Making honey in Kansas is tough but rewarding

Making honey means working around bees constantly flitting by your head and landing on your body.

In learning to keep bees, you are taught to resist the impulse to squash or brush them off your arm, said longtime beekeeper Wes Wolken, and instead blow them off.

They generally won’t sting, said Wolken, at least not the gentle, easy-going Carniola honeybees that he stocks in the dozen or so hives in his backyard in south Wichita.

“They don’t want to sting you,” said Wolken, who last year started American Bee Keeping & Removal. “They die if they sting you, so it has to be for a very good reason.”

And he doesn’t want to be that reason. He uses full protective gear when opening the hives to remove honeycombs or separate out new hives.

Successful beekeeping takes time, education and money – and veterans say it has become harder in recent years – but there’s also a lot to love about the business and hobby of bees.

There are roughly 7,000 hives in commercial honey production in Kansas, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and last year they produced 525,000 pounds of honey. That compares with 149 million pounds of honey produced across the country.

This tends not to be the honey you find on the shelves at Dillons or Wal-Mart, which is typically produced at giant commercial farms in California, Florida, Montana and the Dakotas, as well as imported from other countries.

In Kansas, most growers produce honey for friends and family, or for the specialty market for the raw honey. In addition to honey, beekeepers often have related businesses such as raising beehives for sale, providing bees to pollinate certain farm crops, removing bees from houses and businesses, selling bee-raising products and teaching beekeeping classes.

Local producers

Wolken was laid off in 2009 from a long career at Hawker Beechcraft and tried several times to get back into aircraft production. Last year, he decided to turn his longtime hobby into a business selling starter hives and beekeeping equipment.

He said he’ll generate just about 1,000 pounds of honey this year, but it’s more of a byproduct of his beehive production business. He started out with three hives last year, and this year has 42 hives in various locations. He’ll sell a starter box containing five frames of bees for $150. He expects that to grow strongly this year, and hopes to get access to a few acres of vacant land nearby so his bees can spread out.

Bill and Candy Vinduska, of Vinduska Apiaries in the Marion area, have 200 hives. They sell raw honey locally at Bill’s former store, Bullseye Shooting Range, but their biggest outlet is farm store Cox Produce.

Last week at Cox Produce, 6059 S. Seneca, the shelves where the Vinduskas’ honey usually sits were nearly picked clean. The next day a shipment of 100 or so jars and bottles was due, but that day the shelves held just two 2-pound jars and one lonely squeezable plastic bear.

“People who use his honey are very loyal,” said store owner Ron Stein. “They’ll sometimes go to the grocery store and they see it’s just not the same.”

What makes it different is the pollen and enzymes left in the raw honey. Bill Vinduska calls it wildflower honey because his bees feed on the pollen and nectar of the flowers on his land and nearby areas. Grocery store honey is heated and filtered so that it is fully liquid and clear, he said.

“Basically they’re making something akin to corn syrup,” Vinduska said.

Vinduska has raised bees for decades and is known throughout the state for his knowledge. He recently got out of the business of removing bees from homes and businesses. It’s a lot of work and, since he moved out to Marion, a lot of driving.

He said there are a lot of people who want to get into hobby or semi-professional beekeeping. They need to know, he said, that it’s not that easy and it’s not cheap. It can cost $700 to $1,000 for the hive and equipment. Having the bees survive and propagate is important.

“It’s not easy as buying bees and turning on a tap and having honey drip out,” Vinduska said. “They get into beekeeping without understanding how difficult it is to get the right outcome. They want to save the bees and have pollination in their backyard, but they didn’t do enough reading and take enough beekeeping classes.”

Wolken agrees. He teaches 10-week classes on beekeeping at Orchard Park Recreation Center. He teaches three classes simultaneously, he said, with a total of 45 students. They’re always full, he said.

He said people take the classes typically for three reasons: to promote the number of honeybees as an environmental good; to pollinate plants in the area; and to produce their own honey. Education is critical, he said, but so is learning on the job.

“A lot of people will just put the bees in the backyard, and I say ‘good luck.’ Well, I guess that’s how I started.”

Decline in bees, in industry

But raising honeybees has gotten harder in Kansas in the past 10 to 15 years.

The number of hives and honey today is half what it was 10 years ago, when the state had 14,000 honey-producing hives and produced a million pounds of honey, and a fraction of what it was 50 years ago.

Jim Kellie, owner of Kellie Honey Farm, a commercial beekeeper from Larned and past president of the Kansas Honey Producers Association, once was a commercial beekeeper on a national scale, with 13,000 hives. He trucked them around the U.S. to pollinate farmers’ almond and alfalfa crops.

But Kellie is down to 250 to 300 hives. He got rid of most of his hives eight to 10 years ago because the mortality rate of the bees just got too high, he said.

His bees were victims of the scourge that has killed millions of bees in recent years in a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, as well as a series of other infections. There has been considerable study and debate over the causes of colony collapse disorder, but no scientific cause has been identified, according to the USDA.

But Kellie blames much of his own woes on ever-more efficient and technologically sophisticated Kansas crop farming. He said farmers are planting larger and larger fields in single crops that don’t produce pollen, have gotten ever more effective at killing off wildflowers and weeds with herbicides, and use pesticides that kill or, at least make the bees more susceptible to, several kinds of lethal mites.

The whole state and beyond has just grown more difficult for the friendly and helpful honeybee to thrive in.

“There used to be large pastures,” Kellie said. “The bee pasture is slowly disappearing throughout the United States.”

This story was originally published July 8, 2015 at 6:01 PM with the headline "Making honey in Kansas is tough but rewarding."