Unique Muskoka August

KNOWLES PLUMBING
Muskoka’s Bath & Plumbing Centre
· Sales
· Installation
· Service
· Design
Consultation
Visit our
Showroom!
Featuring the most
complete selection
of quality bathroom &
kitchen fixtures
to create a pound of honey. And a beekeeper
can expect to harvest up to 50 pounds (23
kg) of honey or more from a hive.
Small wonder beekeepers risk a few stings
to keep their hives.
Beekeeping is booming across Ontario. For
a host of reasons, newcomers are coming to
the practice in – well, in swarms. Some have
come driven by news headlines, with the urge
to help threatened honeybees. Others are keen
to tap into that strange, special relationship
between a beekeeper and 25,000-plus
industrious, stinging insects.
At a recent meeting of the Muskoka Parry
Sound Beekeepers’ Association, half the
people in attendance were beginners. In
Muskoka, beekeeping is primarily a pastime,
the association’s president, Cathy Crowder,
says.
“They’re all hobbyists; they have 15 or 20
hives at the most,” she says.
Many beginners are quite content to deal
with one or two hives. Crowder herself
operates four yards in Milford Bay and
elsewhere, with a handful of hives at each. Her
father-in-law, Jim Smith, who’s been at it
since the early 1980s, is one exception: he’s
managing eight yards with about 60 colonies.
He keeps about 40 of them at Deerhurst
Resort, where Poppa Jim’s Honey is used in
their kitchens. The veterans know it’s best to
keep hives scattered in different locations.
Smith says he started because he had a little
extra money one year and went shopping for
bees from an older beekeeper in Hillsdale. He
was warned he had a lot to learn. So he started
reading.
“I’m still learning today,” he says. When he
began he had a lot of welts from angry bees.
Today, he says, he can work in a hive and
barely needs to use the smoker that calms
bees.
“I’m always asked, ‘How many times have
you been stung?’” he says. “Well, I ask right
back, ‘How many times have you made love?’”
Who cares? Who counts?
Smith’s personality is classic beekeeper:
part curmudgeon, part poet. People mired in
the rut and squabble of the business world
will label beekeepers as eccentrics. But a
beekeeper is a person deeply in sync with the
rhythms of the hive – the rhythm of nature.
“I love it,” Smith says. “You’re out there
with the bees, working with them and you’re
18 UNIQUE MUSKOKA August 2016