Think globally. Pollinate locally!

When customers visit Pearmund Cellars for a delightful afternoon of wine tasting, few folks realize they are only a couple hundred yards north of two colonies of about 100,000 buzzing honey bees.  Whoa!  Did you say BEES?  And, uhhh, 100K of 'em??? For nearly two years, two complete hives have resided quietly and peacefully under a small sapling down by the large red barn on the property. The bees need only to fly about 30 feet for a cool drink of water from South Run brook, which meanders by the tiny bee yard, reminiscent of a pastoral scene of an apiarist's eden.

During the Spring at the peak of bloom for local area flowers, hard-working bees gather pollen and nectar to feed their young larvae.  Customers will rarely see these flying insects doing their thing because the grapes grown on the property do not require bee pollination to produce the bounty which becomes the delicious wine Chris offers. However, the bees are helping the environment as well as our own food supply by contributing to pollination of other plants vital to our agriculture base.

The hives are very healthy indeed right now, due in large part to them being nurtured by Chief Beekeeper Keith "Spacesuit Man" Fletcher, Associate Beekeeper D.J. "Want-a-Bee" Leffin, and ocassionally Chris Pearmund himself. Chris may soon earn the nickname “Bee Charmer” since he has been known on occasion to visit the hives dressed in nothing more than shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt, yet the bees never sting him!  However, the real credit to the hives' success goes to long-time Pearmund friend and beekeeping consultant, Karla Eisen. Karla got Keith started in beekeeping last year, assigning him Pearmund Cellars' hives as his first duty station. Efforts have blossomed from there, and last summer saw the first honey harvest, when 20 pounds of honey was extracted from the bees' extra reserves. This year, we hope to extract 50 pounds!

One of the vital jobs Keith performs for the bees is feeding them.  What do you feed bees, you ask?  Don’t they feed off pollen and nectar?  Sure, they do…when the pollen and nectar are readily available in Spring and Summer. The other times of the year, the bees need to be fed sugar water to promote egg-laying by the queen so there will be more bees to tend the colony in winter and to protect it from critters at night.  Chris' staff buys Keith all the sugar he needs for feed and he concocts the 1:1 mixture in the winery kitchen and delivers the homemade "nectar" to the bees using specially made bee feeders.

Another job in managing hives is to figure out how to keep the bees from swarming. Swarming is a very natural BEE-havior, and usually happens every Spring, unless colonies are managed extremely well.  While swarms of bees look rather intimidating to a non-beekeeper, the insects are relatively calm in that circumstance because they don't have a home to defend and their bellies are full of honey. Swarming happens when bees in the colony perceive the queen is old or they are running out of space in the hive. They ready themselves to split away by quickly cultivating a second queen, known in beekeeper terms as "supersedure," thus permitting half the colony to depart the present hive to find another home. Since a swarm at a winery can be bad PR for business, the beekeeper manipulates the bees in a way to make them think they have already swarmed. He divides the colony in half on purpose, introduces a mated queen from another bee yard many miles away, and with a little bit of luck the bees are satisfied with staying put, for now. This action keeps them home and poses no public concern.

The last big job mentioned here, which is probably of most interest to the public is the task of collecting honey. Bees make honey for their own use, i.e., food stores for the wintertime when there is no nectar flow, but most well maintained bee colonies make more honey than they need. This extra honey becomes food for us to enjoy with anything needing a natural sweetener.  As mentioned before, 20 pounds of honey was collected last year, but this year could be even more if the colonies maintain their strength.

Recently, Keith took a day away from his Air Force job at the Pentagon to spend about four hours working with the bees. He remarked, "After several months of winter weather, the first Monday in March was unseasonably pleasant. I called my Colonel and told him, 'Sir, I've gotta take leave!  I just can't pass up the opportunity to work with the girls.' "  Worker bees are all female, but only the queen is sexually viable, and she can lay up to 2,000 eggs each warm sunny day. Keith fed the bees sugar water, inspected the hive combs for eggs, and was pleasantly surprised to actually find the queen very much alive and active in the hive." It was an epiphany moment for Keith as a new beekeeper.

Also shocking to Keith was the amount of pollen the bees were bringing into the hive so early in the year. He said, "I didn't know there were plants producing pollen that early because of the cold weather we have had. I was encouraged with what I saw, because more pollen = more bees = healthy hive = more honey! There were so many foraging bees returning to the hive with pollen on their legs, I think I could have walked on them in flight and by sheer numbers alone they would have kept me aloft in the air!"

Chris Pearmund is delighted with the apiary's success and has promoted Keith's hobby to sister Winery at LaGrange. Chris says, "I gave Keith a company credit card and told him to buy all the bee supplies he needed to get a LaGrange bee mansion started." Keith replied,  "I've always enjoyed being around a whole lot of women!" Hmmmm, sounds like working with Keith's ladies will give a whole new meaning to the term "Honey-Do" list!

Check out photos of Pearmund Cellars' beekeepers, Karla's bee class, and our 2008 Spring Bee Day on the CBS News.