Uncorking a new idea: Early winery hopes for a honey of a product next summer

Every dog has its day, but it seems a bee gets two of them each year. First on May 20, which is World Bee Day, and then the third Saturday in August that marks World Honey Bee Day.

But World Bee or World Honey Bee, is it a distinction without a difference? Eh, maybe for some.

But really, any attention directed to pollinators is worth sending. That’s how our food gets made.

At Skies over Texas Winery in Early, that was their idea for marking the day with a semi-official small to-do in their main room. This year, the day fell on Aug. 17.

“We did it as more of an awareness thing,” said Brian McCue, who has owned the winery with his wife Moira since 2017. “We've had honeybees here since we opened.”

Still recovering from the sting of winter

That first hive formed around a water meter and led to more hives in the process. But despite getting serious with their apiary, the Feb. 2021 “Snowmageddon” set them back.

“We had four hives, I lost three in the freeze,” he said. “I felt really bad that it happened.”

A pair of regular customers who were also beekeepers convinced McCue to try again. An internet course through Cornell University on beekeeping essentials picked him back up and got him on his way once more. Now McCue is ready to take the next step.

“I signed up for their master of beekeeping course,” he said. “It's a 15-month course starting in January. So, I'm kind of excited about that.”

Why all the buzz over bees? Over 20,000 bee species, along with butterflies, moths, birds, bats and other smallish critters, are what transport pollen from one plant to another during the growing season.

Without that pollination, there’s no agriculture. Some plants, like McCue’s vineyard, self-pollinate. But others, like the entire California almond crop, completely rely on bees for pollination.

According to a recent report from Penn State, “Nearly 75 percent of major food crops, including fruits, vegetables, and nuts depend on honey bees and other pollinators, which equates to about one in every three bites of food we eat.”

Pollination is vital for maintaining biodiversity. Bees, moths, birds and everything else that spreads pollen from one random plant to another overall strengthens the ecosystem against the shock of disease or other blight.

Building a community of bees

McCue said they have six hives this year at the winery, two of which they started the year with and four more that were recruited from swarms in the wild.

“People either post on Facebook or contact me. One was at Comanche Electric, and (the bees) were all on a fence post,” he said. “I mean, it was just a big old swarm of bees just sitting there.”

It was somewhat challenging to get them into a box. If the swarm is on a branch, you can just shake the whole crew into the vessel.

“But these, I had to pretty much scoop out bit by bit just to get them into the box,” McCue said.

The real question, however, was if the queen was in there. He hadn’t seen her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t around.

Sometimes, the best action to take is no action at all.

“When I closed the box, I sat and waited,” he said. “This was in, I think, July, so it was hot, I was taking a break more than anything, waiting to see what would happen.”

Two, three, then a few more bees started flying up.

“As soon as you see the bees going into the box, you know that you must have the queen at that point. And that's what happened,” he said. “They follow that queen.”

Two feet or two miles

If you’ve got your hive established, with the drones out making their collections and the queen inside making little bees, things can get a little complicated if you decide you want to relocate the box.

“The thing with moving a hive is you either move it two feet or two miles,” McCue said. Bees, you won’t be surprised to learn, don’t appear to be so good in the short-term memory department.

“If you move it five feet away, any bees that are out foraging, they’ll come back to that old spot and they'll just stay there,” McCue said. “They won't look for the new box, they'll just stay at the spot where the old box was.”

That’s kind of sad, when you think about it. The solution, of course, is to incrementally move the box along a few feet each day. If that sounds tedious, it’s probably because it is. Better to get everything right to start with, McCue said, than to hopscotch your hives across the yard for two weeks.

A honey of a view

With only two active hives the majority of the year, there wasn’t much honey to harvest this summer. Priority one is you’ve got to leave enough food for the bees to survive on in the coming winter. That’s not only honey but also bee bread. It’s a mixture of pollen, honey or nectar, and bee saliva, and is the animals’ primary source of protein.

For now, the McCues have installed a small orchard of young plum trees for the bees to dine on in the future and are prepping another nearby area as a future pollinator garden featuring native flowers. McCue claims the backyard behind the winery is already home to some of the best sunsets in the Big Country.

He said the coming garden will only add to the spectacle.

“We should go into next year with a larger number of hives,” he said. “Generally, they say you harvest in Texas about once a year, and that's usually like late July or early August.

“So, I'm looking forward to next year.”