Beginners, experts share beekeeping knowledge at Amboy Grange

Kellogg — The only thing missing from the “Introduction to Beekeeping” at Amboy Grange in Kellogg last Wednesday was live bees.

A crowd with a wide range of beekeeping experience gathered for the event hosted by Paul Anderson of Amboy Grange and Scott Sievers of Outyard Apiaries. The duo helped novices understand the basics of beekeeping and answered questions from beekeepers with 80-plus hives.

Anderson is relatively new to the world of beekeeping. He took up the hobby two years ago when he heard about the alarming losses of the bee population. Worldwide, 40-50 percent of bees have died over the last couple years, Anderson said.

“Bees are a real critical part of our world and our ecosystem,” Anderson said. “I thought it was important to help out if I can. I have a farm, so to me it made sense to get a few hives and see if I could help them keep going.”

A typical way to start in beekeeping is to buy a package of bees. A three-pound package contains about 30,000 bees, which come with a queen. Most packages in the United States are sent from California with a can of sugar syrup to keep them alive during transit. Anderson bought four hives his first year.

“I was advised that it’s not always best to start with just one hive because if you run into trouble with just one hive — if your queen dies or they swarm and take off on you — you really don’t have much to work with,” Anderson said. “Whereas, if you at least have two, you can kind of rob parts from one and keep it going.”

Sievers, who is an Iowa native and currently lives in Richland, has been a professional beekeeper for more than 15 years. His experience with bees, however, dates back to his childhood. When he was 13 years old, Sievers’ grandfather secured him a job helping a man with bees.

“First day, he asked me to pull a board off the side of his barn because he thought there might be bees behind it,” Sievers said. “There were. A 13-year-old boy can run really fast down a gravel road with a whole bunch of bees after him.”

Later, Sievers got married and moved to Maine, where he stayed for 17 years. Eventually he found his way back to Iowa and reconnected with the old man, Lloyd, who he worked for as a child. He started helping Lloyd on the weekends, and when the old man passed away, Sievers received his leftover supplies and officially became a beekeeper.

Searching for more knowledge, Sievers spent endless hours on the internet. He studied himself into confusion, he said. That’s when he decided to start his own website, outyard.net.

“That was the purpose of my website when I started it — to show people that it’s not difficult to keep bees,” he said. “You can keep bees very simply if you want to. You don’t have to make it difficult.”

In addition to his own website, Sievers recommends beginner beekeepers and people interested in taking up the hobby check out worldwidebeekeeping.com, which is an online forum with a wealth of knowledge. He said it’s the one forum he sticks with, and it feels like home to him.

“The people there won’t harass you. They won’t laugh at you. They won’t criticize you,” Sievers said. “If you have questions, they will answer your questions honestly and truthfully and try to give you the best advice they can.”

Beekeepers, however, should realize not all the advice given on the forum will be necessarily helpful, Sievers said. Different areas of the country and world demand different care for bees. Climate, humidity, types of bees and other factors are important to consider.

“Somebody in Texas with 3,000 hives isn’t going to give you as good advice about your four hives that you have in Iowa as somebody in Illinois with 10 hives is going to give you,” he said. “That’s something that you need to pay attention to when you’re asking questions.”

Anderson provided the Amboy Grange crowd with some interesting bee facts for novices. A queen bee, he said, can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day, which is the equivalent to her own body weight.

“The worker bees make all of the decisions,” Anderson said. “The queen is basically just an egg-laying machine.”

In addition, all the worker bees are female. The male bees, or drones, don’t have any stingers. Their only purpose is to mate the new queens, Anderson said.

When in doubt, Sievers said, beekeepers should leave their bees alone. The professional keeper said he has killed more bees fussing with them than he ever would have if he had just left them alone.

“More bees are killed by over-care than by under-care,” Sievers said. “If you’re doing what you should be doing with your bees, and you make a mistake, usually your bees will fix that mistake.”

Contact Justin Jagler at
641-792-3121 ext 6532 or
jjagler@newtondailynews.com