My name is Martin James and my company is, "Slide Ridge Honey" and we're based out of Mendon, Utah.
Utah State University sends around this pamphlet every year of extended learning classes. I was 8 years old and I says, "Mom, I gotta go!"
My mom took me up there. She had no interest in this but she did it for me.
So anyway, I took the class! I did all the assignments and that's when I started beekeeping.
That year, Dultmeier came in with their aerial sprayers and my bees all died.
So now I go into my teens and I started floorcovering, construction, and did all that. And so, met my wife and we dated.
So now I'm like 26, 27, 28 and we go camping with my wife.
So this swarm of wild bees lands in the campground and the camp directors, "Go back! Go back! There's wild bees! Save yourselves!"
I said, "oh really?" and I had never told my wife I was a beekeeper, never told her about the class and I said, "let's go look!"
And so yeah, sure enough there was this swarm that was on a little tree and it was all draped over and there were these heart-shaped bees.
And so the kids were kinda following me and I said, "Look! It's a baby bee hive!"
They're very docile, they're not aggressive whatsoever. It's like a baby calf and so you can actually stick your hand (and I stuck my hand right in it).
And I said, "They're full of honey, because that's their only food store". So it's like after Thanksgiving dinner, your bellies are full
and it's really hard to reach your shoes to tie them. Well, a bee has to bend it's thorax to sting you like this.
Well, it's full of honey so it really has a hard time bending to sting ya. So, they don't want to start anything, they're fully exposed.
So, long story short, I collected that bee hive and that hive, I produced 150 pounds of honey off of it that year.
So at that point I thought, you know, this is what I want to do! This is my passion. That was 15 years ago.
So now it's built into a really nice family business. We try to run about 3,000 colonies, 8% of the business is honey.
Pollination of agricultural crops is about 90% of what we do. So, there's 156 different agricultural crops that have to be commercially pollinated.
We work closely with Johnson Family Farms for tomatoes and all kinds of vegetables that we pollinate.
Thayne Tagge, Tagge's Fruits, and we talked one afternoon and he said, "Martin, my fruit is bigger and it's healthier and it's better"
But he says, "the quality, the flavor of it is 10 times".
So when you have a watermelon and it doesn't get pollinated properly, it looks like a bee stung it, it's not formed, it's not round.
Each one of those little seeds in there have to be pollinated. A raspberry - they don't form properly unless they're pollinated.
Each one of those little bumps on there is a seed and it has to be pollinated.
But when it gets full pollination, the flavor is remarkably different. You get a lot bigger fruit and it's redder, it's the good stuff!
So, does a glass of milk have to be pollinated?
The alapha has to be pollinated to feed the cow, to produce the milk, so yeah! The pollination it might be one bite out of three, but
it affects everything else. You're not going to get hamburger, you're not going to get steaks, you're not gonna -
it all has to come back to the bee.
And as a universe I would say, and it's proven, that the bee is probably the most important insect that we carry today.
Now in Utah there's 2600 different types of pollinators, but they're localized and they don't produce enough or pollinate enough
to pollinate the agricultural crops.
The orchard that I go in California is like 28,000 acres of producing almonds. I'm the only one of about 30 beekeepers that go in
to pollinate this. They put two hives per acre. So I can only pollinate about 6,000 acres of this total orchard.
Every day is different. I don't really have a set schedule every day.
In spring time, we're making a lot of baby bee hives. You see the NUCs, we're preparing bees, we also sell bees as a product.
Bees, you lose 30% of them every year, so you have to make increased, or replenish your dead bees.
We have queens coming in so this time of year it has to be about 70 degrees to mate a queen and
a queen has to actually fly and they're chased to mate and to come back.
They won't fly unless it's about 70 degrees, or warmer, with no wind.
And so we buy queens from other regions. California where they have really good spring weather to mate those queens.
So we've got queen banks over there and those queens are going in. Takes a frame of honey, a frame of pollen, to produce a frame of brood
We want that done by about May 15th or so and then we go into another where we're just feeding the bees, growing them,
and then we start setting honey supers hopefully by the first of June.
Our honey production months are June, July, and August. The end of August we'll start pulling the honey crop off, it goes
to the warehouse to be extracted and bottled and sent out to consumers.
and then, we get the bees ready for the winter. So that starts happening in September and October, all the bees
have to be pulled out of the mountains. We have an indoor wintering facility that is held at 41 degrees exactly.
Then the bees are stored in there until the last week of January when we start the year over again, we ship everything to California
for pollination. It's like, I tell people that it's like working with horses. People loves horses, right? Well, you know not
to walk up behind a horse and poke them in the butt.
Because you're going to get kicked, right!
Well, there's things about honey bees that they're going to talk to - the bees are actually telling you and giving you signals right now.
They're pinging you in the back of the head, well, you're too close. You know, walk away.
And if you turn and walk away, they won't bother ya. I usually come about 6:00, 6:30 as the sun's coming up and walk through them,
clean up stuff, pick up garbage, and kind of sort the day out of what's going to happen and which bees I want where.
It's probably my safe place. There's a connection with the rhythm of the seasons.
The honey is harvested, once it's capped and sealed, then we drive the bees off of it. Normally, we just use a brush and sweep it off.
We have two markets for honey. The first one is, is extracted honey. The other one is, we pull the frames out and
sweep them off and they're packaged just like that. They go nationwide and it's combed honey. They sit on a buffet type of deal
with meats and cheeses and everything around it and so when you come through the line, you just take and scrape off a piece of
the honey comb and put it on your steak or whatever - your plate - and it's wonderful. And a lot of our honey gets sold that way.
The extracted honey are the frames that aren't quite perfect, that aren't picture perfect to sit on a buffet, so those are extracted
and that honey is bottled. Honey is - there's nothing added to it. You can take a spoon over to the hive and take a bite
of it right then. It's the most purest, natural food there is.
So there's all these different things that comes from the beehive. There's thousands of different products.
How I learned most of this was reading in books. Everything that's been done is in books.
And so read them, and go from there. Call a local beekeeper. There's local clubs!
Everywhere I know, there is a local club.
You will find retired guys that absolutely have the passion and the time to teach beekeeping and I think it's a great learning tool
too, besides it ties you to nature.
All of a sudden you start thinking, "Oh wait a minute! You know, what is the chemical used? Why are the bees dying?"
There's just a huge problem with honey bees, which is going to affect our food chain.
God gave us this world and we get to use it to best of our ability. But we're stewards of this world for the next generation also.
So we have to watch what we're doing. What are you going to do with your world and how are you going to leave it for the next generation?