On a brisk winter day Jim Lyons, aka That Crazy Bee Guy, is going through stacks of square, white, wooden boxes with his assistant at a former industrial site in West Dayton where he keeps some of his bee hives.
He lights a handful of wood shavings on fire and puts it into a metal container with a bellows attached, known as a smoker, to calm the bees as they open the hives.
“Bees don’t like smoke. Smoke means fire. Fire means death,” Lyons said as he uses the smoke on his body to keep the bees away.
Everyday People a series that shines a light on the public service jobs you might not know much about. But the people who do them are often the glue holding our communities together.
Lyons is the county apiary inspector for three counties in the Miami Valley.
Unfortunately almost half of Lyons' hives took a major hit this winter and he isn’t finding many bees still alive.
“Well, most of them are from just dying back, (or) got robbed from other bees, which happens when you don’t have a good fall,” Lyon’s said looking through the empty hives. “You don’t have a good fall crop and they are robbing (honey) from each other.”
And without the honey as a food source over the winter, the bees starve.
Goldenrod, which blooms in the fall, is one of the major food sources for bees going into winter. However, bee keepers across the country have reported that their hives haven't been visiting the fluffy yellow flowers.
“The bees haven’t eaten that for the last three years in a row, and we don’t know why they are not eating it,” Lyons said. “And it’s only a month, month and a half, long that they have a chance to be eating it because of how quick our fall turns into a frost that kills everything, so there is no food for them.”
Lyon has around 250 hives at this location that he is sorting through with his assistant Cliff Morgan to find out which survived.
As they sort through the hives, Morgan uses a metal tool that looks similar to a crowbar on the empty hives to loosen and pull up slender wooden frames filled with honey.
“And most of the frames, if they are like this, I’ll store them,” Morgan said, pulling up a frame filled with the waxy substance.
“Right there on the dolly, there’s probably 300 to 400 pounds of honey, and I’ve got another pallet inside that is probably 600 or 700 pounds worth,” he added, pointing to five white hive boxes stacked on a cart.
The hives that have survived will make the seven hour trip down to a farm in Tennessee that Lyon uses to get an early start on the spring season.
“I move mine out of state over the wintertime, to have them growing up instead of dying out more and getting more dormant,” Lyons said. “Then we will be bringing them back up and filling up these (empty) hives with bees again and get them back out and start the whole thing all over again.”
Bees are considered livestock because they produce a crop — honey. And because they're livestock, many municipalities won’t allow backyard beekeeping.
But for those areas that do, beekeeping has become a growing hobby as more attention is paid to the challenges that bees face and their vital role in food production.
“I got into it as a backyard beekeeper many years ago. They had on the news, I want to say 16-17 years ago, that a third of the bees in the nation died,” Lyons recalled. “So I looked at my wife and said, ‘Honey, I’m going to buy a beehive to help save the planet.'”
After Lyons fills his truck with the hives full of bees that are still alive for the trip down south, we head back to a house in Springfield that he uses to keep his bee paraphernalia.
Boxes of bee supplies and bee-related products that he makes from his honey are stacked everywhere.
On the floor in one area are huge glass jugs filled with an amber liquid that he is turning into mead — an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey mixed with water.
“And now we’re really heavy into bee venom therapy, so now we have bee venom collecting machines to collect the bee venom without causing the bees to die,” he said, holding up a tiny vial of pale yellow powder.
Lyons uses his passion for all things bee related to help other beekeepers in the Miami Valley, where he serves as the county apiary inspector for three counties.
“Inspections are more to try and alert everybody to diseases because of (the) American Foulbrood and European foulbrood (diseases that) years ago killed off most of the population of bees in the United States,” he said, explaining how counties began having apiary inspectors.
“Now we’re still doing that (but) but it’s more for counts — get a total account of what there is out there,” he added.
Ohio requires that all beehives be registered with the state. It’s a $5 fee, which is designed to cut down on illegal bee smuggling.
Yes,bee smuggling.
It’s actually a big problem that's been linked to a worldwide epidemic called deformed wing virus in both honeybee and native bee colonies around the world.
This disease, like the American foulbrood, are just some of many issues facing bees that get lumped into the general term colony collapse disorder — an unexplained phenomenon where bees disappear from the hive.
And while the viruses aren't a threat to humans, the resulting devastation to these small insects is. It’s been estimated that bees are responsible for 75% of our food crops through pollination.
And it’s not just the diseases that pose a threat to the bees.
“There’s not enough food for how many bees we have,” Lyons said.
So you know that old saying about catching more flies with a teaspoon of honey than a gallon of vinegar?
Well it’s not just flies that are attracted to honey.
“You got ants, you got roaches, you got mites, you got moths — you got everything attacking them for all the food they got,” Lyons explained.
“Then add mankind to it,” he said. “What’s mankind doing? They are stealing all the honey.”
So the bees are starving to death.
Lyons said people are trying to do what they can by planting their own fields of pollinators and trees, but it’s still too small.
A problem his assistant Morgan has noticed with beekeeping is people who want to start beekeeping, but aren't sure what they're getting into and then change their mind.
“So we’ll take them out there and set them down, a week and a half later they’re like, ‘Naw, we don’t like the bees. They’re detrimental, they’re annoying, they’re kind of attacking us, so get them out,'” Morgan said.
Lyons said they try to promote beekeeping as a proactive hobby, where you’re in the hives all the time, checking your hives and letting the bees get used to you. This reduces the chances of them becoming aggressive and stinging.
He points out that the worst thing you can do as a beekeeper is buy bees and stick them in your yard and forget about them, thinking that nature will take its course.
“They’re being attacked by all those things I told you earlier as a food source,” Lyons said. “And (you) go out to check on them months later and ants got to them all.”
For those who want to get into backyard beekeeping Lyons has this simple advice: “Pay attention to your bees. Your bees will tell you what they need.”
