Beekeeper enjoys hovering around hives, even when stung
A sweet living
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| Rick Graefe photo/ These bees are some of the hundreds of thousands kept by Ballwin beekeeper Sharon Gibbons in five hives in the back of Dr. Duane Marquart's Primary Care Chiropractic property in Manchester. |
 
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To see video of bees in action click here.
For Sharon Gibbons of Ballwin, small nooks like that throughout St. Louis County are her bread and butter.Uh, make that “honey butter.”
Gibbons is owner of Gibbons Bee Farm LLC, based in Ballwin. She’s a longtime friend and customer of chiropractor Dr. Duane Marquart, 53, of Ballwin, who operates Primary Care.
Gibbons, 67, has been an established beekeeper since 1979 and has packaged the product for sale since about 1984.
“I began doing it after I moved here from Minnesota in 1976 because I had a lot of allergies and had started buying local honey at a beekeeper’s place,” she explained. “But it was my husband, John, who bought a couple hives from a man who worked at Monsanto and gave them to me as a birthday present in 1979. I then took a class at UMSL on beekeeping and joined the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association, where I learned a lot as a ‘new-bee.’”
The number of her hives grew from two to four to 15 — and today, close to 1,000, including 12 locations in the St. Louis County area. About 80,000 pounds of honey are produced each year by her firm.
“John now takes care of honey deliveries,” she said.
Their son Christopher, 42, of the Columbia, Mo., area, also is a beekeeper and now takes care of the honey-extracting operation wing of the business, based in Rocheport, Mo., near Boonville. His wife, Ceanne, does all the honey bottling there.
And even grandson Matthew, 8, “has a bee suit and tools,” Gibbons said.
“I started out just in Ballwin, though shortly after, I had some hives on the property of Lydia Hill in Chesterfield, where City Hall is now located,” Gibbons explained. “I have unique relationships with those who own the land where I keep the bees. Some are retired beekeepers, like one fellow near Creve Coeur Lake in Maryland Heights and another whose home is off Mosley Road in the Creve Coeur area. Another guy is a farmer off River Valley Drive in Chesterfield. I have some hives at private homes on Litzsinger Road in the Ladue area.”
At Primary Care, Gibbons has five hives with about 60,000 bees in each, she said.
Watching bees come and go from the hive, with bright yellow pollen on the legs of those returning, Gibbons decks herself out to work with the bees at Primary Care in a full bee suit with head covering.
“Bees can see black well, which is why keepers wear white,” she explained.
But she admits she gets stung “almost each time I go out.”
“We’re invading their home when we open the hives,” Gibbons pointed out. “But for the average person, they don’t need to worry if they get near a bee on a flower.”
Marquart also did some beekeeping when he was a student at Logan College of Chiropractic in Chesterfield, from where he graduated in 1983.
“While at Logan, I lived in a trailer park and kept bees next to the trailer,” Marquart recalled.
He first learned the art while he was attending Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., for his undergraduate degree, and a roommate’s grandfather taught him the fundamentals.
“Sharon, when she became a patient at least 10 years ago, wrote down that she was a beekeeper, and I told her I knew she had to be looking for places to put hives and asked if she wanted to put some here,” Marquart mentioned.
He said the vast majority of patients aren’t even aware there are bees on the property, and no one has been stung.
“Honey is such a healthy, natural food,” Gibbons said. “And each year, Sharon gives me a case of honey, which I give to my patients as gifts. Over the years, I’ve given out hundreds of jars.”
Marquart said that when he was doing a lot of beekeeping, “the bees were more calm.”
Gibbons agreed, while she was using a smoker to calm the bees down, allowing her to work with them.
She explained bees weren’t native to the United States. They arrived with the Pilgrims, appropriately enough, on the Mayflower. As settlers moved west, so did the bees.
“Wild bees in this country have taken a health hit since the 1980s, suffering from an Asian blood-sucking mite parasite (as well as pesticides) that have decimated their numbers, which is why in the United States, we’re using a darker-colored, more aggressive European bee,” Gibbons said.
“They’re genetically better at fighting disease but not temperamentally better,”
she said while she was injecting smoke into the hive.
“The bees see the smoke and think there is a fire in the woods, so they need to vacate the hive,” she said. “They suck up as much stored nectar as they can, to be able to restart a new colony, so they can’t sting well.”
Marquart said beekeepers can range from hobbyists to large corporations and “bees are sent by tractor trailer in large boxes to orchards all the time, to pollinate crops.”
“Actually, urban bees, like the ones here, are healthier than rural bees these days because they’re not exposed to as much agricultural pesticide,” Gibbons said.
There are distinct parts to each hive.
The bottom two sections are the actual hive where the colony lives and has its brood chambers, Marquart said.
Nectar and the honey produced are stored by the bees in honeycombs in one to five “supers” stacked on top of the hive. Bees use some of that for their own food to help them survive the winter.
“The more active the colony, the taller the total hive,” Marquart said.
He said bees will fly up to a mile away to collect from any blooming flower, attracted by their color, scent and infrared signals.
More “supers” are added by beekeepers to the top of good-producing hives to give bees more room for production and storage.
“Sharon tricks the bees into making more honey than they need, so she can collect it,” Marquart explained.
Gibbons said the skyscraper-like supers “prevent the bees from swarming, which they do to form new hives when the old one gets too crowded.”
“As long as there is nectar out there, bees will collect it and make more honey, which is why they say “busy as a bee,” Gibbons said.
But big hives can weigh a lot, “which is why I continue to see Dr. Marquart,” Gibbons quipped.
Marquart calls Gibbons, in turn, “someone with top-drawer credentials in the beekeeping industry.” She has been president of the Missouri State Beekeepers Association and the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association. She was selected by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to serve on the National Honey Board.
“It’s fascinating for me to come out here and watch the bees come and go over the back fence, collecting,” he said. “A hive is like a big city, with a community that has to feed itself.”
Gibbons, in addition to selling honey wholesale and to individual customers, also has developed a variety of honey-based products, such as a spreadable creme in fruit flavors, honey mustard, honey poppyseed dijon salad dressing and even honeycomb beeswax, molded beeswax candles and soap.
Her honey has garnered many state and national awards.
“Beekeeping is hard work, harder than I thought it would be,” she said.
Gibbons pointed out that honey lasts forever as long as it stays dry, and has been found in Egyptian pharaohs’ tombs.
“But there is such a magic element with bees,” she said. “You open a hive and see all the bees taking care of each other.”
You can contact Mary Shapiro at mshapiro@yourjournal.com.
Honey Bee facts
-- Honey bees, which are social insects, live in colonies, with a division of labor between the various types of bees.
-- The queen is the only sexually developed female and is the largest bee in the colony. A two-day-old larva is selected by the workers to be reared as the queen. She will mate in flight with about 18 drone (male) bees, during which time she receives several million sperm cells that last her entire life span of nearly two years. A productive queen can lay 3,000 eggs per day.
-- Drones are stout male bees which have no stingers. Their sole purpose is to mate with the queen — after which they die.
-- Workers, the smallest bees in the colony, are sexually undeveloped females. A colony can have 50,000 to 60,000. Her life expectancy normally is about 28 to 35 days. But workers reared in September and October can live through the winter. Workers feed the queen and larvae, collect nectar, produce honey, guard the hive entrance and even help keep the hive cool by fanning their wings.
-- Honey bees’ wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.
Information courtesy the National Honey Board (Web site www.honey.com).
You also can see Gibbons — and some of the honey and honey-related products she sells — at the Best of Missouri Market, set for 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 4 and 5, at the Missouri Botanical Garden, 4344 Shaw Blvd. in St. Louis. For information on Gibbons’ business, visit her Web site at http://www.gibbonsbeefarm.com/, call her at (314) 394-5395 or e-mail her at SGIBBs314@aol.com.
