Bees are too busy trying to survive to care about stinging. They are normally not aggressive and their sting is relatively mild. A bee’s sting is also usually its last, as it dies. According to the USDA Agricultural Research Service, less than one percent of the population will have an allergic or anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting.
James Vasich knows all this first hand. As owner and operator of Aledo Apiary, Vasich makes a living removing and rehoming swarms of bees. Being stung just comes with the business — even for a prepared, cautious professional.
Vasich encourages contacting a bee expert to extract and rehome bees rather than exterminating them. He notes killing not only hurts the bee population, but often compounds the problem, because dead bees and honey left behind after exterminating attract mites and other pests.
“If it is on someone’s property, it is their choice, it’s up to them,” Vasich said. “But when we remove bees, they will be incorporated into the aviary, and if the queen’s good and the temperament of the bees is good, they will become part of the colony.”
There are a few feral hives Vasich encounters with an overly-aggressive disposition, but only three times in his career has he come across what he believes were actually Africanized bees.
Vasich has about 100 hives, but that number fluctuates depending on many factors.
Raising bees is not easy because bees can be moody. The science behind splitting hives, breeding queens, freezing honeycombs for future bee food, and collecting strays that have gone rogue are other challenges. Precautions also have to be taken to avoid deadly enemies of the bees like mites and moths.
Bees can be used for agricultural exemptions and for hobby, but Vasich suggests not considering raising bees without the knowledge and effort it takes to sustain a colony. If you love the sweet stuff, remember that bees make honey for their own survival. It takes time to produce an abundance they can part with.
Bees need pollen for protein to survive. They also produce and consume honey because they burn so much energy buzzing up to three miles from their hives to forage for pollen. Vasich has been raising bees long enough to harvest honey and has plans in the future to market it, but it takes time, patience, and luck to mature colonies to the point they produce beyond what they need for themselves.
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“This past year was OK, but the year before that was a severe drought,” Vasich recalled. “I think I fed them probably 4,000 pounds of sugar all summer and through the winter just to keep them alive because there was nothing blooming. People think you can plop some bees on a property and you get honey, but it is not that easy.”
To augment meadows of wildflowers around his property, Vasich plants large gardens of flowering buckwheat, sunflowers, turnips, garlic, and clover so he has flowering foliage through most of the year to nourish his bees.
Because words like “pure honey” and “Texas honey” are sometimes vacillating terms used for products that are blended with glucose sugar or honey shipped into Texas for distribution, Vasich is part of the non-profit Real Texas Honey (www.realtexashoney.com) which promotes the production of 100 percent pure Texas honey.
You can read current bee reports and watch videos of James Vasich doing bee removals on the Aledo Apiary Facebook page or call him at 817-781-4345.
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