UW News

December 1, 2005

What’s the buzz? UW carpenter has a honey of a hobby

Van Sherod’s work life plays out against the buzz of power tools, but when he goes home, he’s greeted by a more natural kind of buzz. Sherod, a UW carpenter, is a beekeeper in his spare time — such a good beekeeper, in fact, that he was recently named Washington State Beekeeper of the Year.

“It’s relaxing,” Sherod says of his hobby, which he’s pursued for the last 20 years. “Most people don’t think bees do much of anything, but there’s a lot of activity in the hive. And I love to watch them fly off in different directions.”

Self-employed before he came to the University 15 years ago, Sherod was doing a job for someone who kept bees on his property. The job was in Kingston, so Sherod stayed there for a few days, and by the time he got back home to Queen Anne, he was hooked. He’s had colonies of bees in his back yard ever since.

Fledgling beekeepers get started by mail ordering something called a package, Sherod explains. A 3-pound package consists of about 9,000 bees and a queen. All you need then is a hive, a box about the size of a cooler made up of a bottom board, a hive body, a queen excluder, a super, an inner cover and a heavy wooden lid.

The hive body — which is on the bottom — is where the bees live and raise their young, while the super is where nectar is stored and becomes honey. The queen excluder is a metal plate or grill in between the two with spaces large enough to let a worker bee pass through but not large enough for the queen. This prevents the queen from laying eggs where the workers are depositing nectar. When the honey is ready, the beekeeper extracts the frames from the super and collects it.

“When you get a package, you just dump it into the hive and leave it alone,” Sherod says. “You have to feed the bees sugar water at first, but pretty soon they’re gathering nectar and are on their own.”

The frames in both the hive body and super are designed so that the bees can easily build a comb on them. In the hive body, the combs are filled with eggs and then young bees, while in the super, they’re filled with nectar.

“Once you have the bees in the hive, you have to keep an eye on them,” Sherod says. “You want to make sure you have a viable queen and that she’s laying.”

And how do you know that? By the pattern you see when you look at the hive, Sherod says. A number of empty cells on a comb, or most cells protruding, indicating that they’re filled with the larger sized drones rather than workers, is the tipoff. If the queen has died or isn’t laying, then the beekeeper has to order a new queen to replace her.

Another thing the beekeeper has to watch out for is crowding, because crowding leads to swarming. “You try to prevent or stop swarming, because if bees swarm, then half of them will leave the hive, and you need a large population of bees to get honey,” Sherod says.

The beekeeper relieves crowding by adding supers to the hive. He or she can also use a smoker to calm the bees down. A smoker is a metal cylinder the size of a coffee pot. It has a spout at the tip and a bellows fastened to the side. The cylinder is stuffed with slow-burning burlap, lighted and kept burning by air from the bellows. The smoker, Sherod explains, is placed at the entrance to the hive and smoke is puffed in.

“Bees don’t like smoke, so they’ll move away from it. It keeps them docile.”

Has he ever been stung? Well, yes, Sherod admits, but he insists that bees in general are not aggressive. “They only sting when you get in their way.”

Sherod has been very successful with his bees’ honey, which he has won prizes for at the Puyallup Fair. To get different flavors, he sometimes takes his bees to the mountains, where they harvest a different kind of nectar than they can get at home. He also makes prize-winning beeswax candles.

But Sherod’s beekeeping activities aren’t all for his own benefit. He teaches beginning beekeeping classes for the Puget Sound Beekeeper’s Association and extracts honey from the club’s apiary to be sold at the Arboretum gift shop. His service to the club drew numerous letters of support for the state award.

“Besides being the most important contributor to our group and every individual’s success in beekeeping, Van is above all the most modest and giving person I’ve ever met,” wrote the organization’s past president, Tim Celeski.

And its vice president, Nancy Beckett, wrote, “Van Sherod is a gem and the Puget Sound Beekeepers are very privileged to have him as a member. He has shared beekeeping with hundreds in our corner of the world by using his humor and expertise.”

Sherod accepted the award — a copper smoker — at the recent three-state conference of beekeepers. Usually, he says, the nominating letters are read when the award is presented, but it didn’t happen this time — there were too many. “The guy making the presentation said he’d never gotten so many letters.”

If you’re curious about beekeeping, try attending a meeting of the Puget Sound Beekeeper’s Association, which is held the fourth Tuesday of the month at the Arboretum Visitor’s Center. There is no meeting in December because, the club’s Web site explains, “Reindeer and honeybees don’t play well together.” See www.psbees.org.