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Mike Macri, owner of Macri Honey Bee Farm near Conway, S.C., holds a frame of honeybees.
Photo by Thomas Hammond
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Mike Macri considers beekeeping more than a hobby—“My main concern is to make the bee populations grow,” he says.
Photo by Thomas Hammond
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Worker bees live an average of five to six weeks, while queen bees (with the distinctive green dot) can lay some 2,500 eggs per day in the busiest summer months.
Photo by Thomas Hammond
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Macri Honey Bee Farm maintains 30 beehives, from which beekeeper Mike Macri extracts honey that he gives to friends and sells locally. He also keeps a good bit of honey for the bees themselves, who need it to survive the winter.
Photo by Thomas Hammond
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To get a jar of golden honey, the wax is first scraped off the comb, then the combs are spun at a high speed to extract the honey.
Photo by Thomas Hammond
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“It’s crazy what God’s little creature does to our whole food survival,” beekeeper Mike Macri, holding one of his honeybees, says.
Photo by Thomas Hammond
On a mild afternoon as spring begins to burst into bloom, beekeeper Mike Macri makes his rounds to check on his 30 beehives. All about him, honeybees swarm and buzz, but Macri moves among them with the nonchalance of a man who’s been stung a thousand times.
He stops at “Hive 5”—one of his “docile” hives—and issues a few puffs from a handheld smoker. He stands back, hooded in his beekeeping suit, and lets the smoke calm the creatures. Then, with a hive tool, he pries open the top of the wooden box, which the bees have sealed with a waxy substance called propolis, or “bee glue.” Inside, 10 wooden frames are stacked vertically, like old pictures in an attic box, and Macri carefully lifts them out, one at a time.
Within each frame, the honeybees have built a honeycomb—one of nature’s most marvelous feats of architecture—and there’s only one way to describe what’s happening: The bees are busy as bees. Some are feeding the young. Some are feeding the one and only queen. Some are cleaning the cells of the hive. Some are heading out on scouting trips to nearby flowers.
Macri guesses there are around 60,000 to 80,000 bees in this hive alone, an entire colony that seems to be performing a complex dance in anticipation of the upcoming spring’s honey flow.
But Macri is quick to point out that honey is only one aspect of beekeeping.
“I mean, yeah, we do honey,” he says, referring to Macri Honey Bee Farm, which he runs just outside of Conway with his wife, Joanne. “But my main concern is to make the bee populations grow.”
Here he offers up his favorite quote—something he’s as fond of saying as he is of showing off the honeybee tattoo on his left arm. “You know,” he says, “Einstein once said, ‘If bees die, we die four years after them.’”
Like most beekeepers, Macri sees beekeeping as more than a simple pastime or hobby, and he will wax lyrical about how bees pollinate our plants as part of “the great circle of life.”
“This year, we helped put bees on a strawberry farm,” he says. “The farmer told me yesterday, he goes, ‘Boy, my strawberries have never looked so good.’ You not only get more berries when you have bees; you get bigger berries.”
Strawberries, peach trees, cucumbers, squash, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower—these are just some of the crops that depend on honeybees as insect pollinators. With nectar and pollen, the bees use the mixture to make “bee bread,” which they feed to their larvae and their queen.
And when honeybees mix nectar with certain enzymes in their glands, and blow this mixture into one of the cells of the honeycomb, and fan it down to a moisture content of around 17%, they will cap the cell with wax. Voila: their nonperishable winter food, honey.
It’s an intricate web of give-and-take, of work-and-make, and beekeepers don’t just come in at the end to scrape the comb for honey. Beekeepers are there to ensure that the life of the hive—and the hive of life—continues to thrive.
Ben Powell, coordinator of the Clemson Apiculture and Pollinator Program, puts it this way: “Having honeybees in your landscape improves the ecosystem, and of all the agricultural practices we have, honeybees and beekeeping have the lightest footprint and the greatest benefit.”
Protect bees, protect life
All of this is why the current news about honeybees is, well, stinging. Bees are dying off in alarming numbers across the country, and although thousands of labs are researching the causes, no one knows why.
At a recent monthly meeting of the Blackwater Beekeepers Association, one of 26 local beekeeping associations in South Carolina, President Rick Vereen shared the latest data. Colony losses over the past winter were drastically higher than usual, and commercial beekeepers had suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
“For commercial beekeepers, this is very significant,” Clemson’s Powell says. “They’re losing 40% of their stock. Imagine if you were a chicken farmer or cattle rancher. If you lost 40% of your animals every year, that’s a significant loss. And so, beekeepers have some challenges, but beekeepers are also very hardworking and industrious people, and they’re working diligently to overcome those losses.”
Powell emphasizes that people can support pollinators, even if they aren’t beekeepers, by being conscious of how they manage their land. They can build native plant gardens and reduce pesticides. They can maintain biodiversity by replacing plants that aren’t very productive for pollinators. They can call a beekeeper when they see a hive, rather than exterminate it.
Do it yourself
And if people are interested in becoming a beekeeper?
“If you want to be serious about getting into learning about how to manage bees, produce honey and keep bees either for a trade or for income, my main suggestion is that you look for a local club or a local class,” Powell says. “That’s the best way to learn how to keep bees in South Carolina.”
Macri agrees. He believes the No. 1 thing any budding beekeeper can do is find a good mentor. Or, better yet, several mentors.
“Beekeeping, to me, is like being an artist,” he says. “Every artist puts their paint on the canvas differently. Well, you take what you learn from here and there, and you make it your own. You do it your way—what works for you, what’s simplest for you.”
As Macri is saying this, he finally finds the queen inside one of the frames of “Hive 5.” She’s noticeably larger than all the other bees, and sure enough, she has an unmistakable green rump. He tells Joanne to checkmark “Spotted Queen” on this hive’s inspection checklist, which also includes such items as “Brood Pattern,” “Mites,” “Hive Beetles” and “Demeanor”—each a potential issue he must monitor.
One problem beekeepers face is a fascinating phenomenon known as “swarming.” This occurs when the hive becomes overloaded and splits to make a new hive elsewhere. During a swarm, the old queen will take half the bees and leave, thus drastically reducing honey production.
Macri, for his part, isn’t concerned about any potential swarm today. He closes “Hive 5” and moves on to inspect the next one.
In the coming weeks, the bees will fill each comb with honey and then cap it with wax, almost like sealing the lid of a Tupperware jar. Macri will take these honeycombs (called “supers”) and walk them over to his “Honey House”—a storage shed in which he has an extractor and a bottler. He’ll scrape the wax off the comb and let the extractor spin out the honey. He’ll bottle it up in 16-ounce jars, which he gives to friends and sells locally.
But he will also keep a good bit of honey for the bees themselves. After all, that’s how they’ll survive the winter. And we need the bees to live, if we want to live.
As Macri puts it, “It’s crazy what God’s little creature does to our whole food survival.”
Macri Honey Bee Farm honey muffins recipe
Makes 6–8 muffins
1½ cups white flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Dash of salt
1 egg
½ cup local honey
½ cup skim milk
¼ cup canola oil
1 cup blueberries (optional)
Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease a 12-count muffin pan or line with cupcake papers.
In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside. In another bowl, whisk together egg, honey, milk and oil. Add in flour mixture and mix until just combined. Divide batter evenly into prepared pan (fill about ¾ full). You should get approximately 6–8 muffins. Bake 15–20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
Let muffins cool for five minutes before removing from pan. Keep leftovers in a covered container.
Honeybee facts
8—Estimated number of honeybee species worldwide, out of some 20,000 bee species overall.
1 in 3—Bites of food that have been pollinated by bees.
$20 billion—Estimated value of honeybees’ contribution to U.S. crops annually.
5–6 weeks—Average lifespan of a worker bee, during which time she’ll produce about 1/12 teaspoon of honey.
2,500—Number of eggs a queen can lay per day in the busiest summer months.
Sources: The Bee Conservancy, Clemson Apiculture and Pollinator Program, National Geographic Kids