Beekeeper has sweet success moving bees from Cathedral

Hive to produce honey by autumn; keeper says it's for the bishop

Published: July 5, 2008

By Tara Little
Associate Editor

Abigail Crimmins

Chuck Crimmins inspects the bees' progress June 20 at Heifer Ranch. Now confident of their gentle nature, he wears only a sun hat. He said bees can sense the mood of an approaching person.

Abigail Crimmins

Chuck Crimmins inspects the bees' progress June 20 at Heifer Ranch. Now confident of their gentle nature, he wears only a sun hat. He said bees can sense the mood of an approaching person.

Unlikely though it may be, about 10,000 honeybees made a home for themselves at the Cathedral of St. Andrew this spring. Many might think these new parishioners unwelcome, but, in fact, church staff went out of their way to make sure the wild bees found a new residence at Heifer Ranch in Perryville.

John Hodge, Cathedral maintenance supervisor, made the unusual discovery May 27, the day after Memorial Day. He said the swarm had congregated on the guttering atop the church's apse wall, about 30 feet off the ground.

Hodge, whose father-in-law was a beekeeper, said he had never seen bees nest that high in the air, much less in an urban area like downtown Little Rock.

The fact that they were so high coupled with the fact that he found the bees to be a "very gentle swarm," he said he never worried about parishioners' safety, but became very concerned for the bees.

Hodge called several agencies, including the Pulaski County Beekeepers Association, and eventually spoke with Chuck Crimmins, garden and forestry coordinator at Heifer Ranch, one of five learning centers for Heifer International, which is based in Little Rock.

His job includes serving as ranch beekeeper, a craft he calls "a gentle art," and one that he has been perfecting for 20 years. "You don't take a college class in beekeeping, you just kind of pick it up," he said.

Crimmins is also Catholic. He, his wife and their six children are members of St. John Latin Mass Community in North Little Rock. When he got the call, he was happy to help, but the bees' location presented a major problem.

He went to the Cathedral and climbed a ladder to get a closer look. If it were just a swarm, Crimmins said, he would have left the bees alone because swarms move on after a few days.

Amazed at what he saw, he estimated that at least 10,000 bees had "eight or 10 frames of honeycomb already drawing out, full of honey and baby bees."

"They'll swarm that high, I've seen that before. What's unusual is they settled and decided to colonize that high attached to cement and metal," he said. "Our bee inspector said that's rare."

And once bees colonize, "they're not going to leave," Crimmins said. "They had changed from looking for a home to saying, 'This is home.'"

Hodge also marveled at how the bees got to the area considering that honeybees never get far from their nest.

Crimmins said bees that gather nectar (which they turn into honey) don't fly more than a mile from the hive and that distance is even less for a swarm.

He said he believes the Cathedral's bees came from a mother hive somewhere in downtown Little Rock because swarms have been reported in the area over the past couple of years.

The problem with leaving the bees is that, even though they would be fine in the heat, Crimmins said they would not survive cold weather without protection, which would be a shame.

"They would have drawn out 25,000 to 30,000 bees by the time winter hit," he said. "The queen will lay up to 1,200 eggs a day and she was really doing well."

Crimmins agreed to take the bees but needed a way to reach them, and Hodge arranged for parishioner Bruce Hum, of Hum Hardware & General Store in Sherwood, to lend them a cherry picker.

So at 7 a.m. Friday, June 13, Crimmins and Cathedral maintenance man Scott Brecht, clothed in protective jackets, veils and gloves, took a 10-framed wooden beehive box up in the lift and began dislodging sections of honeycomb.

Crimmins then attached the sections, covered with bees and honey, with rubber bands to the wooden frames inside the box. This was to preserve what the bees had already built and encourage them to continue the process inside the frames.

With honey dripping everywhere, Crimmins said, "It was kind of a sticky mess up there," but a tasty one. After they finished, he and several onlookers enjoyed a sweet snack by sucking honey out of the excess honeycomb.

As expected, about two to three percent of the bees were lost. "You're never going to catch them all when you try to move a hive," Crimmins said.

Now, after nearly a month in their new home, he said the Cathedral's bees are healthy and growing into a stable colony.

For now he is feeding them honey and keeping them separated from the other 10 hives at the ranch.

"Whenever you get beehives next to each other, a strong hive will rob a weak hive and kill it," he said.

The bees have permanently attached their honeycomb to the frames and Crimmins has stacked another 10-frame box onto the first. These boxes make up the beehive body and honey produced in these are reserved for the bees to live on through the winter.

Each box is 10 inches deep by 2 feet long and 16 to 18 inches wide. The narrow frames (like window frames) are stacked up closely, side-by-side, inside the boxes.

Once the body is full, Crimmins said he will stack another smaller box, called a super, to collect excess honey for human consumption. He expects to be able to add the super by September. When full, supers contain three gallons of honey. "That's pretty good for the first year," he said.

Crimmins also hopes to give the first batch of honey from the Cathedral's bees to Bishop Anthony B. Taylor this fall.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's his honey," he said. "It's his bees."