Let’s Talk about Bees
Many of us enjoy the summer music of the garden as bees buzz on the blooms we are weeding, birds sing in the trees, and barks and crows echo through the breeze. This then is a perfect time to introduce you to the Pierce County Beekeepers Association (PCBA)’s president, Mary Dempsey, and Elmhurst customer, Jason Faber.
Mary’s sweet adventure started with her brother’s beaming face as he handed her a Christmas gift (a build-it-yourself beehive, bee suit, and smoker) with the words, “You’re going to be a beekeeper, Mary”. She says, “I had no idea how to be a beekeeper”; but because you cannot let your brother down, she became a beekeeper. After 8 years, she has 12 hives in the Puyallup / Tacoma area and operates The Woodland Hearth, a local business that grew from her beekeeping adventures.
Mary is a retired labor and delivery nurse who delivered countless babies in hospitals and homes. In a colorful, curious, and active life, she was a Revolutionary War reenactor, professional clown, massage therapist, published photographer, and square dancer (her husband is a caller).
Today, Mary is the president of the PCBA, an organization dedicated to understanding and caring for bees, supporting their sustainability, teaching and mentoring beekeepers, and educating the public. She manages hives for luxury apartment complexes focused on an environment of nature and sustainability. Through her business, she sells honey and honey products.
Mary sees the same divine purpose and sense of the miraculous in bees as she did in delivering babies. She lights up talking about bees and says they are “fascinating, incredible insects who do things you shouldn’t be able to do”. A forager bee will fly 2-1/2 miles from the hive to find a flower she likes. When she returns, she will do the “waggle dance” on the frame of the hive. In those movements, she is telling all the other bees the longitude and latitude of the favored flower. The rest of the bees can go to the exact same flower from watching her dance.
If the queen bee dies, a member of her court can start feeding a recently laid egg royal jelly, and that egg will become the new queen with an entirely different anatomy from any other bee. How that egg is fed determines if it will be a queen, worker bee, or drone. A bee will lay 1 teaspoon of honey in her entire life of approximately 6 weeks – think of that the next time you see grocery store shelves lined with jars of honey.
There are different kinds of honeybees (8 species are recognized with 43 subspecies), including the Italian (Apis Mellifera Ligustica), the Carniolan (Apis Mellifera Carnica), and the Russian bee (known for more aggressive temperament and higher production of honey). The Italian bee is most common in the United States known for its gentler temperament. Mary says mean bees have their advantages, as they can more independently withstand threats such as mites and yellow jackets.
Bees provide other benefits than honey. Their propolis is anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-fungal. Evidence suggests bee sting therapy is good for relieving arthritis. Some vets use honey to put on animal cuts with a good healing effect.
Mary is proud of the work she and Vice President, Kathleen Clerc, are doing with PCBA. Membership is growing, the website was redesigned, and they have an active social media and community presence. She is most proud of the community volunteers who cover every fair shift and raise their own products to contribute to fundraisers. The PCBA has a teaching apiary and is building a queen apiary with the goal of raising local queen bees.
Volunteers talk about bees at schools, senior living communities, and rotary clubs. They participate in Camp Marshmallow and collaborate with Behind the Walls to build mason bee hives. They field 30-40 calls per week to handle swarms of pollinators.
This brings us to our Elmhurst customer, Jason, 1 of the PCBA’s swarm catchers.
Jason is a 4-year beekeeper and participates in PCBA’s bee-hosting program. (Employees from both Elmhurst and Lakeview Power and Light host Jason’s hives.)
Jason grew up in Lakewood and has a keen curiosity about how things work in the world, which ultimately led him to beekeeping. He started raising Mason bees, then grew interested in honeybees specifically because of their impact on our food supply and the ways in which they are at risk. His interest started as a hobby but is slowly growing even as he masters the welding trade for his “real work”. He has a heart for the little creatures who share our world (he recently rescued 2 baby raccoons) and hopes 1 day to own larger property so he can train and board dogs (and continue his work with bees).
Jason’s company, Life’s a Bee, LLC, is a preferred vendor for Camp Murray, where he recently did a cutout (literally cut a hive of over 80,000 honeybees from the brick wall of a building at Camp Murray). Jason is often called to remove swarms and hives of bees (honeybees and bumble bees) from properties. He hopes to expand his business so he can collect other pollinators (including wasps).
Pollinators include wasps, honeybees, mason bees, yellow jackets, and bumble bees. Right now, the only real option in Pierce County for removing wasps is to destroy their swarms and nests, which in turn squanders their benefit to our community (their venom is prized in medical research). Rehoming wasps sounds like a mission tailor-made for Jason!
Mary would like everyone to know that “we care about our community, our bees, and each other. Joining an association like this is the best program to help understand the importance of pollinators and the importance of how we all fit into our universe.” She feels beekeeping brings us back to a sense of community, being grounded, and having a more personal sense of what is going on in our neighborhoods.
We thank Mary for her time and work to foster a strong beekeeping community in Pierce County and for taking time to meet with us. We thank Jason for his endless patience in teaching newbies how to inspect bee hives, catching swarms, and for forgiving early mistakes.