Vol. 38, No. 18

2-15-2006
By: Julia Harris

Ohio State's beekeepers are creating a buzz

Let's face it. To most people, bees just aren't cute. They're hairy; they've got enormous alien eyes and - oh yeah - there's that whole stinger thing.

To a certain intrepid group of folks, however, bees are almost like pets. And to an even more select circle, honey bees are their life's work - people like Susan Cobey, apiarist at Ohio State's Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Lab in Columbus, and James Tew, Extension specialist and supervisor of the Extension Honey Bee Lab at OARDC in Wooster.

Cobey speaks of her bees with a possessive familiarity, waxing affectionately of their personalities, elegance and gentleness. "My bees are selected for temperament and quality," said Cobey. When asked how often she gets stung, she does own up to a few stinging incidents, but is quick to add, "For the most part you could go out there in your bathing suit and be just fine."

At Rothenbuhler since 1990, Cobey is one of the foremost experts on bee insemination and propagation, teaching classes to beekeepers in places as far away as Denmark and Argentina. Each year she also teaches several short courses to Ohio State and international students on queen breeding and advanced insemination techniques. She's the first to admit that her specialty is unusual, but sees her mission as vital to the sustainability of the beekeeping industry.

"The industry has been decimated by Varroa mites," Cobey said. "The mites have become resistant to the chemicals used to treat them. Our goal is to select bees that are more tolerant and move away from dependence on chemical controls. Our breeding program also acts as a teaching model for students."

Heady genetic research is all well and good for the Columbus lab, but for the crew at the Extension Honey Bee Lab, the emphasis is more on practical application. For the past 28 years, the lab has hosted a beekeeping workshop that has become the largest of its kind in the nation, last year drawing 650 people from Ohio and surrounding states. This year's workshop is March 4 at the Fisher Auditorium and Shisler Conference Center in Wooster, and will include sessions as diverse as "Cooking with Honey," "Producing Colonies from Survivor Stocks" and "So You Want to Be a Beekeeper."

"We've evolved toward trying to be all things to all beekeepers," said Tew, who has been at the lab since it was built in 1985. "Beekeeping itself is very eclectic: you can be a pollinator, a honey producer, a classroom teacher, an environmentalist, a farmer or a biologist."

To meet the diverse needs of its constituents, the lab offers a range of services, from international bee culture training to educating the public about stinging insects to performing pollination studies and offering hands-on experience at its honey processing facility. In full swing, the lab can support as many as 200 hives with 70,000 bees per hive. In a good year, bees can produce 85-150 pounds of honey per colony, and since they only need about 75 pounds of it themselves, that leaves a lot of honey for the rest of us to, as Tew said, "drizzle on our pancakes in the morning."

Each year, the lab sells some of its surplus honey and other products - including 10 varieties of hand-packed lip balm and waxy Christmas ornaments - at the Hidden Benefits Fair on the Columbus campus, as well as at events in Wooster. "We like to show people that you can buy different kinds of honey, from clover to buckwheat," said Sherry Ferrell, office associate and self-styled "lab organizer." "And sometimes we do a display of things you'd find in the grocery store that use beeswax, like mascara, lipstick and even candy."

Ferrell also is in charge of a genuine novelty: the Honey Bee Museum, which celebrates the history of beekeeping with three rooms full of things like old hives, honey storage containers and, as Tew put it, "Just a lot of bee junk."

Bee junk or not, the museum is not open much during the year because of the lab's small staff, so it's not as popular with visitors as the other bee-themed landmark, the Bee Garden. Planted on one-third of an acre in 1995, the garden's primary function is to showcase 48 varieties of plants, such as crocus, swamp milkweed and Brazilian vervain, that attract honey bees and other pollinating insects, because "Gardeners like honey bees," Ferrell said.

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