The buzz on beekeeping
Sewanee resident Rose Mary Drake has been mis-bee-having for 10 years, a passion that began prior to moving to the mountain.
Most of the nine hives Drake has are from captured swarms or hives that she intentionally split—she does occasionally supplement with bees she buys from the Elk Valley Beekeepers Association based in Winchester.
She keeps her hives close to her home, so she can monitor them daily.
“By watching them, I can get a good sense of what’s going on, and I’m alerted to problems,” she said, noting that stronger hives will sometimes rob weaker hives, especially when there’s not much nectar flow.
“In each hive, you’ve got three kinds of bees,” she said. “Each has a queen, each has worker bees which are female, and each has drones which are male bees. The vast majority of the population are worker bees.
“The queen lays eggs in the little cells, and the worker bees tend those cells and feed the larvae until they mature,” she added, noting that the queen determines the sex of the new additions: unfertilized eggs become drones, fertilized eggs become worker bees.
Interestingly, the worker bees decide when they need a new queen.
“They’re all fed the same thing the first few days with something called royal jelly, but when they want to grow a new queen, they feed that cell only royal jelly for their entire life,” she said.
Drake said there are many reasons why worker bees might create a new queen.
“If the bees in the hive sense that the queen is getting too old, she’s running out of fertilized eggs, she’s not performing for one reason or another, or if she dies or is injured, then they create queen cells,” she said.
“A major reason they create new queen cells is that the hive gets so big that they’re crowded in there, so they’ll create what are called swarm cells, which are queen cells, and as those cells are about to hatch, the old queen leaves, taking about two-thirds of the population with her, and that is the swarm,” she explained.
“That leaves the old hive with a smaller population but a new queen,” she said. “That virgin queen’s body has to harden—it’s really soft and easily injured.”
Once her body’s hardened, the new queen goes on mating flights. “This happens at this one period only in their lives. They go on the mating flights, they find clouds of drones, and mate with numerous drones—that queen, if she can make it, then returns to her hive, and in a few days, she’ll start laying eggs.”
The bee population for a hive can run anywhere from 10,000 to 150,000, Drake said, adding that this time of year the population tends to drop off.
“Staring in February, we’ll start having plants that bloom that create nectar and pollen, and at that point the queen starts laying more eggs, and the hive increases in population. They get at their strongest in what’s called the honey flow, which is March to June, where all the spring plants and trees are blooming and creating nectar and pollen, so the hives really burst forth with big populations.
“But then we reach this time of year which is the dearth. We don’t really have that much in the way of new-blooming plants, so there’s no new nectar sources, so the queen stops laying as many eggs, and they go into more of a holding pattern trying to sustain themselves during the hot weather. They’re trying to find water sources too, and they’re trying to stay cool.”
Drake said in this area there is another nectar flow in the fall.
“It’s not anywhere near the size of the spring nectar flow,” she said. “What I do and what most beekeepers do is harvest honey in the summertime—for me that is late June or early July.”
She said the taste of her honey crop varies from year to year depending on the nectar the bees have collected.
“I don’t ever harvest honey in the fall,” she said, noting she leaves that for the bees to survive over the winter. “That’s their booster—that’s more stores for the winter. It’s also said to be a more bitter-tasting honey, so I just leave it for them.”
One interesting thing Drake also does is sell ‘honey shares.’
“People buy advanced shares of the future possible honey crop,” she said. “I sell those at the end of the year for the next year’s crop. Nothing’s guaranteed, so they may just be investing in helping honey bees survive, or they may get a portion of the honey crop. I think every year that I have sold shares that I have had a honey crop to give people.”
A honey share costs $25 and gives the investor a forty-fifth of her average honey-producing hive.
“Those people who bought honey shares the prior winter get their share, and they also get first dibs on buying additional honey. A lot of people don’t even eat honey, but they want to support my beekeeping,” she said.
Five years ago, Drake bought her 20-acre Moonrise Farm in Sewanee after her mother’s death and a terrifying robbery at gunpoint outside her East Nashville home mere weeks later.
“I bought this place to come and recover from both the loss of my mom and the trauma of having a gun put up next to my head in an aggravated robbery,” she said. “I thought this would be the place I’d come to on the weekends and that I’d keep practicing law, but the more I stayed, I just wanted to be here.”
She also found life at the Sewanee property easier for her recuperation after undergoing double knee replacement; COVID hit, and she never went back to her law practice.
For Drake, 64, returning to Sewanee was a homecoming. She graduated from the University of the South in 1980 before going to Vanderbilt Law School and then returned in the late 1990s to manage property for the University for a few years.
“I was familiar with the area,” she said. “We have the advantages of having the University nearby, so you have this intellectual life that’s possible—the lectures, the concerts, so it was a good fit for me. A lot of alumni from my era have retired here, so there are people I have known from forty years ago here.”
Drake first tried beekeeping unsuccessfully in the 90s in Goodlettsville, Tenn.
“My family owned an antebellum farmhouse on 120-acres that had been in the family for years,” she explained. “I ran a bed-and-breakfast there. I tried beekeeping then, but I didn’t have any luck with it. I just did it for a year.”
About 10 years ago, she decided to try again. The rest, as they say, is history.
