Cover story: Beekeepers

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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 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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anti-bacterial qualities, so it helps to immunize the hive a little bit. Drug companies actually use it and it’s used for varnishes, including the polish they use on Stradivarius violins.”

Once Simpson learned about beehives, he was hooked on the hobby and called a friend to help him make three hives.

“I had the hives before I knew anything about bees, so I did it backward,” said Simpson, who will be 70 in December. “I built the top bar hives and then I found out about Ray Chapman in Bunker Hill, who had been a beekeeper for 35 years. He’s a retired plumber and the ex-mayor of Bunker Hill.

“After much cajoling, I persuaded him to be my mentor and we’ve become fast friends. He’s the one who recommended me for Beekeeper of the Year.”

It wasn’t long before Simpson’s little hobby became a big one, and his collection of hives continued to grow.

“I started off with three hives with Ray and a week later, I bought another one,” Simpson said. “I asked him to help me hive a top bar hive because you have to persuade bees to accept your hive. The top bar isn’t the easiest hive to persuade bees to stay, so we reset the frames to fit and put the bees in there and they stayed.

“Bees won’t leave their brood, which is their babies. They’ll die before they leave the brood.”

Like many beekeepers, Simpson started to catch swarms and his bee yard started to grow.

The largest swarm he caught consisted of 50,000 to 60,000 bees, which is enough to produce five boxes of honey.

“We started to look for places to put bees and at one point I even advertised on Craig’s List about ‘looking for a place to park bees.’ You would be surprised how many people responded and told those people they would be rewarded with a portion of the harvest,” Simpson said.

“When it was all said and done, we had bees in O’Fallon, Marine, Prairietown, Moro and all over Edwardsville. It was running me ragged, so I started to move all my hives closer to home and I made a circumference all around

see BEEKEEPERS, Page 20

Sign in the front of beekeeper Tom Simpson’s house. (Thomas Turney/For The Edge)t