While bees are vital to the ecosystem, many people don’t want to be around them for fear of being stung.
That’s not the case for Batavia area resident Robert White, 86, who has been hanging out with honey bees “for the past 70 years” and watched his father and grandfather before him do the same.
A lifelong resident of the area, White is a beekeeper whose flying minions crank out honey each year that is now being marketed by his son, who will likely become the fourth generation keeper of the hives himself.
“I was born on the farm where I am now here in rural Batavia. When me and my wife Ella first got married, we lived at my grandpa’s farm for eight years and then I moved back here,” White said from his home on White Oak Lane in an unincorporated area near Batavia.
“As far as the bees go, my grandpa had bees, my dad had bees, and I’ve had bees all my life,” he said.
White said he knows “that most people don’t want to be within 10 feet” of a bee hive.
“They don’t hurt you and we wear bee suits most of the time for protection,” he said. “If you don’t rile them and treat them gently they don’t get too ornery.”
Familiarity with humans seems to work most often with animals, but White said the same doesn’t apply to bees.
“I don’t think they get used to a person but do get used to the way they are handled,” he said. “We use a smoker and give them a little puff, and it alarms them and they run in and tell everybody that something is going on. Bees get excited and when they do they fill up with honey and start sucking their bellies full of it in case they have to escape or something like that.”
While White’s son has basically taken over the marketing and selling of honey, the veteran beekeeper himself “sells it at coffee shops and mutual friends and anybody who wants any.”
“We sell anything from a half-pound container to a half-gallon pail,” he said. “I have a group of friends that I have coffee with at the McDonald’s in Batavia and they buy it and I have a neighbor who works at the summer market and let him handle the sales in the summer. A guy named Bob Burgin now sells it at the winter market in Batavia.”
Burgin, 60, of Maple Park, runs a farm himself and met White a few years back thanks to a farmer-to-farmer connection.
“We’re both farmers and you get to know people in the area that do what you do,” Burgin explained. “This is the first season I’ve been carrying his honey and people want it. It’s been accepted very well. It’s very local and comes about five miles from the market here and people are looking for real local honey.”
Burgin said he has had a lot of repeat customers for the honey at the indoor winter market in Batavia, which runs from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturdays through May 11 at Grainology Brewstillery at 131 Flinn St., Suite C, in Batavia.
“People are wanting his honey all the time and I’ve had a lot of repeat customers,” he said. “People go through it quite a bit. Mr. White comes over every week and brings me his honey every Friday and we talk.”
White said his bees make approximately 100 pounds of honey per colony each year and that he currently is collecting from a dozen colonies, which potentially means an annual haul of about 1,200 pounds of liquid gold.
“Bees on a super year will make 150 pounds of honey but, on average, you’re doing good if you get about 100,” he said of each colony. “Most hives have about 50,000 bees so with 12 hives we’ve got a lot of bees. You might think we’ve taken all the bees but if we weren’t raising them you might not have any pollinators. We are helping the region. The bees will roam as far as three miles from their base.”
White notes that years ago, farmers raised bees to get the honey to use as a sweetener.
“Back years ago everyone had bees so they wouldn’t have to buy sugar,” he said, “but it was easier then to raise them. They didn’t have the diseases and the mites we have now that we’re always fighting.”
He said he still enjoys using the honey his bees produce.
“I put honey on my bowl of Cheerios every morning,” he said. “I believe in the health benefits.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
