THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 20, 1997 TAG: 9701170172
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LAWRENCE MADDRY
LENGTH: 87 lines
UNBEELIEVABLE!
A quick look inside the huge convention hall in the Omni International Hotel in Norfolk last weekend was enough to tip off a total stranger about the nature of the convention in progress.
Yep. The annual meeting of the American Beekeeping Federation was in progress.
More than 500 members from about every state and several foreign countries had gathered to talk bees.
And there was plenty of bee stuff on sale. Bee bonnets, bee jewelry, bee books, bee buttons, bee postcards, clothing with netting attached to hats, bee honey in 50 flavors, bee combs, honey bottles in dozens of shapes and sizes, honey recipes, honey candy, beeswax, quilts embroidered with bees . . . you name it.
Interesting items and people everywhere. On a tiered stand were about two dozen beautiful open-topped, orange-yellow, beeswax globes holding a beeswax candle inside.
What made the exquisite creations exceptional were the dried flowers and plants arranged in delicate patterns on the wax bowl's exterior. Each of the patterns is named for one of the 12 tribes of Israel.
The bowls' exteriors were decorated with forget-me-nots, fern, verbena, alyssum and such - are made by the Olde Virginia Candle Shoppe in Harrisonburg.
Michael Bennett is a member of the three families in Harrisonburg that make the hand-dipped candles. The families live in the same house, Michael said.
``We work together, share everything for the common good in the same way that bees do,'' he said, a soft smile playing across his lips.
After admiring those candles, I ran into the vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation - a tall, gangling gent in jeans, denim jacket and cowboy boots.
David Hackenberg had the appearance of a cowpoke who'd ambled over from the bunkhouse. Actually, he lives in Lewisberg, Pa.
``Yeah, I keep a few bees,'' he said. David is modest. He's a big-time bee rancher who moves 8 million bees up and down the East Coast on huge trucks, pollinating crops by renting out his bees. He ships his bees to northern states in the spring to pollinate apple orchards and to Maine a little later to pollinate the blueberry crop.
``We ship 7,000 truckloads of pumpkins from Pennsylvania to Virginia each year for use as Halloween Jack O' Lanterns,'' he said. ``My bees pollinate the pumpkins.''
Agricultural crops that are bee dependent are valued at about $10 billion, he said. ``And you couldn't have cow milk without bees, because bees pollinate the grass.''
Each winter, David puts his Pennsylvania bees on flatbed trucks - about 2,000 hives - and takes them to Dade City, Fla., for the winter. He has to make about three round trips, because there are so many bees to be moved.
``The bees can't take the cold winters in Pennsylvania,'' he said. ``They like to winter in Florida about as much as I do. You can almost see them smiling when they get there.''
Problem is that when he's loaded the wooden hives atop the flatbed truck and covered them with netting, folks don't always smile when they see him coming down Interstate 95.
``Yep, restaurants are something of a problem,'' he said, with some understatement. He said he makes it a practice to always park in the back, where customers won't be as upset by the buzzing. Sometimes the sound coming from the back of the truck is a high-voltage wire.
Bees tend to go in and out of the hives during the daylight hours, and no matter how carefully he drapes the hives with netting, a few get away. And if there's a rip in the netting, thousands will buzz away.
``That's why I make it a practice to eat in hurry,'' he said.
Truck inspection stations tend to be a nuisance, but many officials at the stations wave him through.
``The problem is when you stop the truck the bees are going to want to fly out no matter what,'' he said. He ran into one difficult situation at a Florida inspection station.
``There were several trucks ahead of me, and the longer I waited, the more bees came out into the netting and escaped,'' he recalled. Finally, the inspector came over and told him that inspecting the truck wasn't going to be a problem.
``My daddy used to raise bees, and he could keep 'em away by smoking a cigar,'' the inspector said.
The the inspector crawled under the truck with a cigar in his mouth to check the brakes. Seated in the truck cab, David watched the inspector through the rear view mirror.
``Now when I wiggle my foot, you apply your brakes,'' the inspector shouted from beneath the truck.
David never saw the foot wiggle. It just disappeared.
``The next time I saw him he was running down the road slapping at bees,'' David said.