SOUTH GEORGIA HONEYBEES

ARTIST BIO

CHARLES R. WILLIAMS

Charles R. Williams is an artist and educator. Williams grew up in Central Florida and spent his childhood visiting relatives in Georgia. His time spent between these two states allowed Williams to develop a deep understanding of the South that is seen implicitly in his work.

“It is a place of beauty and tragedy, and the more that one understands how the beauty and tragedy are enmeshed, the more the place and the soul become one. I am fascinated by perceptions of our world as natural and constructed. Myths, memories, storytelling and folklore are so much a part of who we are, how we speak and how we spend our time. I am piecing together a puzzle that will never be complete.”

Williams earned his Master of Fine Arts from Florida State University in 2003. In 2004, he came on faculty at Albany State University as a professor of painting and teaching. Today, he's the associate vice dean of ASU's College of Arts and Sciences, and teaches courses in art history and museum studies. He and his wife, Nicole, executive director of the Albany Area Arts Council, enjoy the outdoors, music, museums and traveling. “She tolerates my idiosyncrasies, and I do my best to keep her laughing.”

“The South is a cultural melting pot filled with harmonies and dissonances,” Williams said.

Visit chazzwilliamsart.com to view more of Williams' art. Get the one-of-a-kind piece of art featured on the cover at the Albany Area Chamber. Contact us at (229) 434-8700 or marketing@albanyga.com.

South Georgia

honey bees

all the

Buzz...

Photos courtesy of Todd Urick, 4C Academy and Kat Tucker

Dale Richter’s roots with beekeeping go deep, all the way back to when he was just five years old, learning the ropes with his grandfather.

“He had bees, and I just ventured out there and started helping him with it,” said Richter. “As I grew up, going through school, people, teachers and students, knew me as a beekeeper, so I was always doing presentations in school.”

Now, Richter has the prestigious certification of Master Beekeeper, manages the apiary at President Jimmy Carter’s boyhood home in nearby Plains, and owns and runs Buzz Fuzz Bee Removal.

Pollination, which is so often done by honey bees, has a statewide economic impact of $267 million, according to data from the University of Georgia (UGA), and honey bees are responsible for pollinating many of the crops in Southwest Georgia, including blueberries, watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes and, occasionally, cotton. Many of these crops – whose production plays an important role in the Southwest Georgia "breadbasket" that supports Georgia's top industry of agriculture − would be much smaller and have smaller yields without the help of the honey bee.

“You can take a beehive − normally you want at least 10, but sometimes you take as many as a semi-truck load − and you put them on the crop,” said Richter. “That just, literally, saturates the crop and the bloom with pollination. You get stronger blooms, bigger blooms, and therefore a stronger crop.

“When I was at UGA, we actually had a graduate assistant and her job was to go out and cover blooms individually with pieces of screen, and then we would see what the difference was between the ones that couldn’t get pollinated and the ones that did get pollinated. This particular crop was watermelons, and there was a huge difference in the size (between the two groups).”

And for some beekeepers, it was this connection to pollination that drove them to get involved with beekeeping in the first place. That was certainly the case for Monte McDonald, the owner of McDonald’s Farm and a huge honey producer in Lee County, who works as a contractor at Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany full time and runs his honey business on the side.

“I like to grow gardens and all that kind of stuff,” said McDonald. “There came a time that we had a pretty nice garden growing and everything was blooming. But we weren’t getting any fruit. My friend next door was experiencing the same problem with his garden, and he came over one day.

"I said, 'Normally I can come out here and all you can hear is a buzz of bees, and there aren't any bees here.' He said it was the same way at his house.

“Right then (I decided). I’d already been considering (beekeeping) because I have a friend in South Carolina that started keeping bees,” Richter said, “and he’d been encouraging me to start doing it. I just decided that it was time to get in it.”

McDonald and his son started off small back in 2014, but he now keeps an average of about 40 hives and in 2021 produced 1,500 pounds of honey. His honey has won multiple local awards and in 2017, it won the local and state competition for “Black Jar Honey,” a title that judges purely on the taste of the honey.

“That was real rewarding to get that kind of accolade,” said McDonald. “We’re fortunate to make some good honey out here in Lee County. When we process honey, it’s all pure raw honey.”

McDonald’s award-winning honey can most often

be found at his booth at Tift Park Community Market in downtown Albany, as well as at a few local festivals throughout the year. Now McDonald is working toward obtaining a certificate from the Georgia Department of Agriculture that will allow him to sell his honey to retailers and get his honey in stores throughout the area. Although McDonald is still a relatively new beekeeper (at least compared to Richter, who has been doing it since he was a child), he understands how important bees are to the area. “Beekeeping and farming and agriculture, they go together,” said McDonald. “They go hand in hand because without the bees, a lot of the crops wouldn’t get pollinated. A lot of the food you eat is pollinated by bees. There’s other pollinators, too, not just We were standing honey bees, but a lot of crops depend on pollination. They’re out there in the necessary and they’re great garden, and for your flowers and all these individual gardens that people we came to the have. There’s a lot of benefit to the honey bee.” realization that While more experienced we needed bees. beekeepers like Richter are often still the norm and bee populations have continued to decline in recent years, Southwest Georgia has seen growth in beekeeping interest thanks to the SOWEGA Beekeepers Club. Membership in the club - which meets at Albany's famed Chehaw Park - has tripled in the past year, and the group saw record attendance at its most recent beekeeping school in February 2022, with 114 students. According to club president Kat Tucker, they average one new member each week, not including all the students from the school who automatically became members. Having got his start in the club, McDonald stressed the importance of the club for those interested in beekeeping without any real experience. “When you become a member of a bee club like that, you meet a lot of different people in all stages of beekeeping from a novice right on up to the commercial guys,” said McDonald. “You get a lot of free advice, you might call it. You get a lot of opinions as well, so it’s one of those things, you just mix them all up and pull out what you think is what works for you the best. But the bee club is definitely for anybody, and I encourage people all the time to come to the club meetings if they’re interested in bees.” And while McDonald fits the image people often have in their head about what beekeeping looks like, keeping bees to sell honey is just a small snapshot of the industry as a whole. Richter is an example of another important aspect

of the beekeeping industry with his professional bee removal service. Richter spends his days traveling all over South Georgia performing inspections of homes or other buildings where bees may be living, removing the bees, taking the bees either back to his own hive or one of the many teachers and mentees he often gives bees to, and sterilizing all of his equipment. Although Richter’s side of the beekeeping industry takes much more experience because of things he may encounter, such as plumbing and electrical wiring, it still shows that the world of beekeeping is much broader than outsiders often think.

Richter’s managing of the apiary at Jimmy Carter’s boyhood home is yet another side of beekeeping, and an an example of how bees have an impact not just on agriculture, but agritourism. In addition to being a part of the attraction for visitors at Jimmy Carter’s home, bees are also crucial to places to places such as Mark's Melon Patch in nearby Dawson and Calhoun Produce in nearby Ashburn. The crops these places produce, such as pumpkins, melons and strawberries, draw visitors year after year.

Beekeeper Broadus Williams highlights another side of beekeeping: raising queens. Williams’ interest in raising queens started out of necessity because, as he puts it, he was getting tired of coming home from work, seeing his bees swarming in a tree (a behavior that’s seen when the hive gets too crowded and part of the colony tries to find a new home), and having to climb up there to catch them. Although he has sold some of his queens, he does it more out of “necessity” so he doesn’t have to catch so many swarms and also for beekeeping friends.

Patrons of Albany's Pretoria Fields Brewery and Pretoria Fields Collective can appreciate the more commercial side of beekeeping and the contributions that chemist and beekeeper Liv Lawnick and her team have made to products there. Bees Learn more about the SOWEGA Beekeepers Club at sowegabeekeepersclub.com, (229) 854-6135 and on Facebook.

Membership in the SOWEGA Beekeepers Club has tripled in the last year.

helped with the pollination of berries for the collective's Farmberry Gose, the strawberries and the basil for the Strawberry Basil Gose, and provided honey for the popular Brown Thrasher, an American brown ale named after the state bird of Georgia.

Although honey is often the most common byproduct of beekeeping, beeswax, too, has its impact on the region as it can be used to make cosmetics, furniture polish, and candles.

And then of course, there are hobbyist beekeepers like Kat Tucker with the SOWEGA Beekeeping Club, who was drawn in after she and her husband attended a 2018 bee lab hosted by the club.

“We just fell in love with the beehives and the bees,” said Tucker. “We just knew someday we were going to have hives.”

Other members of the club, such as Stan Okron and Sophie Rabun, are hobbyist beekeepers drawn in as adults by the awe-inspiring bees.

“I was just totally blown away,” said Okron. “I still remember when I pulled my first frame and you can get that smell of the nectar and the honey. It just had this scent. I was totally hooked.”

“I’m just fascinated with them working themselves to death, but then someone comes to carry on the same,” said Rabun, who just got her start in beekeeping with the school hosted by the club back in February.

For Rabun, at least, these tiny, fascinating creatures have something important to teach us all about life.

“I want (my son) to learn the importance of how this little honey bee starts off,” said Rabun. “I want him to see that it's home based. Young people need to see that they need to take care of their homes first.”

Broadus Williams raises queen bees that are used to start new hives when the orignal hive gets too crowded.

For all of us who call Southwest Georgia home, the importance of what home means and what we can do for our home may be an important lesson to learn from the humble honeybee.