Q & A with: Walt Moody

Mar. 13—Q: How did you get into the bee business?

A: I was 5 years old. My dad kept a beehive and field. He was a chemical engineer. He worked for Bigelow Sanford carpet company on the Connecticut River and he could walk to work from the house. He had a beehive in the garden and when I was a kid, I'd go out there. I was fascinated by them but I quickly learned you couldn't get too close because you'd get stung up.

Once we moved out to Crystal Lake, he never had bees again. I didn't have any interaction with bees for the next three decades, at least.

We were homeschooling our kids at the time. My wife had left her job and I was slaving in the coding pits and she wanted me to do a homeschooling project that involved science or something. I said, we'll get a beehive. We'll learn about biology and entomology. I got the beehive, and it was real fun. The kids were fascinated by it for a while.

But along comes perfumes and car fumes and distractions. They weren't so interested in it anymore, but I was. I'm really fascinated by these insects.

It's hard to make money on this. It's like owning a sailboat. It's just a hole in the water you throw money in, but I get closer and closer to being profitable every year. For a while I was pollinating farmers crops or putting a hive on a friend's property. He had blueberries and it would help his blueberries and my family would get blueberry picking privileges. That was a good barter.

I really enjoy interacting with people on that non-commercial level and having fun together and being able to be on some beautiful property, because I didn't have this land. I didn't have a home apiary. I was relying on convincing somebody to let me put it on their property.

It got to the point where the loop got too big and I needed to put fewer miles on the pickup. That's when my wife and I started looking for a piece of land. We looked for eight years before we bought this place.

Q: What was it about beekeeping that made you commit to it? It takes years to pull a profit.

A: I love honey. It's a challenge. If it were easy, I probably wouldn't be so interested in it. I started asking questions and believe me, in beekeeping there's always questions. There's always failure. I'm drawn to that.

Also, I'm a tree hugger. I like the land. I like gardening. I like planting trees, even if I may not taste the fruit, because maybe my kids, maybe somebody will appreciate it.

The bees are a challenge. They sting your (butt) off sometimes if you make a mistake. One thing about being in the apiary with bees, it does force me to slow down, be more deliberate and thoughtful, because you don't want to move fast, rattle the hive, get them annoyed. It helps if you're centered when you're dealing with them. It forces you to do that and you get punished if you don't.

Q: What were the first few years like in getting the hives going?

A: Expensive. For a basic hive, you need a bottom board, you need two deeps, and then you need a lid. Under the lid you need an inner cover.

The mites are terrible, and they are hard to manage. There is a mite called varroa destructor. It came into this country a few decades ago. Its normal host was an Asian bee that had evolved with it and they figured out how to coexist. But when that mite came around the world, the European honeybee, which I use, had never evolved with it. It gets in, it parasitizes the adult bees.

These mites are carrying certain viral and fungal diseases that get transferred to the hive. Or maybe a bee from one hive that's infested goes to the same flower as another bee and the mite jumps. There's nobody who has a hive that doesn't have mites.

Some people create hive bombs or mite bombs. If they don't treat or manage a hive and it gets infested and the bees die out, my bees might rob it. Bees are opportunistic. They want nutrients. If there's a nectar drought and they can't get stuff from the flowers and there's a dead hive over yonder, they'll rob it and bring mites back. Eventually, the bees, if we're lucky, will figure out how to deal with them and survive.

Q: What are some of the common misconceptions that people have about bees?

A: Killer bees. The venom is no different than the bees I have. They're basically the same bug. The difference is their genetically informed disposition came from Africa, where it wasn't like Germany, northern France, where European honeybees developed. They didn't live in a hollow hardwood tree. They were in a climate that was totally different.

Russian bees are the Putins of the world. They're not as bad as the killer bees, Africanized bees, but the first time I got scared out of my pants was

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