Charles Lorence prefers the summer dew point near 60 degrees, his afternoons heating up to the low or mid-80s, and just a little humid. Nighttime temps are best in the 60s.
Lorence is not that picky, but his bees are. From March through October, the retired Aurora schoolteacher awakens at 5 a.m. to check the weather reports. The highs and lows of the day will determine the high and lows in the business he loves: the business of keeping bees.
A beekeeper for 38 years, Lorence, 66, said the coolest July on record has not helped him or his bees one bit. Honey production is down about one-third, he estimated, because bees prefer to collect nectar on sunny, warm days with a little humidity. Cool and cloudy with occasional showers doesn’t suit them well. And lush green growth doesn’t mean much: Bees want flowers.
Last week, Lorence and beekeeper Ron Hilger of Sugar Grove worked quietly and swiftly among the 23 hives Lorence keeps at the Morton Arboretum. The bee yard was a simple, peaceful scene, a summer morning in the meadow with monarchs landing on the milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace waving in the breeze. But where Lorence and Hilger worked in their white bee coveralls, hat and veil, it was a buzz of activity. Thousands of bees had to deal with the fact that it was honey harvest day. Lorence had come to take home his honey — about 2,500 pounds of it.
In checking a hive, home to 40,000 to 60,000 bees, Lorence pulled one super, or tray from the brood box where the bees raise their family. Like finding a needle in a haystack he located the one queen of the colony. She was attempting to find an open spot to lay more eggs. In her lifetime she will lay 3 million to 4 million eggs at the rate of 2,000 eggs a day.
Lorence began keeping bees in 1971 after he read a magazine article about apiaries while waiting at a dentist’s office. His father had kept hives when Lorence was a child in Racine, Wis., and the boxes were still at the family farm, so he started with two hives.
His hobby soon became a sideline job, and when Lorence retired from teaching in 2000, it became his passion and second profession. For 15 years he worked as a bee inspector.
Now Lorence and his wife, Karen Lorence, a retired home economics teacher, own and operate Lorence’s Honey Bee Haven, “because the bee yard is a haven to me,” he said. He manages more than 140 hives (125 in Illinois and the rest in Wisconsin), she makes honey-based skin-care products and candles, and he teaches beekeeping classes for the Wheaton and Geneva Park Districts. Most of the Lorences’ honey-extracting operation is in Wisconsin, but they sell their honey and products at the arboretum gift shop, a few independent grocery stores and health food stores, farm stands, and at the Saturday-morning farmers market outside Naperville’s 5th Avenue Station.
“This is work but not as demanding,” he said. “I don’t punch a clock or teach every day. I go to the bee yards on a nice day when the bees are happier and are out gathering nectar. It’s always amazing to me. Did you know that one-third of the food we eat depends on bees for pollination?”
Rest assured that Lorence, co-president of the Cook-DuPage Beekeepers Association, has a lot more of those “did you know” questions in his back pocket. He is both beekeeper and teacher at heart.
Lorence has kept hives at the arboretum since 1993, and the honey produced there by his Italian three-banded bees is some of the purest honey because the bees forage for nectar from the flowers of the nearby Linden trees, he said. Nectar from the Lindens makes for mild and pure honey.
Lorence’s bees produce about 6 tons of honey a year, averaging 100 pounds a hive. At his first arboretum harvest of the summer, to be followed by another in late August, he found that some frames were packed with honey and some were not. He would not take home as much as he had last year.
“Some make more and some make less, but this year they are struggling,” he said. We need a good stretch of two to three weeks where it is high in the 80s and there are not a lot of rainy periods. Dryer is a little better for bees. When plants are stressed a little, the flowers secrete more nectar, and the bees can harvest more nectar to make more honey.”
What is a good year for one beekeeper may be a rougher one for another. Lorence is joined by 1,400 registered beekeepers in Illinois, according to Steve Chard, apiary inspection supervisor for the Illinois Department of Agriculture in Springfield.
Weather conditions vary among southern, central and northern Illinois, and previous summer droughts have hit some Downstate beekeepers hard. This year’s honey crop numbers are still to be reported. About 20 of those registered beekeepers manage more than 100 colonies or more than 500 colonies, Chard said. Illinois is considered a hobby beekeeper state.
The Dakotas, followed by California, are the biggest producers of honey, with huge commercial beekeeping operations trucking migratory bees across the country to custom-pollinate crops such as almonds, fruit and watermelon. The pumpkin crop in central Illinois’ Tazewell County, the top producer of pumpkins in the nation, is custom-pollinated by bees, Chard said.
Chard said he is optimistic that many new beekeepers have registered with the state this year, and beekeeper Ken Haller of Elmhurst shares that optimism.
Haller, who has 15 colonies in the Glenview area, is past-president of the Illinois State Beekeepers Association, whose membership has grown to 610 from 400 in 2007.
“Not all are active, but the vast majority are,” Haller said. “We have seen a spike in beekeeping interest.”
Beekeepers believe some people have become interested in bees since news spread about colony collapse disorder, in which for no known reason bees disappear, leaving behind the queen and starving infants. Although the condition has been attributed to many factors, including pesticides and radiation from cell phones, there is much research to be done, Lorence said. The good that has come of it is that people are more aware of the importance of bees to our food sources.
“One bee makes one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its whole life,” said Lorence, who has replaced sugar in his life with honey, and applauds his wife’s homemade fruit-and-honey smoothies. “Apples, strawberries, peaches, melons, almonds … all dependent on bees.”
“Honeybees are a miracle of nature,” Lorence likes to say. “Everybody pulls their load to keep the operation going. A [worker] bee’s whole life is about six weeks. They die when their wings are usually too tattered to carry them back from the field to the hive, and they perish on the job. I tell my classes that a bee’s life sounds like science fiction, but it’s true.
“From now through October is my busiest time. Now is the time of reward for the good beekeeper: the honey.”
