Clinton News-Record, 1976-10-21, Page 17it is!
o:
ill': and Wilfred Ross of Brucefield
Millions of busy bodl .s oorkin
1�, but to bass their home in
._ uiet Central Huron Co .nty
Mage, one would never knows• it.
In fact.: the two Huron County
hives have nearly a perfect set-up,
y don't have to pay their
Workers" any, money at all, lust a
Ile sugar water every once in .a
le.
ilfNred. Ross and his son Bill are
keepers, you see, and things are
literally busier thana beehive at
heir Brucefleldapiary as they
1
extract their annual crop of honey.
Usually, they have all done their
extraction by now, but because of
the wet cool summer. thebeeS Were
late laying in the nectar and so In
stead of being done collecting �e�cting their
annual sweet harvest, the Rtisses
were bust getting into full. swing
extracting on the Thanksgiving
weekend.
The Rseskeep about a thousand
hives in three counties, Hurron,'Perth
and Middlesex, and have a full-tirhe
job keeping track of all their various
''workers". •
Bill Ross removes the honey combs from the honey supers and loads them into
a special machine where they are uncapped. Bill, along with his father Wilfred,
have more than 1,000 hives that keeps the Brucefield business In honey money.
Each hive contains betty
and 30,000 beeSit and in a
each hive can produce nearly
s
pounds +cit. � which means the
�,, sof
bees must sit literally million..
flowers,j coVer thousands- of
miles in round trips.
Each, hive contains four boxes,
about two feet square .�. by le inches
deep, and the top two hives are
reserved for honey only. as only the
smaller worker bees can gain ad-
mittance to then.
The larger queen bee is restricted
to the bottom two boxes where her
Whole life consists of laying eggs to
propagate the species.
The top two boxes or "honey
supers" as the beekeepers call
them, are' removed in thefall and
taken back to the apiary where the
racks, or honeycombs, are removed
ancd the honey extracted. Each box,
or super, contains eight racks or
honey combs.
Extracting the nearly 20 tons of
honey that the Brucefield apiary
produces every year used to. be a
tiresome, back breaking job, but
Modern techniques-, developed
during the last few years have made
the job somewhat easier.
After the honey supers are
brought in from the field, they are
placed in a warm room for a few
days and then the long process
begins.
The racks are then removed from
the supers, and placed in a special
machine where they are uncapped.
The uncapping machine, which
takes the lid off the honey comb, so
to speak, is a highly specialized
machine, and son Bill Russ says it
was only the second one in Ontario.
There are still only a few in the
province.
From there, the racks are placed
in a large rotating drum that forces
out the honey by centrifugal force.
The empty combs are then removed,
and placed back in the supers where
they will be filled with honey again
next year by the» bees.
After coming out of the separator,
the honey flows to a heated tank and
by a series of flotation devices, the
remaining wax is taken out » of the
honey. The sweet warm honey is
then pumped up a long hose and
through another cloth filter to
clarify it even more, making it
ready for bottling or for bulk ship -
hf
public or
hsteurize
destroys some
e flays and nutrients of the
holey.
Pasteurizing is actually a poor
word to use in honey anyway. Bill
WS, because it implies that honey
is :dirty. He says it is one of the
purest foods known in nature, andall
that the pasteurizing does is stop the
honey from turning from a liquid to.
a crystal.
Besides being more .natural. Bill
says that . sells honey, in a
cu temers own container, for atiatif
65 cents per pound compared 10
nearly a $$i.20 in the stores. He says
he and his dad have 'regular
customers who return year after
year and would never think of
buying "store-bought" honey. The
occasional customer buys up to 50
pounds -of the bees honey at one
time.
For Bill, beekeeping started off as
a hobby. which he kept up when he
was an Ontario -Provincial Police
officer. " and he returned to
Brucefield to go into the beekeeping;
business -full time with his father in
1970.
While beekeeping does have its
advantages, one obvious question
8111 gets all the time is: how many
times have you been stung?
"How How many . hairs does a man
have on his head." was Bill's quick
response.
He .says that after being stung so
many times, he doesn't even notice
anymore and the stings don't
bother him, although he admitted
that some persons are allergic to
bees and can even die if they are
stung too many times.
But all of the Rosses bees are
mostly *Italian bees with a few
Caucasian hives, and unless
agitated, are relatively harmless.
The Rosses keep their bees all
winter, and unless the winter is
particularly severe, most survive.
Actually last Spring was par-
ticularly bad for bees, as a hot week
in April was followed by nearly a
month of cold weather. The over-
wintering bees only fly several times
before they die, and many hives had
not built up new offspring before the
warm weather returned in late May.
Bill . Ross also laments that its
getting tougher and tougher to
produce honey in Huron.
"This county was once a
beekeeper's paradise,"' Bili said, but
now with the emphasis on cash
cropping, there are fewer and fewer
clover and hay fields where the bees
can gather nectar.
The wide -spread use of herbicides
is also hard on the beekeeper, as
farmers, trying to keep the weeds
down, also hurt nearby flowering
crops.
"1 know that farmers have to
spray," Bill says, "but they are
overdoing it. They should be
educated to use the sprays properly
so that they do themselves good, and.
apairy
the environment too."
He also decries the spraying of
roadsides by county. highway and
township crews, who in their zeal to
keep the ditches and roadways
clean, also destroy the foundation
of the nectar gathering bees.
Each year, the Rosses find
themselves travelling farther and
farther in search of spots to rent for
their hives, and unless the trend
towards cash cropping . and in-
creased use of herbicides is
reversed. honey will once again
become a rare treat, eaten only by
the very rich.
Urban Miller of Dashwood, toads the decapped racks, or combs, into the Kelly
extractor where they will be spun to remove the honey. The Rosses waited I%
years for delivery of the machine. after the spinning, the combs, some more
than 50 years old, are loaded back into the boxes, or supers, and will be used by
the bees again next year.
Sior and
photos bij
James FItzgeraid