There are hobby beekeepers, and there are commercial beekeepers. And then there are beekeepers that take the queen bee on vacation with them.
Allan Hazel, who owns A.P.’s Back Beach Bees on Sullivan’s Island with his wife, Judy, had just bought a new queen to replace one that wasn’t producing.
Queen bees cost between $30 and $40, not including that same amount in shipping, and they come in a wooden box about the size of a roll of pennies, along with some attendants to feed the queen, packed carefully inside a cardboard box.
In normal circumstances, the box is plugged with a marzipan-like substance, and the bee colony eats their way through the sweet stuff, getting to know the new queen in the process. But sometimes, the introduction fails, and Hazel had a trip to his in-laws in Florida planned. He knew if the colony rejected the new queen, then he had no queens for that colony, an unsustainable situation.
So Hazel, a retired marine biologist, packed up the old queen bee in a small cooler and added her to his luggage for the drive, bringing her into restaurants and swiping some condensation from his iced tea onto the little wooden box to quench the queen and putting her box in his nightstand at night after feeding her a honey-water combination.
“My in-laws never knew I had a bee in my bedroom,” Hazel recalled. “But I’m glad I did that, because, when we got back, the new queen had died. I put the old queen back in and, darned if she didn’t become one of my top producers!”
“She just needed a little vacation,” Judy Hazel said with a laugh.
The Hazels have seven beehives on their property, which has been in Allan Hazel’s family since his grandfather built the residence in the early part of the 20th century. He and his siblings are the stewards of the land, and he is the youngest of 33 grandchildren. His ancestors sold eggs and milk from their animals and boarded horses, including those of the late Sen. Ernest Hollings. But as Sullivan’s Island gentrified around them, the ownership of large agricultural animals became forbidden. He decided to raise bees to bring back some of his agricultural heritage.
He started with two hives. He destroyed one hive by accidentally crushing its queen and the other survived “despite everything I did,” he said. Now, each of his seven hives have between 40,000 and 50,000 bees.
Allan Hazel learned, despite the stereotype of a “queen bee” ruling in luxury, the truth is queens mate only once in their two-to-five-year lives and then lay up to 2,000 eggs a day. And while it’s true that the bees will do almost anything to protect their queen, if she stops producing, they kill her.
Hazel was astounded by the quantity of honey his small farm produced, and soon the hobby became a business, with simple word-of-mouth creating a demand the Hazels can barely keep up with. Last year, a better-than-average year according to the Hazels, they sold 500 pounds of honey, and the wax is used for candles and lip balm.
“Honey’s easy to sell. I felt like a drug dealer, selling it in parking lots sometimes,” Hazel said.
A family affair
The company name, A.P., was a nod to Hazel’s grandfather, Allen Perry Jones, and the label came from a painting of the property’s back beach created by Allan Hazel’s sister, Andrea Hazel. The entire family is involved, with Allan Hazel taking care of the hives, Judy producing the honey and marketing for the company, and their 16-year-old daughter, Maggie, helping with production and confessing, “I got my dad’s science mind, and I’m fascinated by the science of bees.”
The honey itself has a terroir just like wine or cheese, Allan Hazel said, and indeed, a taste of honey processed just a few weeks ago, the light gold color of a good Sauvignon Blanc, sings with notes of Sullivan’s Island wildflowers. Honey produced later in the season is almost brown because of the flowers the bees visit, and it has a spicy, slightly sulfuric note like fresh molasses.
“The darker honey is great for baking,” Judy Hazel said.
Allan Hazel also discovered that bees can see and can tell by pattern which hive box is theirs, although, he added, they can’t see the color red. They also have a strong sense of smell, and Judy Hazel says the outside of the house is bombarded with bees when she’s in the middle of spinning the honey off the comb frames and droplets of the sweet stuff get everywhere, even in her hair. The process is arduous, done in an un-airconditioned room to keep the honey from thickening, and the bees looming outside just add to the difficulty.
Those senses mean that simply moving a hive won’t keep the bees away. The Hazels remove problem hives from people’s houses, and they have to move the hive more than three miles from its origin or the bees will return.
Like other beekeepers, the Hazels are concerned about dangers to their bees, both man-made — such as toxic pesticide sprays that can kill a whole colony — to natural, such as the invasive small hive beetle from Africa, which lays eggs in the honeycombs that create destructive yeast and fermentation.
“If I could tell people anything, it would be to use pellets and not sprays in their gardens,” Judy Hazel said.
In addition, climate change has meant earlier swarming, moving to February from late March or April. And climate change can bring strong hurricanes.
“In a hurricane, we just strap the boxes down and pray like hell,” Allan Hazel said.
He would have started beekeeping much earlier, he said, but he was afraid of bee stings. He discovered on a trip to a beekeeper relative in Maryland that the bees were much more concerned about going about their routine than stinging him, and he said he’s been stung only “about 50 times” in the 10 years since he’s been beekeeping.
“It’s absolutely worth it,” Allan Hazel said. “Bee stings are a minor annoyance. I love the biology of it, studying a non-human society that is so complex and important to our own society.”
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