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Bee happy – The rise of urban beekeeping in Baton Rouge

Leaned against his pickup truck with a glass of iced tea, Dr. Steve Antrobus looks right at home in front of the worn-down barn of his farm in Ethel.

Antrobus spends most of his time in the city, working long days with his skin cancer patients. But on the weekends, the surgeon shrugs on a protective suit and heads to his farm to tend to his berry bushes and four hives containing tens of thousands of bees.

“A lot of my patients have spent a lot of time in the sun,” Antrobus says. “Gardeners, farmers, outdoors people. We talk about that kind of stuff, and one of them asked me, Do you have bees?’ I said no, and they said, Well, why not?'”

Smoker in hand, Antrobus makes the rounds to each of his hives, carefully removing the tops from each to check on the comb, remove excess honey to stave off overcrowding and stack up additional drawers. This gives a colony more room to grow.

Up close, the bees seem to share one mind, bustling back inside the hive at the calming influence of the smoke or buzzing around their keeper’s hands as he works.

“Each hive has its own personality, based off of the queen—these are nice bees,” Antrobus says of the hives he keeps near the pond on his property. He points back toward the buzzing hive behind his berry patch and adds, “Those are ornery bees.”

In Baton Rouge, Antrobus is just one of many who have joined the trend of beekeeping in their spare time. Bolstered by monthly meetings of the Capital Area Beekeeping Association (CABA), resources for locals are more available than ever before.

CABA was founded in 1985, but there’s no time like the present for these local bee aficionados. The club now boasts a membership of more than 200 families from East to West Baton Rouge, with many of them deep inside the city.

Most members of CABA harvest and sell excess honey locally, like the team behind Bocage Bee & Honey, the capital area’s biggest distributor of local honey, with hives in Bocage and surrounding areas. Other keepers, like Antrobus, manage bees for the sake of sustainability.

A report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2013 found that the bee population in the United States. has dropped since the 1940s from 5 million to 2.5 million, and colonies continue to collapse due to pesticides, parasites and urban development. Crops like strawberries, peppers, okra, onions and others rely on honeybees for pollination. As long as bees teeter on the brink of the endangered species list, Louisiana cuisine—and food sources worldwide—will hang in the balance.

The upswing in beekeeping interest around Baton Rouge could be a step in the right direction. And according to Antrobus, there’s nothing to stop city residents from getting in on the action.

“My perspective is as a busy professional,” he says. “I work 10, 12 hours a day, five days a week. And I have found that it doesn’t take much time or effort.”

New beekeeper Laverne Simoneaux is proof of just that.

After leaving a 20-year career as a librarian, Simoneaux wanted to remain active. She now teaches elementary students who speak English as a second language, and in April she purchased a package of 3,500 bees to keep in the backyard of her Mid City home. Her protective gear is a selection of her own long sleeve shirts, straw hats and galoshes, plus a pair of $4 rubber gloves from Wal-mart. It’s a no-frills approach for Simoneaux, who doesn’t want anything fancy.

“My goal is not to go into the honey business,” Simoneaux says. “My goal is really a sustainability thing.”

Her daughter’s involvement with Slow Foods, an organization connecting communities with local, environmentally friendly food, first inspired Simoneaux to enrich her garden. After catching a few documentaries on colony collapse, Simoneaux began researching beekeeping and turned to CABA for support. She’s found much of the information she needs for her bees from tutorials on YouTube. She purchased her first hive through Craigslist.

Unlike the tall, stacked Langstroth hives that Antrobus and most beekeepers use, Simoneaux favors a long, horizontal top-bar hive that requires less heavy lifting. She also lets her bees create their own comb without the pre-made foundations that other beekeepers often choose, opting for the most natural habitat she can muster in her city backyard. She keeps them hydrated with sugar water laced with lemongrass and spearmint, and watches as they create their own busy, productive society.

As for her neighbors, Simoneaux says she’s never received a complaint about her bees.

“I live next to these three men who have a magnificent garden, and they’ve noticed some bees in their yard,” Simoneaux says. “It’s not like huge storms of killer bees. You’re just working in your yard, and you see honeybees.”

In fact, Simoneaux has found the city to be the perfect place to keep bees, thanks to the wide variety of plant life within the colony’s flying range. She says her bees are happy to help that growth along.

Some beekeepers sell their harvested honey, while some make it into soap or give it away to friends and family. But all are connected by a network of beekeepers spanning the capital area and growing larger.

From the outskirts of town to neighborhoods nestled behind restaurants and coffee shops, Baton Rouge bees are on the rise. Local beekeepers like Antrobus and Simoneaux are boosting our ecosystem, and all it takes is some research, the right resources and a little spare time on the weekend. labeekeepers.org | cabainfo.org

Turn the page for tips on how to start your own hive.

Do’s and Don’ts of Backyard Beekeeping
By Jessica Weimer O’Connor
Editor’s note: O’Connor is the Audience Development Manager for 225, Business Report and inRegister. She and her husband Anthony have been urban beekeepers for two years.

DO:
1. Choose a good spot. Requirements in Baton Rouge include simple items like providing a water source and having a fence or hedge near the hive.Ideal locations face the rising sun, have partial shade during the day and are accessible but out of the way of high-traffic parts of your property.

2. Join the Capital Area Beekeepers Association. For $10 a year you’ll learn first-hand from seasoned experts. Go to meetings. Read the newsletter. Ask other members for advice.

3. Shop local. Cut costs by finding a local beekeeper selling old items or visit a hardware store with beekeeping equipment. Just make sure it is certified disease-free.

4. Research. There are different breeds and queens, and you have to start with a package ordered through CABA or a nucleus from a local beekeeper. Packages typically include three pounds of bees by weight plus a mated queen. A nucleus costs a little more and involves working with a beekeeper who will raise a starter colony complete with stores of honey, eggs and pollen in your hive.

DON’T:
1. Try to figure it all out online. There’s no substitute for a hands-on approach like touring an apiary or offering to help a veteran beekeeper work their hive.

2. Obsess over getting stung. Heavy gloves and a full beekeeping suit can create more problems than they prevent in the Louisiana heat. Odds are that you will get stung a few times, but unless you’re allergic—you checked for that, right?—it will be a short-lived pain.

3. Throw in the smoker too quickly. Most new beekeepers—myself included—don’t get everything right the first (or second) time. Learn from your mistakes, remember that not every problem could have been prevented and don’t give up.