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