Texas beekeeper saves hives one at a time
SAN MARCOS — When Charlie Agar pried open the lid of an abandoned piece of farm machinery in San Marcos recently, he found a sweet treasure inside. Glistening honeycombs lined most of the rectangular hollow inside the equipment.
But the honey was guarded by 5,000 to 6,000 wild bees that Agar had been hired to remove. One immediately stung him on his hand. The 50-year-old New Braunfels beekeeper just grinned, scooped his bare hand inside the hive and brought out a fistful of bees to examine.
“I’m just looking for the queen,” he said.
Agar, 50, not only removes wild bees’ hives for a living but also vacuums up and moves the bees to a rural piece of property where he builds new hives for them. He rents some of the hives out to local landowners, who can place them on their land to get a break on their property taxes under certain guidelines.
He also mentors military veterans as part of a nonprofit program called Hives for Heroes that connects veterans with beekeepers. Agar said beekeeping can help calm people with post-traumatic stress disorder because it makes them focus on the bees.
Helping honeybees is important because they provide pollination that contributes nearly $20 billion to the value of U.S. crop production each year, according to the American Beekeeping Federation.
But honeybee colonies are suffering from disease and die-offs across the nation.
A national survey done by the nonprofit Bee Informed showed that from October to April, an estimated 32.2 percent of managed colonies in the United States were lost. In Texas during that same time period, 37.5 percent of the managed colonies were lost, according to the survey.
Agar, who sells the honey from his hives, said he has about 120 bee colonies. “My slogan is ‘Saving bees and sweetening teas,’ ” he said.
On the same day he removed the bees from the farm equipment in San Marcos, Agar tore off the siding of an old house on the same property and found honeycombs built against the wallboard — surrounded by about 10,000 swarming bees.
He and his friend Alfred Friedle, another beekeeper, gently puffed smoke on the hive to make the bees confused and a bit more docile.
Agar said he doesn’t sell honey from wild hives because he doesn’t know whether someone has sprayed them with pesticide. After he removes a wild hive, he usually replaces the feral queen with a domesticated queen so the new hive he builds produces gentler bees, he said.
The bees that he vacuumed into a small tank from the farm equipment and the wallboard were not Africanized bees. Africanized bees, also called killer bees, look like other honeybees but are known for their aggressive behavior. They were first imported from Africa to South America for honey production, where they escaped containment and hybridized with European honey bees, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department’s National Invasive Species Information Center.
Agar said he has been stung multiple times, but that doesn’t deter him, even though he is mildly allergic to bees. “I get hungry to open up a hive,” he said.