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she slowly overcame her fear of the stinging insects.

“As bees landed on me and were doing what bees do, panic set in and I ran,” she recalls in an article she wrote. “My patient husband calmed me down and coached me back. I did what he said and closed my eyes and just listened to the buzz around me.”

Mike said he read as many books as he could find on beekeeping, and they also watched a lot of YouTube videos from other beekeepers to learn how to develop what’s called an “apiary,” a collection of hives. From those first two hives they continued to add more and more bees, and are now planning to get up to as many as 60 hives this summer.

Four years ago, they enrolled in a master beekeepers class offered online by the University of Montana, graduating after two years of study and completion of a research project on rearing queen bees. Their study results were published in several publications, including the American Bee Journal, the Australian Bee Journal and the Irish Bee Journal.

The field of beekeeping, known as apiculture, is filled with technical buzzwords like “nucs,” “pollen paddies” and “royal jelly,” a substance used to feed queen bees from the time they are larva into their adulthood.

“Individually, she (the queen) is the most important bee in the hive, but she doesn’t actually control everything in the hive,” Mike said. “The workers actually control her a lot – how much she lays (eggs), when she lays. If she’s not living up to snuff, they’ll get rid of her and find a new one.”

If a hive takes on too many bees, Laurie said the worker bees will actually starve the queen so that she can relocate with the swarm.

“She can’t fly when she’s big and fat, so they’ll slim her down for swarming,” she said.

As the couple gets ready to expand their operation this summer, Mike is busy assembling brood frames, which are used by the queens to lay eggs inside cells across a honeycomb structure. At the North American Honey Bee Expo earlier this year, Laurie said they were giving away pink-colored frames, so she and her husband used them to set up a “breast cancer hive,” with all the proceeds from the hive’s honey being donated to cancer research (a similar blue-colored hive is planned for prostate cancer research).

Weather and predators

Like any other type of agriculture, beekeeping is heavily impacted by the weather. This year’s unseasonably warm winter is a particular concern for the Lawrences.

“We’re really worried right now because, when we had those 60-degree days, the bees really ramped up their egg-laying,” Laurie said. “There’s a lot of babies in those hives, and it’s really hard for them to keep those babies warm. We’re expecting to see them drag dead larva out – not a substantial number – but we’re expecting to see that.”

Normally, Mike said the bees need to keep their cluster at about 75 degrees during the winter, but once they start laying eggs, an internal temperature of around 95 degrees needs to be maintained. In response to the colder temps, Laurie said the couple has been feeding the bees more bee bread (a mixture of pollen and nectar).

Overwintering beehives in Wisconsin’s climate is a challenge. When cooler temperatures first arrive in the fall, if the bees don’t have enough honey for themselves, Mike said they start feeding them a sugar-and-water mixture to supplement their diet. As it gets colder, they push the hives together and add insulation to the top of the wooden boxes to help keep them warm.

The Lawrences also own some polystyrene boxes that keep the internal temperature steady regardless of the weather changes outside.

Keeping their bees alive over winter has been the toughest part of the job, the Lawrences said. Laurie said many Wisconsin beekeepers will send their bees to California, Florida or other warmer states during the winter months, but they keep theirs year-round so they can breed those hardy genetics back into their hives.

In a normal year, they’ll start feeding their bees with pollen patties in late March or early April, which will spur the hive to start producing its next generation. The bees will also start pollinating willow trees in mid-April.

“They start growing really fast in May, and it gets to the point where the hives get too full,” Mike said. “What we’ll do is take the frames of bees and put them into a new hive.”

Through a process known as “grafting,” the Lawrences can provide each new hive with a queen, and by fall, those hives will be big enough to make it through the winter and start producing enough honey the following spring.

Each hive generates about 50 to 60 pounds every summer, with some peaking at 100 pounds and others at about 30. In addition to producing honey, the hives are also rented out to Kamenick Farms on CTH B to pollinate their strawberry bushes.

Besides weather, bees face a multitude of predators both large and small, from hulking black bears all the way down to microscopic Varroa mites, which can affect a bee’s ability to fly and take out an entire colony within a couple of years if not eradicated.

“Varroa mites are one of the biggest threats we face,” Laurie said.

They treat their hives with an organic compound called oxalic acid, which prevents the mites from taking root.

All of the Lawrences’ beehives are surrounded by electric fences, and they strap the hive boxes to bricks, but at least one bear has reached over the fence and taken a swipe at a hive. Con-

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trary to popular belief, bears are actually more interested in eating the protein-rich larvae than the honey itself, Laurie said.

Other predators include skunks, which will stand outside the hives and eat the bees as they come out, which will make the hive more aggressive and likely to sting anything that moves, Mike said. If a skunk happens to spray near a hive, that colony can no longer be used for honey production, Laurie noted.

When asked what keeps them going through all the hardships and challenges, Mike immediately responds: “I think it’s a lot fun.”

Quality control and advice

Honey is graded on flavor, color, clarity and moisture content, which needs to be below 18.4 percent, or it can start to ferment over time. The Lawrences use a refractometer to measure the moisture content, which should be a minimum of 16 percent.

“If we have honey that has too much moisture, we can actually mix that with honey that’s too dry,” Laurie said. “You want to have a good, balanced moisture before you bottle it.”

The taste of honey is greatly affected by where the bees collect their nectar and pollen. Laurie said bees get a lot of their food from flowering trees, including basswood and black locust, which produce an attractive, light colored honey with a minty smell.

“It doesn’t taste minty, but it has a minty scent to it,” she said.

Buckwheat flowers, on the other hand, will produce a darker, stronger tasting honey, she said.

“More commercial beekeepers concentrate on numbers of hives, like 2,000 hives,” she said. “We concentrate on the quality of our bees and the honey we get.”

Besides the honey, the Lawrences also sell beeswax candles at Abbyland Truck Stop and other stores, especially around Christmas time. They recently donated a basket of honey and candles to a fundraiser for New Life Pet Adoption Center.

Over the past decade, Mike and Laurie have experienced their share of setbacks, including times when they had to start over by purchasing all new bees to inhabit their hives. Mike noted that the national average for bee loss among beekeepers is 60 percent per year, but there are ways to improve the survival rate over time.

“When you first start keeping bees, you’re going to lose them, but as you move along, as long as you’re learning from your mistakes, it gets easier,” he said. “So, this year, we’re looking at a 97 percent survival rate for this winter, which I’m sure partially has to do with how warm the weather was.”

Hamburg Honey can be reached on Facebook, and it also has a YouTube channel featuring instructional and humorous videos about their beekeeping experiences.

DECORATING THE HIVE - Kids helped paint the hives that the bees would reside in. From left to right the kids painting hives are: Sierra Eckert, Natalie Sonnentag, Chloe Sonnentag and Max Lawrence as Mike and Jeff Lawrence looked on in the background.