“About four days ago they were flying around in New Zealand.”
Local beekeeper Rudi Peters proudly gestures to the long cardboard and plastic tubes, filled with thousands of bees, that are piled up in his truck, leaning against the house, and tucked under the arms of happy new beekeepers.
It’s a sunny spring afternoon and he’s just finished hosting a workshop – and bee pickup – for the dozen or so Terrace and area residents who keep bees in their backyards. He’s in his element, dispelling myths and telling stories about these ferocious little creatures that are so integral to our food supply.
Before the workshop, Peters had driven straight through the night from Prince George where he’d picked up the bees. They’d been flown in by jet in a temperature-controlled cargo hold from their New Zealand birthplace. He orders them from the southern hemisphere because that country’s bees are the healthiest right now. New Zealand also shares a climate similar to northwestern B.C.
Overseas bees are now being brought in because there’s a ban on importing bees from the United States. That country’s bees, overworked because of the industrialized nature of the pollination business, are vulnerable to disease and numbers are dropping. It’s leading to worries about the future of food production in the United States.
But we’re in a slightly better spot up here, and Peters’ Carniolan bees – affectionately known as the Grey Ladies, because of their colour – have been transported to Terrace in cylinders carrying upward of 10,000 bees each. The bees generate so much heat inside these long vessels that Peters had to drive with his truck’s windows open the whole trip so the bees wouldn’t overheat.
“The temperature in the cab gets to be 20 above,” he said. “The trick is to keep them cool so they stay together.”
Put your ear up to one of the tubes, and the buzz is warm, ticklish and deafening, the sound of thousands of bees patiently waiting to get started on their hives.
“You always lose a handful [during transit],” said Peters. “It doesn’t matter how careful you are.”
The vast majority of the bees that did make it now call Terrace home. Aside from producing honey – which Peters has been selling from his home and various markets for the last couple of years under the Skeena Valley Apiary moniker – they’ll help to pollinate fruit trees, gardens, and flowers, a process crucial to Terrace’s food security.
“Bees are critical for our food production,” said Peters, noting that bees need clean air in order to thrive. “If the quality of our air goes down, such as Alcan dumping increased sulfur in the air, it has an effect on their survival. Bees are a bit like a canary in the mine, if our environment quality decreases their ability to survive decreases.”
“They’re the ultimate pollinators,” said Peters, noting that there are actually very few feral bees – about 90 per cent of the bees you see are alive because of someone’s beehive. That’s why seasoned and new beekeepers like the ones Peters works with are so important to keeping our environment in check.
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Beehives aren’t new to Terrace.
At one time, Terrace had hundreds of hives all over town and the surrounding area, thanks in large part to Martin deHoog who began keeping bees here in 1979. His first few batches of bees came from California, and from there he bred them to sell to people around the northwest. And like Peters, he also sold honey at the local markets.
But in 2005, deHoog, who was then one of only a handful of beekeepers in the area, decided it was time to move on to warmer pastures, relocating with his bees to Salmon Arm, where he still breeds and sells bees and honey at his apiary.
“I got sick of the rain,” he deadpans, when asked over the phone why he chose to leave town.
But he does remember the fruit trees in Terrace thriving. “Fruit trees, when you have honey bees, they get about 25 to 35 per cent more fruit,” deHoog said. “If you didn’t have honey bees, then you’ve got that much less on the average.”
That’s in line with what Terrace farmers and fruit growers noticed once deHoog left town. Charles Claus, who has been establishing a farm and orchard on Braun’s Island over the past few years, says when deHoog left town there was a clear drop in fruit production.
“It really crashed the pollination scene in Terrace,” he said. “People who were having good cherry production, or good apple production most years, or plums, they noticed an acute difference in their harvest – like overnight. I have friends who had 300 to 400 pounds of fruit on their tree a year typically, and some of them went down to almost nothing.”
Claus said he believes that’s in direct correlation to deHoog leaving and taking the bees out – but pressed he has no hard feelings for Terrace’s former main apiarist.
“He was free to do that. He was a business guy, and he was doing bees in town here and in the country,” he said.
The past few years have seen a bee resurgence – partly attributed to more people interested in keeping bees on their property. And it couldn’t have happened soon enough, as more and more people are interested in gardening and keeping fruit trees.
“Bees are critical,” said Claus. “Just to pollinate – fruit trees especially – but if you’re growing zucchinis or squash, some plants like that. They don’t all need pollination like that, but some do. Another plant that would need pollination would be a tomato plant.”
Flowers need pollination, too, he added.
“If you grow flowers and save seeds and things like that, they need to be pollinated,” he said.
Long, dry, early springs like we’re experiencing this year also help with pollination and with keeping bees happy – bees especially love dandelions, a staple of the spring.
But pollination is only the first step – people also need to take care to maintain their flowerbeds, gardens and fruit trees.
“Terrace, historically, has a lot more fruit trees tucked away than some people realize,” said Claus. He’s optimistic about Terrace’s agricultural future, noting events like the fall fair, which encourages youth to get excited about agriculture. And encouraged that so many younger people, when shopping for a house, consider fruit trees an attractive feature – but cautions that those trees take work.
“Fruit trees are often some of the highest maintenance trees you can get,” he said. “A well-managed tree will produce way better, healthier amounts of fruit than a poorly-managed tree. So if a tree has been pruned well and looked after well, and there’s appropriate fertility, there’s raking up the leaves in the fall, managing the bugs properly, it just makes a huge difference.”
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Keeping bees requires a nuanced level of maintenance and care. This is something Peters teaches the people who come to the courses and events he organizes, and who are a member of his Facebook community – he moderates a page where local beekeepers can ask him questions about their hives and stay up to date on various seminars in and around Terrace.
The first thing he tells new beekeepers is not to over-handle the beehive. New beekeepers “have the idea that they’ve got to really work it,” Peters said. But in reality, once the hive is set up properly, they should only be spending about 15 minutes a week per hive.
“If you provide the environment where the bees can thrive, they’ll take care of their own problems,” he said.
Part of this means keeping the hives dry – bees can withstand -40 degree weather, but they can’t tolerate being wet, he said.
He also uses his position to dispel long-standing fears about bees. A swarm of bees can be terrifying, and neighbours might worry that will happen when a hive nests in their neighbourhood, but bees are actually their most docile in the swarm state, he said.
“Everybody freaks out,” Peters said, of the swarm. But bees swarm when the hive has gotten too big and the hive is splitting up – the queen lays a few queen cells, one of which will eventually manage the hive left behind, takes some troops (drones, in bee-speak) and flies off to find a new nook.
And these swarm bees are actually so full and bloated with honey – because they don’t know how long it will be before they have a home base – that it’s very unlikely they would, or could, jeopardize their new home by stinging a person.
The swarm-state is an example of the collective, self-protective mind of the hive – Peters describes a hive like a brain, with each bee as a cell in that brain.
But the experience also underscores another myth, that the queen somehow has a wonderful life – aside from the few hours she spends mating, a queen will only ever get to fly when she’s leading her bees to a new home.
