

Image by Image by edmondlafoto from Pixabay

As BeeWeaver gears up to take orders for spring 2012 bees and queens, I am reminded of how much beekeepers have changed in the last 2 decades. When I began answering phones and taking orders in 1994 nearly every customer had kept bees for decades, had 5 or more colonies, lived in rural areas, were well over 50 years old, and about 99% were men. Typically when a woman phoned the bee order in she was doing so on her husband’s behalf (‘he doesn’t like talking on the phone’ or ‘he can’t hear very well’ were typical refrains). Over the next 5 or so years that generation of beekeepers began to dwindle. Varroa mites caused some to give up, for others it was Small Hive Beetle, and still for others it was the hard labor of working bee colonies (lifting honey supers and honey extraction became too much for aging bodies). Y2K brought a dearth in the hobbyist and sideliner beekeepers. One season BeeWeaver’s packages for the following spring were sold out by Thanksgiving as commercial beekeepers raced to get replacement bees to cover losses caused by varroa mites, small hive beetle and other diseases those pests carried. Hardly any of our bees and queens went to smaller beekeepers.