SWEET SUCCESS

BIG LAKE — Sparse trees and charred spruce on the way out to Steve Victors’ bee yard are a reminder of the fire that burned through the area more than 10 years ago.

The Miller’s Reach Fire, the most destructive in the state’s history, oddly enough served as an inspiration to Victors. He started beekeeping the next year.

“We’ve been doing this since right after the ‘96 fire,” Victors said. “We felt that having some pollinators would help the brush come back quicker.”

He started out with two hives. When he tasted their honey, he was hooked.

“We discovered that it was pretty good stuff,” Victors said.

His beekeeping took off from there. Now Victors sells his honey at farmers markets and at All About Herbs in Wasilla and Palmer. He’s also president of the Southcentral Alaska Beekeepers Association. That might not seem like a big deal at first, until Victors tells you the organization has between 150 and 180 members and that its last monthly meeting drew in 90 people.

It seems there’s a lot of enthusiasm for beekeeping in the region. Following Victors around his bee yard tucked a ways down Echo Lake Road, it’s immediately apparent he shares in that enthusiasm.

“You get into bees, boy, it’s just one of the coolest things,” he said.

Victors spent a good half hour Friday afternoon “re-queening” a few of the hives he recently brought up from California. He said he wanted to replace the California queen bees with more hardy Canadian queens. That way the new bees born in the hive would be hardier and more able to handle Alaska weather.

Victors’ enthusiasm for his tiny livestock is contagious. The science of the endeavor is best described as fascinating.

“That’s an Italian queen. They’re a pretty color,” he said after pulling one out of the honeycomb.

Another queen he pulled out, he said, is a Carniolan, native to the mountains around Yugoslavia. On another comb, he pointed to where bees were apparently preparing a spot for a tiny nursery.

“They have that polished up and ready for the queen to come lay some eggs in it,” he said.

Honeybees are relatively gentle creatures. They have to be. Unlike their carnivore cousins the yellow jacket, a honeybee dies after it stings something. Victors said the bees seem to understand that, so they don’t take that action lightly and will give a beekeeper lots of warning.

“When you’re irritating the hive, they’ll actually come up and head-butt you,” Victors said.

When a lot of bees start banging into his face, he knows it’s time to maybe back off. He said he gets stung now and then, but the rumors are true — beekeepers do build up an immunity to stings. He said his body’s reaction to being stung only lasts a few minutes these days.

Each hive starts out the year with about 15,000 bees at the beginning of summer. Victors said that over the next few months that will balloon up to 50,000 to 60,000. Running about 70 to 75 hives, he can produce something on the order of 3,000 pounds of honey. The most he ever produced was 6,000 pounds, but that year he was running 100 hives and it got to be too much.

Victors said one of the benefits of the beekeeping business is that honey doesn’t go bad. That means he can keep some honey on hand in case the bees have an unproductive year or to sell during the winter months.

In addition to selling his honey, Victors acts as something of an importer. He places large bulk orders for packages of bees to then distribute to members of the beekeeping association.

But spending all this time working with bees, does the buzzing ever get to him? Quite the contrary.

“I think that looking in a beehive is such a gentle and peaceful thing to do,” Victors said. And, he joked, if you’re out in your yard wearing a beekeeping suit with a veil over your face, “nobody will disturb you.”

They know there are bees around.

Victors said there are life lessons to be learned out there in the bee yard.

“Bees are such an example of how society ought to work,” he said. The adults gather food for future generations and save for lean times. “They’re willing to defend the hive with their lives. But they’ll only attack if they’re provoked.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.