me a delicious jar of honey. It was really cool,” he said. Later, Ade’s wife bought him an apprenticeship course. “I was hooked,” he said. Ade said anyone interested should start by taking classes. “First, you have to decide, are you sure you want to get into this?” he asked.

If you decide to dive in, get involved with some of the many beekeeper associations. Ade said he and other like-minded keepers meet regularly to discuss their successes and failures.

Regional clubs & resources include:

• Northwest District Beekeepers Association (NWDBA) serves Snohomish County and nearby regions with free meetings, mentoring, and public education.

• Stanwood Camano Beekeepers Association caters to North Snohomish and adjacent areas as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

• Snohomish Bee Company, located in the City of Snohomish, offers apiary supplies, package bees, and raw honey.

• The Washington State Beekeepers Association (WASBA) provides statewide support—including for Snohomish—through education programs, hive registration encouragement, and club facilitation.

Hobbyists aren’t into beekeeping for the money. In fact, they’re mostly a money drain.

“Yes, it is expensive,” Bowman said, “and I did not realize that. I don’t think my husband realized that either. It is an expensive hobby.” And it can be disappointing. Some hobbyists, like the Dorans, love their “girls” (almost all the bees in the hive are female) as much as any pet. The year they lost their hive was hard.

If your bees don’t survive the mites, the yellow jackets, or the winter weather, you’ll have to buy another package of 10,000 bees and a queen for up to $350. Then there’s the bee boxes, the frames, the smoker, the hive tools. But the honey! Mmmmm. So good. So, with apologies to the Bard, you have to ask yourself: To bee or not to bee?