Batesville student, grandfather bond over beekeeping
BATESVILLE — When Casen Campbell learned he needed a project for his FFA class, he didn’t have to look far — his grandfather Billy Ed Campbell had his own beehives, and Casen was intrigued.
“A few years ago, I would see him messing around here with the bees, and I thought that was cool. One time he had a hive swarm out in a tree and had to get a ladder and cut it off, then get the bees back into the box,” Casen said.
Billy Ed said he wore his suit for protection, but he also “sprayed a little sugar water on them — that makes them calm down. They just swarm out looking for a new home, and we had to catch them.”
He said the swarm was probably about 15 feet high, and he was able to catch the bees and put them in a new hive.
Casen, a sophomore at Batesville High School, said most of the students in his FFA class have projects involving cattle, chickens or something else — he’s the only one he knows of with bees as a project. He said he keeps an online journal and records the work he and his grandfather do.
Billy Ed said he had some beehives in the 1980s until they were invaded by pests.
“I had done it before, but tracheal mites got in them and pretty much killed them out. There was a varroa mite that came in about the same time, and it’s made it pretty difficult,” Billy Ed said.
“I had a friend who had an accident in the early ’80s, and he needed some help,” said Billy Ed, who started helping his friend and enjoyed it so much he got his own hives; he said he had about eight or 10 before the mites came.
After that, he lost interest until about three years ago, he said.
He and Casen both said beekeeping is a good hobby and can be relaxing.
“You’ve really got to concentrate on what you’re doing,” Billy Ed said. “Your other worries are put aside while you’re working with bees.”
Casen said he became involved with FFA three years ago and needed a project.
“You have to have 30 hours or so put into an agricultural project,” Casen said. “It can be farm animals, like cows; it can be food production or handson work like carpentry. You can make money, but you don’t have to. You have to get the hours in.
“I thought [beekeeping] would be pretty interesting. I like it, and it helps pollinate the crops in the area.”
The son of two educators — mom Lori is the EAST facilitator at Sulphur Rock Elementary School, and dad David is the Batesville High School principal — Casen said he wants to get into agriculture when he gets out of school.
“I’ve thought about getting more hives and getting into beekeeping on a deeper level,” he said.
Casen, an avid outdoorsman, has even considered a military career but said college may or may not be part of his path.
Billy Ed joked that beekeeping, also known as apiculture, “is an expensive hobby” and said Casen wasn’t in it to make money.
Casen plans to build his own hives from scratch and paint them white to give them the “iconic beehive look.”
He also said the white paint helps reflect the heat in the summer.
“I’ll start with one this year and maybe two next year,” Casen said.
Once the hives are built, he’ll have to buy bees but said he wants to buy them locally from Karrel Fleetwood.
Casen said he plans to buy Italian bees, which he and Billy Ed said are calmer than some other breeds and are a popular choice in this part of the country.
“The Russian bees are a little more aggressive,” Billy Ed said. “They make a little more honey, and they may sting you a little more.”
The number of bees in a hive changes depending on the season, he said.
“In the winter, if you had 20,000 in there, you would be pretty comfortable. In the summer, that’ll go from 35,000 to as high as 70,000,” Billy Ed said.
Unlike a lot of insects that hibernate in the winter, honey bees remain active year-round. Billy Ed said the bees will form a tight cluster around the queen, flexing muscles and vibrating to generate heat within the hive. Outer bees will trade places with inner bees as needed so all stay warm, and all can consume stored honey to replace energy stores.
The key to beekeeping, Billy Ed and Casen said, is the queen.
“If you don’t have a good queen, you’re out of the bee business,” Billy Ed said.
“Bees play a big role in agriculture in this nation, and if we can get more people interested in having bees, it would help our crops,” Casen said.
Some crops are self-pollinating, but about 35 percent of America’s crops rely to some extent on bees or other pollinators, according to the Sierra Club in an Oct. 25, 2019, article.
Some beekeepers even take their bees to California to pollinate almonds.
“They make more money there than selling honey. They take them about now and bring them back sometime in late March,” Billy Ed said. “Then sometimes they’ll take them to peach orchards in Missouri and sometimes take them to the cotton fields, but almonds are the money maker. That’s a little big for us.”
The Campbells will, however, take their bees to Billy Ed’s bean field in the bottoms.
They also said eating local honey can help people cope with seasonal allergies, but they said they can’t taste a difference in honey produced at different times of the year.
Spring honey, they said, is lighter in color than honey produced by fall blooms.
“It’s the different flower — clover, willow or buckwheat,” Billy Ed said.
While some people heat their honey, the Campbells do not and said they don’t strain it too fine in order to keep the health benefits of the pollen in the honey.
Billy Ed also ordered and planted three bee-bee trees, a small ornamental tree that he said bees apparently love so well “they even work on it when it’s dark.”
“And we may plant a few ‘bee’ flowers around them,” Casen said.
Billy Ed gives most of his honey away to family, friends and fellow church members.
“I think that’s nice — helping out the community,” Casen said.
Another important aspect of beekeeping is the protective gear beekeepers use, particularly during the extraction of honey.
“We wear the suits so we don’t get stung,” Casen said, explaining that bees instinctively recognize vulnerable places on a face, whether human or animal, and if threatened will attack a predator’s face first.
He said beekeeping is not as easy as one might think.
“From what I’ve learned, there’s a lot of things that go into it,” he said. “You have to put work into it. … I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but I’m learning.”