Backyard beekeeping all the buzz

The Coastal Bend Beekeepers Association is something to buzz about. This month, the club for bee enthusiasts is hosting its fourth annual Honey Tasting at the Garden Senior Center, 5325 Greely Drive in Corpus Christi.
Join honey aficionados on Thursday, Nov. 2, to taste a wide bounty of honey from more than 60 local beekeepers. The event is free and open to the public. Guests will be provided disposable tasting straws, coffee, tea and water.
The Coastal Bend Beekeepers Association represents beekeepers from Victoria to down in the Valley. The association hosts monthly meetings and events as educational outreach on honey bees and beekeeping. It regularly invites successful beekeepers from across Texas to speak on their experiences harvesting honey.
The annual tasting gives aspiring beekeepers a chance to mingle with club members and talk about honey varieties and floral sources. The association is a great resource for up-and-coming beekeepers: The monthly meetings are a means to educate and keep new beekeepers from getting discouraged.
“People get to experience the whole variety of the honey we make here in the Coastal Bend,” said Dennis Gray, president of the Coastal Bend Beekeepers Association. “Every batch of honey is different. If you keep bees in your backyard, you’ll get a different batch in spring than fall. It depends on what your bees find!”
There will also be a raffle for a “bee nuc,” a small starter colony with just the bare essentials. It includes a queen, some frames and workers — a perfect backyard beekeeper starter kit.
Gray has been keeping his own bees for five years and is making moves to create a business out of it. He calls beekeeping “honest agriculture” with large yields. Just one hive can produce 80 pounds of honey in a year.
“It’s really hard work,” he said, “but it’s great to work with animal husbandry, and you get to see in a very real way how bees are, how they divide and thrive. You see your failures quickly, and you get to really enjoy when you’re doing it right.”
Gray stressed that it’s important to support local honey rather than commercial honey — so make a trip to the farmers market rather than the grocery store to satisfy your sweet tooth.
“Commercial honey is strained of all the pollen, while local honey is loaded up with pollen and other natural enzymes.” Gray said. “Also, it is true that the pollen in local honey can help with local allergens.”
The honey industry in the South has had a successful year, though hurricanes Harvey and Irma didn’t do it any favors. The hurricanes disrupted a lot of Southern beekeeping operations. Several keepers in Rockport lost everything they had. An operation in Houston lost approximately 800 hives. Gray is hopeful the success throughout 2017 will counteract the two storms.
In regard to the plummeting bee population — which has decreased by 90 percent since 1990 — it does not affect the honey industry, according to this local beekeeper.
“The honeybee population is not dwindling. There are more now than there have ever been,” Gray said. “It’s the bumblebees, the wild bees, that are struggling a great deal.”
He explained that honeybees have an advantage to wild bees because their keepers intervene. If they’re hungry, they get fed; if they get sick, they get medicine. Wild bees don’t have that kind of support. Loss of habitat and industrial pollutants don’t help either.
Beekeepers are encouraged to raise as many honeybees as they can. The city of Corpus Christi has an ordinance that protects backyard beekeepers and allows residents to keep two hives as the City Council finds that “honeybees are of benefit to mankind.”
Whether you want to become a beekeeper, or you just want to sample a variety of local honey, the annual Honey Tasting is a sweet way to spend the day.
The annual Honey Tasting is 6:30-8:30 p.m. Nov. 2 at Garden Senior Center, 5325 Greely Drive in Corpus Christi. Call (361) 877-2440 or visit the website for more information.