Local man raises millions of honeybees

Ron Wehr doesn?t mind the occasional bee sting. Over the past 25 years, he?s had quite a few of them. It should come as no surprise since he houses tens of millions of bees on his property east of West Chester.

Wehr farms full-time, raises hogs and sheep and runs a construction business. What little free time he has left he devotes to growing honeycomb. Wehr said he got into bees many years ago because he had grown tired of corn and beans.

?I don?t know why I started a bee farm. I guess I just wanted a different hobby,? Wehr said.

Wehr said he was really ?gung-ho? about raising honey when he started his bee farm in the 1980s.

?I used to take my honey to the state fair to be judged,? Wehr said. ?I did that the first five or six years I grew honey.?

Wehr said the judges liked his honey so much they draped a purple ribbon around it.

Wehr was at the Washington Farmers Market Thursday. He had his honey on display and a glass case containing honeycomb and a swarm of bees. He said the bees in the glass case were a tiny fraction of the bees on his farm.

?There were probably 500 bees in there,? he said. ?I wanted people to see what a bee colony looks like. Some bee keepers keep the bees in there all year. Not me. It?s no use to me keeping them in there.?

Wehr has 300 bee colonies on his farm and each colony is home to 60,000 to 80,000 bees. That means Wehr has anywhere from 18 million to 24 million bees in his backyard.

?I?m the biggest livestock producer in the county,? Wehr laughed.

Unlike many bee keepers, Wehr does not wear a protective suit when he?s around the bees.

?I?m not afraid of being stung by bees,? he said. ?Some people wear their bee keeper?s suit. I don?t wear anything. I get stung two or three times in the face. The bees don?t sting too much, really. Once you get used to the stings, you stop wearing suits. I would rather take a few bee stings than sweat to death.?

The bees aren?t too keen on someone coming into their hive and stealing their hard-earned honey, Wehr said. He said extracting the honey makes the bees irate and can lead to a few stings. But what really drives the bees up a wall is when someone gets too close to their young.

?They don?t want you to kill their babies,? he said.

The honeycomb is in a box, and Wehr has to stick his hand in the box and pull out the comb, bees and all. He said the bees are so tightly compacted in the box that he practically needs a prybar to get them off.

?I blow the bees out with a leafblower,? he said. ?Then I bring the comb back to the house. I can only do about four boxes of honey in an hour, and I have 600 boxes out there.?

Each of the 300 colonies produces 70 to 80 pounds of honey. Wehr said this year is shaping up to be a good year as he has gotten 80 to 90 pounds from his colonies. He is in the process of harvesting honey and said he tries to get done every year by Sept. 1.

Rain is not good for his honey business, so Wehr was worried that he wouldn?t make much money in June when it rained often. Since June, rain has been scarce, which is bad for his row crops but good for his bees.

?When it rains, it takes two to three days for the nectar to come back to the flower,? Wehr said. ?Bees also like warm weather, so this summer has been very good for them.?

Wehr has to leave 70-80 pounds of honey for the bees to eat over the winter. If he doesn?t, he has to buy other feed such as corn syrup to keep them alive.

September is an important month for bees because those born that month usually live over the winter while those born earlier do not. Wehr said this is the time of year he treats his bees for mites, because he wants to save as many young bees as he can for next year?s crop of honey.