Sticking to it: Five questions with beekeeper Tim Arheit

Sticking to it: Five questions with beekeeper Tim Arheit



Beekeeping is an occupation that goes back thousands of years as people discovered the sweet benefits of honey and beeswax, and with bees being effective natural pollinators, they not only provide honey but are critical to plant health, including plants we rely on for food. With honeybee populations shrinking due to issues with mites, beekeepers have to be particularly vigilant in providing their bee colonies with the best opportunity to survive and thrive.

Tim Arheit has worked with bees for more than 20 years. When he is not working as a software engineer, he runs Honey Run Apiaries southeast of Delphos, selling honey and beekeeping supplies. For Arheit, beekeeping has become his “hobby run amok,” the definition of a passion project.



What made you so interested in beekeeping and how did you get started?

I always liked the outdoors and nature and garden stuff when I was a kid, and there was a gentleman whose lawn I mowed. He had some bees, and he offered me some. He was elderly and was getting out of it. I said yes, but of course, I had to check with my parents, and, well, the offer kind of disappeared after that. They said no.

So when I got married and moved out into the country, and I saw an auction in The Lima News, and I went to an auction and I bought bees. I think it was 1999 or 2000.

I had enough to research, enough research that I knew to move them at dark and how to move them. But I knew nothing else. I had no equipment. I knew nothing. And then two weeks later, there was another auction, and I bought a few more. So I ultimately started with seven [hives], and then for the first several years, they just about doubled every year.

From that start, I did join one of the local beekeeping associations, the Northwest Ohio Beekeepers Association, meets up in Ottawa the fourth Tuesday of the month that was a great resource for knowledge. Because the biggest problem jumping into it, especially how I did, is this was pre-YouTube, and you can read all you want in books, but you’re still going to have questions. So any advice I’d have for a new beekeeper join a club? YouTube is at least a decent resource, but all beekeeping is local. You know what works here at the time of the year won’t work for someone else. I mean the difference even between here and Columbus, which isn’t that far away, or here and Dayton, can be rather dramatic.

But basically from that, I learned how to keep them alive, and when they did well, they did very well.

What kind of products do you see through Honey Run Apiaries?

We mostly just do the honey now, just because of time. A lot of people ask about wax. Yes, we’ll typically have some beeswax, but beeswax is more of a byproduct. I typically find for every 100 pounds of honey we were to harvest, you might get three pounds of wax. So it’s not a significant product, and some of it we actually use, you know, in our beekeeping process.

Sometimes we do chunk honey. We don’t have any this year because we didn’t get out in the right timing. That’s basically where you cut out a piece of a comb. But we primarily use plastic, plastic frames or plastic foundation like this that the bees build on. And you can’t, obviously you can’t cut that out.

We’ll do something called creamed honey. Essentially, that is actually just crystallized honey. At the end of the day, it’s just crystallized at the right temperatures with some mixing, so that instead of getting coarse crystals, you get very small crystals, so it has a creamy texture. There’s nothing added to it. There’s actually no cream. It’s just finely crystallized honey. Some people will call it whipped honey. It’s shelf stable. You don’t need to heat it. You don’t need to cool it. Room temperature’s actually best. If you heat it, it’ll turn back into liquid honey.

Most of what we sell honestly is, you know, online and shipped at this point. You know, there’s only so many beekeepers locally. At least in Allen County, there’s really no commercial activity, and by commercial, you’re talking about beekeepers that have 1,000-plus hives. I have about 140.

What is the process in collecting honey?

So we put a frame into the hive and when the bees are collecting surplus nectar, more nectar than what they need to feed their young, they’ll build out all of this, you know, build out in the little cells and wax, fill up with honey, and put caps on it.

The simplest form [of collection is] we end up cutting off the tops and the caps. Put it in a bucket. There’s obviously some honey goes with it. And then we use a device called an extractor, and the extractor, and basically it spins around. It’s basically a centrifuge at the end of the day, and the honey spins out, runs to the bottom. Now there will be a lot of debris in it, bits of wax, maybe the odd leg, like here or there in it, and so we typically will run it through a double strainer. This will sit on top of a five-gallon bucket, and it runs from this into the five-gallon bucket, and then you have honey you can bottle. It’s actually, on the surface, pretty straightforward and simple.

Now when you get the big operations and there’s more steps, they run it through clarifiers, pumps, but at small scale. I mean, what we use is just a bigger version of this. Now, if you get into the really big [operations] they will have steps where they actually heat it. That’s where you get into the pasteurized honey. They do this for two, maybe three reasons. One, hot honey goes to the filter a lot faster, so they can process it faster. Heating it dissolves all the crystals that are in the honey, so you get a clear product. Two, it does kill the yeast that naturally occurs in honey. So if you get an old jar, but you get a jar that starts crystallizing just in the bottom, and if all those solids start getting pulled out the top, its moisture content can actually increase. And once the moisture content gets too high, the yeast can start growing. So the jar on the shelf could start fermenting under under the right circumstances. It does not kill the botulism that could occur just like in any raw fruits and vegetables. Honey is no different. Botulism occurs normally, and that’s actually why they recommend not giving it to infants, you know, under one year of age.

What are the pitfalls you can encounter when it comes to beekeeping?

There are really only two types of hives: hives that have Varroa [mites] and hives you haven’t looked hard enough to find them. It only takes one mite among all of the bees to start an infestation of the hive, because they, the adult mites that you see on the bees are female, and they’re already pregnant, and their life cycle is they spend about seven days on the adult bee and then they go inside the cell, right before it’s tapped, and feed on the pupa. As they’re feeding on the pupa, they lay eggs inside the cell, and the first one, first egg, is a male. Ones after that are female and male and yes, I know it’s kind of incestuous, but the male mates with the other females. As they feed, they’re feeding on the pupa, and they’re feeding on what’s called the fat body of the pupa. It weakens the bee [in areas like] thermal regulation, which is kind of important in winter, and processing and producing proteins.

And if that weren’t bad enough, it’s like a rat. It spreads viruses, bacteria and fungus between bees. So that’s oftentimes some of the first signs we see is damage to the bees, like deformed wings or pupa that just don’t have the strength to get out of the cell, not so much from the Varroa, but from the viruses that the Varroa carried. We already see that first the big things the Varroa directly do is weaken the bee, shortening its lifespan and making it less effective at various tasks. And that really, really comes to a head in the winter, and that’s why we’re seeing losses like we are. I mean, I think this year was particularly bad. I think the published numbers were something like, you know, most states were seeing like 60% loss. It has been 40%, which is still remarkably high.

There are a number of pesticides, both synthetic and natural chemicals, on the market, and one of the notable ones, they’re finding a lot of resistance to, because if not outright killed by it, they might develop some resistance or tolerance. So the best recommendation is to, one, not assume your treatment worked. Always follow up and test. And two, rotate your treatments. There are the completely synthetic chemicals. There are a few organic acids, like formic acid and oxalic acid.

Inspect and treat for mites and then hopefully they put on enough honey so they can survive the winter. They need somewhere around 60 to 90 pounds of honey to survive a winter or you have to feed them sugar syrup, which is increasingly getting more expensive.

What is it about bees that keeps you coming back year after year?

The simple point is, they’re interesting. I don’t think we know even a fraction of everything. I mean, there are books but they barely cover a fraction of the stuff out there.

It gets me away from the computer, away from people. Like everything else, there are times when it’s work, but it is a nice break. And it is a challenge, and you’re always learning something new. It’s just, it’s neverending.

It helps that I really don’t watch sports. I don’t golf. I don’t have those hobbies. I’d rather take a walk in the woods than the walk on the golf course.