4 • Thursday, July 15, 2021 • On the Edge of the Weekend
A honey of a business
Sold Glen Carbon home to fledgling beekeepers By Scott Marion Hearst Newspapers EDWARDSVILLE — Beekeeping has been a sweet hobby for Tom Simpson, but he’s decided it’s time to cut back. Simpson has been a beekeeper for 11 years and sells his own honey to local businesses through his own business, Bethel Refuge Apiary. But Simpson is downsizing his apiary of 80 to 100 hives as he and his wife, Gay, prepare to move from Edwardsville to Bull Shoals, Arkansas. “I’m still undecided about how many hives I’ll have in Arkansas, but I hope to take some with me,” said Simpson, who was named Beekeeper of the Year by the Illinois State Beekeepers Association in 2018. “If not, then I’ll just have to start fresh in the spring. We only have one acre compared to the 14 acres we have here. “When I get to Arkansas, the flow of the nectar will almost be over, so I’ll have to feed
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my bees for them to survive. Bees do well on refined sugar and it actually stimulates the queen and helps her to produce more brood.” Simpson, a retired union boilermaker and a member of Belleville Local 363, had been retired for a year or two when he got an email about top bar hives. As it turned out, the message set him on the path to becoming a beekeeper. “Top bar hives are not the normal hive that most beekeepers use. We use a 10-frame Langstroth hive (the most common hive used in North America),” said Simpson, who recently sold his house to a Glen Carbon couple that recently got into beekeeping. “The top bar is pretty much the same design as the Langstroth except it didn’t have removable frames and it didn’t have the bee space. “Bee space is 3/8 of an inch — anything more, they build comb on it and anything less and the bees will fill with it propolis, which is a byproduct of tree sap. It has medicinal and
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