Bees 'winter' in Mullins, spend the other months traveling the U.S.

For most people, dragging your family across the country to work is a foreign idea; even going cross-country for a vacation is unusual for many. However, Ken and Joy Stone of Madison, N.Y., take an opposite mindset when it comes to traveling with their family, even when their family numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

The Stones are commercial migratory beekeepers and every year they move with the changes of the season throughout the country. “We pretty much just travel across the country with the bloom,” Ken Stone said. “We start up with the beginning of the year … we just keep moving from there on out.”

The Stones run what Ken calls a “Mom and Pop” operation that has only two employees. Every now and then they will employee the use of a truck and a forklift. Their operation is not only self-sufficient, it is also quite dynamic, as they move their hives from South Carolina, to California, Maine, New York, and then back to Maine. That is the end of their pollinating. The bees winter in Mullins.

“Without bees, there would be no crops,” Stone says. “A lot of people don’t think about bees and all the good that they do, but almost all of our food is pollinated.”
For the bees, the rest that they get during the winter in South Carolina is key to the annual journey they make across America. “In January, we start getting our bees ready in South Carolina, and then we send the best of them to California to pollinate almonds,” he said.

“Around March, (we will) get the bees ready to go to Maine to pollinate blueberries, and then we take them to New York to make wild flower honey and then around October, we take them back to South Carolina for the winter.”

When stationed in South Carolina, the bees and Stones take up residence on the Huggins’ farm in Marion County, as was the case this past spring.
“What our bees do down in South Carolina is gain strength for the upcoming season,” Stone says. “Down in South Carolina, (there) is some of the most nutritious pollen in the world.”
Stone likens the bees to children, going on to say that if you wanted strong children, you would give them the protein they needed to be strong.
Pollen is the bee’s protein, and they need that to be strong, he says.

When traveling from Maine on the first leg of their journey, Stone says that the population of many of the hives he carries can number up to 50 to 60,000 per hive. The numbers are at their strongest at the beginning of the season.

The pollen in South Carolina is one of the big factors in deciding how big the Stone’s bee population will be for the up coming year. “We get paid by how many bees we bring with us to pollinate and for us to have a lot of bees, the nutrition in the pollen down in South Carolina is very important,” he says.
While many beekeepers across the country are finding a rapidly increasing number of their colonies deserted due to a mysterious condition called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), Stone and his wife have not had the displeasure of having their bees disappear.

“CCD is something that people really aren’t sure of what it is, aside from it being something new,” he said. “It is a very real thing, but I haven’t had any sort of first had experience with it.”

Many possible clues lay in deserted hives as the honey created by the bees remains untouched in cases of CCD, but in other cases where colonies have disappeared, bees from other hives would take the remaining honey.

“If the colony dies from CCD, neighboring bees won’t touch the honey,” he said. “There is something wrong with that honey, but we are not quite sure yet.”
Stone said he sees the United States’ government’s intervention as another problem concerning the beekeeping industry in this country. “One of our biggest problems is our own government,” he said. “The fact that we get honey dumped in from countries like China and Argentina is quite ridiculous.”
Stone explained that the United States has made a habit over the past decade or so of purchasing surplus honey from the two countries to unnecessarily re-enforce the amount of honey within the country.

“They are expecting us to compete with it really and the fact is, the honey from these countries is not good honey, but it gets bought at a lesser price and put into things that it shouldn’t,” he said. “There is such a high amount of pesticides and other things that is in this honey. Things that are illegal for us to even own in the United States.”
Stone said he sees the importation of a lower quality of honey in the United States as one of the reason for their being fewer beekeepers nationwide. “If there wasn’t already a surplus, there would actually be a need for more beekeepers,” he said.