How Sweeeet it is

They're there if you look for them -- white- or tan-colored boxes tucked to the side of a suburban driveway next to a pick-up truck or in a backyard near a vegetable garden.

There are honeybee hives all across Winston-Salem, these incognito wooden boxes, as plain as country clapboard churches, humming with the might of thousands.

Think Slow Food and heirloom tomatoes are trendy?

Add backyard beekeeping to that list.

Locally and statewide, more people are catching the apiary buzz, backyard beekeepers fascinated by the social order of honeybees and convinced that the tiny insects are as vital to their gardens as sunshine and rain.

In Forsyth County, 86 people signed up for Bee School, a four-week introduction to beekeeping through the county's beekeeping association. That's up from 27 four years ago.

Keith Arnott was one of them. He started keeping bees last year. He's up to seven hives -- four in simple tan boxes on wooden stands edging his Sherwood Forest backyard, and another three on a friend's property near the Virginia border.

A former software developer, Arnott runs his own home-management business. He does handyman and home maintenance work for his clients or he finds someone else to do the jobs. He planned on giving his honey to clients, but now that's he harvested his first batch he's going to sell some bottles and stick the money in his kids' college fund.

He's been interested in keeping bees for years. His wife's uncle in Colorado has beehives, and Arnott has helped him extract honey.

"It was just intriguing to see how nature really works," he said. "Since starting beekeeping, I notice things that I never noticed before. It's opened my eyes to what a very small creature does in the world.

"They get their nectar off holly bushes, herbs, mint, cotton -- there are things you wouldn't think they've been on. They actually get some of their pollen from poison ivy in the spring. I never knew."

It's happening statewide, too. The N.C. State Beekeeping Association's membership has more than doubled to about 2,400 in the last decade, according to Greg Clements, the group's president.

David Tarpy, an entomologist who studies bees at N.C. State University, said: "I think there is an overall trend toward people getting back to nature, toward them becoming more intimately knowable and interactive with their food supply -- and honey bees feed into that."

Many new beekeepers are born through the state's network of local clubs and their beekeeping classes, which range from one-day workshops to two-month courses. Go to www.ncbeekeepers


.org/courses for a list of courses by county. Forsyth County's bee school is usually held in the late winter and early spring.

"Five years ago we were averaging about 100 new certified beekeepers," Tarpy said. "Now we're over 500 per year."

Arnott lives on a corner lot. While his hives are within easy sight of the street, he hasn't had much trouble with them bothering neighbors. He checks his hives once a week. The bees are so gentle he doesn't need to use a smoker to calm them.

Keeping bees in suburbia isn't hard as long as you follow a few rules.

At the top of list? Talk to your neighbors. "In bee school, we teach people to be good neighbors," said Buddy Marterre, the former president of the Forsyth County Beekeepers' Association, who also keeps bees in his yard. Outside his house, you can hear traffic on Silas Creek Parkway rushing and kids playing outside nearby Sherwood Forest Elementary School.

Bees also need water. Arnott has two clay saucers filled with water in his backyard, but if a beekeeper isn't supplying them, there's a chance the bees will look for it elsewhere -- like a neighbor's swimming pool, fish pond or outdoor dog bowl.

Arnott once got a call from a concerned neighbor. Turns out, when you become a beekeeper who is managing a hive with thousands of buzzing insects, your sense of scale changes. "One neighbor called about a ‘swarm,'" he said. "It was maybe eight bees on a hot tub."

Honeybees are big business agriculturally. They not only make honey, but they pollinate, spreading it from flower to flower as they collect nectar.

Honeybees are generalists -- they're not picky about what crops they pollinate. And they're semi-domesticated, so they can be managed and moved around. That adds up to about $186 million a year in added economic activity in North Carolina, Tarpy said. "Nationwide, it's something like $20 billion. They're involved in about a third of what we eat."

"It's not just about honey," Marterre said. "It's about blueberries, cucumbers and melons. It's about the grains that we feed to livestock, so it affects our meat supply."

Those crops are more reliant on beekeepers than before, too. Varroa mites killed most wild honeybee colonies in the 1970s and 1980s, and honeybee populations have been on the decline. Beekeepers today have to worry about a whole slew of threats, from pesticides to pathogens, to the mysterious "colony-collapse disorder," an affliction where most of a hive disappears, leaving the queen behind.

Honeybee hand-wringing has been on NPR and in the Wall Street Journal. Haagen-Dazs built a marketing campaign around the honeybee's plight, encouraging ice-cream lovers to "buy a carton, save a bee."

Beekeepers in New York successfully convinced city government this year to change local code that lumped bees with other prohibited wild animals, opening the door to legal beekeeping in some of the most urban environment in the country. (There are no regulations governing hobbyist beekeepers in Winston-Salem). There's a hive on the South Lawn of the White House, and another on top of the Ritz-Carlton in uptown Charlotte.

And all those new beekeepers? Well, that might be a silver lining from all the honeybee headlines, Tarpy said.

lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com


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