Former Rockford coach finds lots of honey, rewarding lessons in beekeeping

More than 200,000 bees live in Perry Giardini’s backyard, and it's not about the honey.

“I was pretty much indifferent to honey,” Giardini said of when he first started keeping bees 40 years ago. “I still am.”

It’s about the bees.

Giardini, who is on the short list of greatest high school coaches in Rockford history, is a man of many interests. He paints miniature toy soldiers. He is an avid golfer. He's recently gone gung-ho over fishing. Every time his wife sees a package on the front doorstep, she assumes he has ordered some new fishing gear. But bees have been his longest-running hobby.

“Bees are super fascinating,” Giardini said. “You’ve got to like them.”

According to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, there are anywhere from 115,000 to 125,000 beekeepers in the U.S., and according to USDA reports, 2.71 million honey-producing colonies in 2020 generated 1.48 million pounds of raw honey.

More: 'Fully vaccinated queens': First vaccine for honeybees approved in US

Uncorking the queen

Giardini starts each spring with three pounds of new bees. That’s around 10,000 to 12,000 bees.

It used to cost him $35. Now it’s $150. He pours them in the hive. The queen comes in her own little box with a cork at the end.

“You take the cork out and stick a marshmallow there. You hang her in her little box right between here,” Giardini said, pointing to layers of honeycomb in the hive. The bees will eat the marshmallow and free her.

As soon as they know where she is, they will get in the front of the hive and start flapping their wings to push her scent out of the hive. All of the bees roaming around who don’t know where she lives will get the scent and go right back to the hive.”

“They know where home is now," said Giardini's wife, Ricci.

'Everything is sticky'

Every honey-making tool becomes a mess — the hot uncapping knife used to sheer off beeswax from the honeycomb to let the honey drain freely, the extractor which uses centrifugal force to drain the honey or the buckets used to collect it.

“The thing about bee tools,” Giardini said, “everything is sticky.”

The bees clean up after themselves when those sticky tools are left in the backyard. “Several hundred of them will come and by the end of the day it’s perfect," Ricci Giardini said. "They’ve gotten every single drop."

In the winter, the bees will form a ball. They flap their wings vigorously — known as fanning — to increase air flow, reduce humidity and raise the temperature. The idea is to keep the middle at 93 degrees and keep the queen warm.

The ones on the outside would freeze, but they don’t stay on the outside. They move within the ball, from the inside to the outside, to stay alive.

A woman's world

Every hive has three kinds of bees: One queen bee. A couple of hundred male bees (drones), whose only job is to mate with the queen. And up to 60,000 female (worker) bees.

The drones die after they mate because their endophallus gets stuck inside the queen and ripped from their bodies. Many never get the chance to mate, but will still die when the worker bees prepare the hive for winter.

“It is definitely a women’s world,” Perry Giardini said. “At the end of the year, they don’t need the males for anything anymore. Because they run out of food, they find all the males and drag them out of the hive. They throw them out and don’t let them back in.”

The queen’s only job is to lay eggs until the fall, 1,000 to 2,000 eggs a day.

“That’s pushing out a lot of babies,” Ricci Giardini said. “That’s why it’s not good to be queen, either. You get special food, but who cares about that? And the queen has to be careful, too. One misstep and she’s gone. They will get their little council together, decide she is not doing like she used to do and get rid of her.”

If they do that, Giardini said, the worker bees will feed the eggs special food and make a few new queens. But only one will survive. The first to hatch will kill the others.

Bees do this when a queen leaves the hive, too.

Pesticides make a short life shorter

While a queen bee can live up to six years, drone bees live 55 days or less. Worker bees will live for five to six weeks in the summer, but can live up to six months in the winter.

The Giardinis used to have about a quarter of the bees in their five hives make it through the winter. Now, none of them do. They blame pesticides.

“It doesn’t kill them directly, but it messes up their radar,” Ricci Giardini said. "They fly out, and they can’t get home. They have no idea.”

The last four years have been the highest-recorded winter losses in history for beekeepers in the United States, according to a new study by the University of Illinois.

Spring, summer and fall bees are constant Giardini backyard companions — buzzing around and leaving the Giardinis with jars and jars of honey to give away to all of their friends.

“People like it,” said Perry Giardini, who is known for coaching the 1998 East High School wrestling team to a third-place finish at state and winning a state football title in 1985. “They come over to look. Everyone is scared to death of them, but if you leave them alone, they are not going to bother you.

I just enjoy having them in the yard and walking around. There is something that makes you feel good, seeing them, knowing you are doing something that is constructive.”

Contact: mtrowbridge@rrstar.com, @matttrowbridge or 815-987-1383. Matt Trowbridge has covered sports for the Rockford Register Star for over 30 years, after previous stints in North Dakota, Delaware, Vermont and Iowa City

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Former Rockford coach reaps benefits of beekeeping for family, friends