Decatur County bee business is a buzzing success

Jul. 26—GREENSBURG — A Greensburg couple is using their combined talents to carve a special niche in the county while helping local farmers see greater yields to their crops.

Dea and Christian Rust officially went into business as "Tree City Bees" in early 2020 and are seeing promising success providing honey bees and honey to an increasingly large part of the Midwest. Christian does most of the field work while his wife Dea manages the business end of the venture: marketing, packaging, web design and maintenance. Christian is also the Washington Township Trustee in Decatur County while Dea is an interior designer and new mom.

"We got our LLC designation in March of 2020,a terrible time to start a business, I know," said Rust. "If we'd started in January before the pandemic started, the process would have been so much easier."

Rust's customers "swarm in" from locales as far as Chicago, Louisville and Dayton to purchase Tree City Bees' "Indiana Queens," which are becoming known for their ability to better tolerate Midwest winters.

Many varieties of bees starve to death before spring, but TCB's "Indiana Queens" are genetically engineered to create tight clusters in the hives during the winter months, eliminating unnecessary mouths (or proboscises, as experts know them) to feed.

Growing at a steady pace up until this year, the Rusts have taken the jump to selling almost 300 "nukes" or nucleus colonies: a hardy Indiana queen and the drones who tend her.

Beekeeping might seem to some to be an inconsequential use of time and resources, but Rust has turned his effort into a sustainable product with a positive impact for Indiana farmers.

In 2022, Tree City Bees will introduce "varroa specific hygiene" into their bee population, strengthening their strain substantially.

The "Varroa destructor" is an external parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on honey bees.

The Varroa mite attaches to the body of the bee and weakens the bee by sucking fat from their bodies. The species is a vector for at least five debilitating bee viruses, including RNA viruses such as the deformed wing virus.

A significant mite infestation leads to the death of a honey bee colony, usually in the late autumn through early spring. The Varroa mite is the parasite with possibly the most pronounced economic impact on the beekeeping industry.

Varroa is a significant stress factor contributing to the higher levels of bee losses around the world.

"The varroa mite is the pandemic of bees, and has been for about 15 years now," Rust said.

Tree City Bees consists of 15 bee yards, hosting more than 300 individual hives, with the ultimate goal being 1,000 hives. Rust explained that each bee yard covers roughly 8,000 acres of surrounding countryside — land the bees work gathering pollen to make honey which they then use to feed their nests.

"What we do also helps farmers a lot," Rust said.

In the summer months, Tree City Bees will move hives from Decatur County to northern farms to assist in their pollination. For soybean farmers, a healthy hive nearby can mean the difference between a plant sprouting one bean cluster and a higher yielding sprouting three or more clusters.

The original plan for Tree City Bees was the manufacture of queens, but the sudden increase in hives has allowed the Rusts to begin marketing their honey as well.

"I breed and sell about 1,000 queens a year, each at $45 a piece," said Rust. "I would like to increase that to 5,000 queens a year, but we are beginning to sell our honey as well."

Tree City Bees markets their honey raw and unpasteurized. Raw honey is as it exists in the beehive or as obtained by extraction, settling, or straining, without adding heat (although some honey that has been "minimally processed" is often labeled as raw honey). Raw honey contains some pollen and may contain small particles of wax. According to Wikipedia, consumption of raw honey is sometimes advocated as a treatment for seasonal allergies due to pollen, but scientific evidence to support the claim is inconclusive.

A healthy hive consists of a single female queen bee, a seasonally variable number of male drone bees to fertilize new queens, and anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 female worker bees to tend the eggs and produce honey to feed the hive.

Healthy hives can produce up to 65 pounds of honey yearly, and to safely collect honey from a hive beekeepers typically pacify the bees using a bee smoker. The smoke triggers a feeding instinct making them less aggressive and obscures the pheromones the bees use to communicate. The honeycomb is removed from the hive and the honey may be extracted from it either by crushing or by using a honey extractor. The honey is then usually filtered to remove beeswax and other debris.

To create his core hives, Rust puts undrawn plastic frames (wooden frame structures without honeycomb) and a feeder that contains sucrose to feed the hive. Each new frame comes from the manufacturer without the honeycome drawn on it; the bees actually draw the honeycomb onto the frame with wax from their glands. The honeycomb cells are then filled with honey or with immature bee larvae for the worker bees to tend. A hive full of honey is created when each cell is full. The wax cells themselves make up the honeycomb.

The taste of honey is greatly affected by the crops being grown within the hives' reach. Honey made from the pollen from clover and alfalfa crops makes a very pleasant tasting honey.

"I love honey made from Florida orange pollen, but I want to get to the point where we are able to keep them here," said Rust.

Rust is developing business contacts across the country and ships to many western states.

"Core hives are very sturdy populations, and when they are shipped they're simply wrapped in plastic, piled on a wooden skid and shipped out. They're very hardy little creatures," he said.

Amazingly enough, queen bees can also decide the gender of the eggs they lay based upon the needs of the hive and the size of each cell created. Queen larvae are fed from a different type of honey reserve, and when the old queen becomes infirm or stops laying the worker bees will break open a larvae cell and begin starving out the old queen.

When a hive becomes overpopulated or runs out of space to create honeycomb and store honey, a new queen and several of her workers and drones will swarm to another location to begin a new hive.

So, it's important to make sure each hive is taken care of, cleaned, and the honey removed at the appropriate time.

"You can't just take a hive box and set it in a field. There's only a small chance a swarm will find it," said Rust.

From harvesting honey to moving queens from hive to hive or selling them to customers from all over the country, Rust said that it's not enough to keep him busy all the time.

"I would like to get to a point where we have about 1,000 hives and can hire other beekeepers. That's our goal," he said.

Rust offered advice for anyone wanting to keep bees: "You'll probably spend more time working with your pet goldfish than tending a bee hive, but you do have to make sure they're inoculated from varroa mites before you start and you'll need just the right queen."

Tree City Bees honey can be found locally at Schlemmer Wholesale, at A. Maxwell in Batesville and soon at Troyer's Market in Milroy. Raw, unpasteurized honey is currently selling for around $12 a pound.

Visit www.treecitybeecompany.com/ on the web for more information.