He had to buy the hives, fresh from a month-long gig pollinating almond trees, because of the number of dead hives he’s had to clean up this winter from his collection.
“This has been one of the worst bee death years all over the United States,” he said. “I’ve been getting calls every day from people asking me if we have bees for sale.”
The implications of a disappearing bee population are more profound than one might think.
“If they all died off, we’d go hungry,” Popp said, noting that his bees pollinate much of the area’s soy beans and other crops. Although they get pollen from corn, he said, honey bees don’t pollinate the plants. “Thirty percent of the food we eat is pollinated by honey bees.”
For the past six seasons, however, the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder has also become a major factor in the honey bee’s decline.
“When a colony collapses, you’ll just open up the hive and not see any bees there,” Popp said.
The exact cause of CCD isn’t yet known, but it could be a combination of factors, including pesticides that people use on their lawns and gardens, warmer than normal winters and the on-going suburbanization of American farmland.
According to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, the total number of managed honey bee colonies has decreased from 5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million today.
Reports by the Environmental Protection Agency suggest that as many as 40 percent to 50 percent of bee hives in the United States succumbed to CCD in the 2012-13 winter.
Honey bees provide several health benefits. Popp, who started building his empire of hives after retiring from General Motors in 1995, also sells bee pollen health supplements and creams, and he’s a firm believer in using honey bee stings to help cure ailments such as arthritis.
“I’ll let them sting me,” Popp said. “But I can’t convince anyone else to do it.”
And then there are the health benefits of eating raw, local honey — what many call nature’s wonder food.
Last weekend, a flat-bed truck delivered 200 hives of Italian honey bees, one of the more docile species of bees, to a Vizedom Road farm owned by Popp’s friend, retired educator Bill Huth.
Popp and his daughter Tracy examined every hive then spent the week taking the hives to their home operation near Collinsville and 40 other strategic locations around Butler, Preble and Warren counties. Popp currently has about 500 working hives.
“They’ll be ready to start making honey as soon as the blooms start,” he said.
“I don’t like to put more than 20 hives in a bee yard,” he said, “and I like to keep them a couple of miles apart, and I like to have them near some woods.”
Honey bees have a foraging range of three to four miles, he said.
Popp is also expecting the arrival of 2,000 “nuc boxes” from Mississippi next month. Nuc boxes, shorthand for “nuclear colonies,” are a smaller version of the traditional hive. A traditional hive will contain about 60,000 worker bees. During the summer, the worker bees, which are all female, will literally work themselves to death, having a lifespan of about 28 or 29 days.
Once the new hives start producing brood, Popp said he’ll buy some queen bees and make his own nuc boxes.
Apart from the purposeful stings for health reasons, Popp said he has gotten so used to stings that they don’t bother him anymore, although Tracy had a little bit of swelling in her right hand from a trio of stings she received earlier in the week.
“I’ve had them go in my year, up my nose, but I’ve never been stung on the eyeball,” Popp said, “but they have got me on the eyelid.”
Popp sells his honey at his farm, 3134 Oxford-Middletown Road in Milford Twp., at Jungle Jim’s, Whole Foods and at some area Kroger stores.
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