Busy as a bee

Phillip Booker stays busy since rekindling interest in beekeeping

by John English Hoopla Correspondent

Phillip Booker first became interested in beekeeping as a young teenager when it was assigned to him as a chore by his grandparents in Arizona.

Following a four decade-long hiatus from what is referred to as apiculture, the Weatherford man resumed it as a hobby eight years ago.

“My wife bought me a little starter hive,” Booker said. “So I just kind of ran with it. It’s a knowledge-based hobby, which means you have to think a lot. That’s probably what I enjoy about it the most.”

Booker, 60, will soon be helping others to better understand the insect that is critical to the survival of life on earth and stressed that their preservation is of the utmost importance.

“It really comes down to pollination,” Booker said. “There are different estimates, but between 75 and 95 percent of our food comes from bees. Take almonds for instance. In an almond field, you get 215 pounds of almonds per acre without bees, but if you have bees, you get more than 2,000 pounds. It is phenomenally higher with bees.”

Booker’s wife, Julie, is president of the 20th Century Club of Weatherford, which will be hosting a workshop this month themed “Protect the Pollinators.”

Booker, 60, who is a licensed master electrician and currently works for Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, will make a presen- tation to the group at 10 a.m. on May 20 at 321 South Main Street in Weatherford. At the honeybee workshop, Booker will have a bee hat, jacket and gloves, all of which kids will be allowed to try on.

“My wife asked me to talk a little bit about bees and how honey gets made,” Booker said. “And also how I extract it from the comb. I’m also going to have an observation hive that I picked up specifically for this event, where there is a frame that is laminated plexiglass, and you can see the bees move around on one of the frames inside the hive. We’re also going to set up an extractor so that the kids can play with that when they come in. We’re going to try to make it as interactive as possible. We are going to have some honey there that they can taste, and we will cut open a honey comb so they can see the inside. We’ll also extract some honey.”

The group will give out small jars of honey and have some coloring pages for kids as well.

Booker will also discuss some of the problems that the bee population is currently facing.

“Bees are threatened because there’s a mite that has been attacking them,” Booker said. “And then there is a pesticide issue. But the pesticide issue is mainly that people are not following instructions. When you follow the instructions on the label and use your pesticides in the evening after the bees have already gone to their hives, we won’t have as big a die off as we have been having.

“This time of year, people are applying it in the middle of the afternoon when the bees are out foraging. If you wait until the evening when the bees are in for the night, the next morning, the pesticides will not affect the bees as much.”

Booker said there are some misconceptions about honeybees as well.

“In general, bees are very docile insects,” on P. 6)

(Continued from P. 4)

Booker said. “Each bee has a role in its life, and the very last role they have before their lives are worn out is guard bee. The last thing it wants to do is sting somebody, because if it stings somebody it dies. Now if it feels threatened it will sting, but that’s only if someone swats at them. Otherwise, they will usually leave you alone if you leave them alone.”

So what should a person do if they encounter a hive or swarm?

“If it’s not bothering anybody, just let it be,” Booker said. “Or call a beekeeper, and we’ll come over and collect it and put it into a hive. If we do that, they have about a 95 percent chance of survival. If the bees stay in the wild, they probably have about a 10 percent chance of making it, because they it might go to someone’s house and get sprayed with Raid. Or, they might get into a piece of farm equipment, and once it starts up, it will tear it apart, so you just don’t know.”

Booker, who served in the U.S. Air Force and has traveled all over the world, said he hopes people take away a few things from the workshop.

“I want for people to learn about bees and their process and life cycle, and how the bees’ culture is collective and not independent,” Booker said. “You can’t make a bee do anything you want it to do, but you can coax it and with a little trial and error, you can work with them.”

The hobby does have its own perils, and Booker said he has received his share of stings.

“At least two or three,” Booker laughed. “No, I’ve had a wardrobe malfunction where I got probably 60 stings. Everything that could go wrong went wrong, but you know, you learn from it. I sealed off my suit and got to a safe distance away, and then what I found works best is Benadryl and Pepcid.”

Booker no longer swells up when he is stung as he has built up a resistance, and in spite of the problems confronting the world’s bee population, the Weatherford man said there is hope.

“We’ve learned a lot about this mite and different ways to treat it,” Booker said.

“Bees are also starting to build a resistance to them and learning how to self-clean their hives to get rid of them. But we’re not quite there yet. There’s still work to do.”