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Rains's hobby helps local endangered bees

By Barry Merrill
NL Publisher

19 March 2008 — After working 32 years with some of the more difficult people in society, Lynwood Rains of Princeton was looking for a really sweet job. He found it.
Lynwood, with the help of his family and a friend in Pine Level, has started Boon Hill Honey Company.

Lynwood retired from the NC Department of Corrections Probation Division on November 30.

He confesses that he has always been intrigued by bees, and a year before he retired, he got a hive to play with. He says it’s kinda like raising rabbits. One hive soon became six.

One of the fellows Lynwood grew up with, Larry Martin of Pine Level, shared his interest in bees. Larry and Lynwood have pooled parts of their operations.

Lynwood says it’s still more of a hobby to him than to many in the business. He did not harvest honey in the fall like many others did. While his bees are able to eat the honey they produced last fall, he is still having to feed his bees.

Mount Olive Pickle uses corn syrup for their pickles and buys in vast quantities, and they re-sell some of their corn syrup to beekeepers for feeding bees, passing along their price advantage to the beekeepers. Local bees also benefit Mount Olive, as cucumbers as well as other produce are more abundant with the pollination of the bees.

Besides the costs to feed the bees, the hives, pallets to put them on, and other equipment costs mount up. “It’s more expensive than playing golf.”

With diesel fuel getting close to $4 a gallon, along with other prices going up, Lynwood expects honey prices to increase.

While honey satisfies many a sweet tooth, there are recorded health benefits from bees and honey.

Eating local honey helps your body build a resistance to the pollen in the air. Honey will reflect the pollen in the area where it is from. Honey from other areas won’t have the resistance building to local allergens that local honey contains.

Much of the honey sold in this country comes from China, Cambodia, Argentina and Venezuela. In some of those countries, they don’t have the pesticide controls we have here, so there is the potential for contamination.

Lynwood stresses that he takes every precaution he can to make sure there is no contamination of his honey. He just seeded three acres with clover to make sure his bees can get all the clover they need from his field.

One of the newly found benefits is called apitherapy. Bee stings have been found to help battle the effects of arthritis. While some recoil at the thought of allowing a bee sting on an arthritic hand, Lynwood maintains that it’s not a s bad as getting blood taken.

Hanging around bees as much as he does, bee stings are part of the daily routine. While some of the family dons the netting, he gets duct tape out to seal up his pants legs and tries to keep them from getting down his shirt.

While the stings themselves are not too bad, he admits he doesn’t like them getting in his pants and walking up his leg.

This spring they have been working with farmers, renting out their bees to help farmers with pollination. They are building pallets to help move the bee boxes, which he says will get quite heavy.

They also paint distinctive shapes on their boxes, which bees can distinguish from one another. He joked that one box had a Star of David on it, as a random shape, not for Jewish bees.

Like many others in agriculture, there are pests which have hurt beekeepers. One is mites, which Lynwood has a sweet solution for. While there are some chemicals that are effective, he shakes powdered sugar on the hive. The bees lick off the sugar and the mites are cleaned off them at the same time.

A new problem that has been devastating to some is called Colony Collapse Disorder. Seemingly, one day the bees are fine, the next day they just fly off. He has lost one hive with the problem, but he knows of a large commercial contractor who lost half of his hives almost overnight.

There’s another problem that has popped up in the state, called American Foul Brood, which doesn’t hurt honey but wipes bees out. He just had a state inspector come in last week to inspect for the problem. Fortunately, they were clean.

With many of the recent problems, the state has put bees on a protected list. That means if someone finds an infestation of honey bees in a house, an exterminator will likely call in a beekeeper for what they call bee recovery. This is another service Lynwood and Larry will offer, trying to remove a hive, but Lynwood says while he will be careful when getting bees out of a wall, he does not fix the hole once he gets them out.

This May Lynwood says they will start harvesting honey and will have honey for sale the next day. Spinning the frames that go down in the box to get the honey out is where Lynwood’s wife, Barbara, gets involved, helping to filter out wax and other particles in the honey. Once they start harvesting, they should have honey the next day.

Their sons, Michael and John, help when they are not at their other jobs. Michael works with the prison system, while John is at Lowe’s.

Lynwood said beekeeping is a little like raising cattle. It’s gone from a hobby to a business.

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