STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

It didn’t bother Steve Hobbs that a bunch of bees had escaped from their box and were buzzing around his truck as he drove through Twin Falls.

Hobbs has been dealing with the stinging insects long enough to know when they pose a threat. And in this instance they were focused on a little syrup that had spilled, rather than on him.

Arriving home, the resident backyard beekeeper unloaded two 25-pound bags of cane sugar he had purchased for his bee colony at Costco, setting them on a garage floor surrounded by skis, snowboards and bicycles.

Then the builder proceeded to unload three wooden packages containing 100,000 bees that he had purchased  earlier in the day at Tubbs’ Berry Farm near Twin Falls. The farm sells bees, along with a can of syrup to feed the bees in transit, and beekeeping supplies, honey and beeswax.

“There’s only two days of the year you can buy bees there,” Hobbs said. “I’m mildly disorganized right now because there are a lot of bees to deal with.”

The bees were destined for a lineup of wooden bee boxes with cupolas and latches facing Bald Mountain from Hobbs’ Hulen Meadows lawn.

One was destined for the Sun Valley Center for the Arts where people will be able to observe the bees at work during The Center’s BIG IDEA exhibition “Bees,” which runs through June 22.

Like a queen to the hive, the unveiling drew a swarm of people to Hobbs’ home—well, at least The Center’s Curator Courtney Gilbert, along with Kris Olenick, Company of Fools manager, and K.O. Ogilvie, the Fools production manager.

Hobbs laid out a variety of protective bee suits that had been loaned him by Tom Harned of Five Bee Hives.

Courtney Gilbert donned a beautiful patterned white jacket with oval steel mesh mask that resembled a fencer’s uniform. Ogilvie and Olenick donned African safari-like head gear that they tied off around their waist. Ogilvie wrapped duct tape around her jean legs to keep angry bees from stinging her legs, while Olenick donned boots to cover her bare ankles.

“I see a niche in the fashion industry,” said Olenick.

Olenick has learned more about bees the past few weeks in presentations offered by The Center and the Sawtooth Botanical Garden than she ever thought possible.

“I’ve learned that bees are really amazing. They have a system that’s amazing and it works,” she said.

“That’s what I love about my job,” agreed Gilbert. I learn about things I would never otherwise have learned about—like bees and watersheds…the brain, even—as we do BIG IDEA projects.”

Hobbs had already filled his bee boxes with pollen and honey to get the new colonies started. He took out one frame to show his onlookers how it contains larvae in all stages of development from eggs to grubs to pupa. Each of the 10 frames will eventually contain up to a quart of honey.

A honeycomb sprawled across another slat. Foragers will store additional nectar and pollen in it, and the queen destined for The Center will lay her eggs in it.

As Hobbs prepared to dump one of the packages of bees into the hive, he sprayed a syrup composed of water and sugar on the bees’ wings. It will make it difficult for them to fly temporarily, he said, mitigating the chances that they will attack while he is transferring them to their new home.

He then asked the three women to help him gather dry grass from his lawn, which he stuffed into a bee smoker. Then he lit the grass on fire, fanning the flames with bellows that are attached to the smoker, which resembles a camp coffee pot.

“The smoke will calm the bees,” he said, as puffs of smoke wafted across the lawn.

While it’s known that smoke calms bees, it’s not fully understood why. It’s thought that the smoke masks alarm pheromones released by guard bees or bees that might be injured during the transfer of bees from package to hive.

“I feel like a monk. It’s very meditative,” said Gilbert, as Ogilvie pumped the bellow in rhythmic fashion.

“You guys, Bee-have,” Ogilvie said as she watched bees crawling across a wire mesh stapled over the opening.

Hobbs turned to the trio.

“Here’s where it gets exciting,” he said.

He lifted the package of bees above the brood box and began shaking the bees loose. Some, which look as if they’ve been swimming in Karo Corn Syrup, fell off right into the hive.

Hobbs brushed off the rest with a brush.

“Look, there’s a bumble bee in here poaching,” he said.

Hobbs has included a variety of ages in the batch, including some about to hatch.

The queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day. Her workers and drones will emerge in about 21 days. In time, 10,000 bees will grow to 100,000.

Some of the bees circled above the hive, trying to orient themselves to the positioning of the hive in accordance with the sun. This will enable them to find the hive when returning from gathering nectar and pollen.

While they get their bearings, Hobbs enlisted Olenick’s help with the queen bee, which has a bigger abdomen than the others—or, what Ogilvie kindly referred to as a potbelly.

The two proceeded to transfer the queen bee to another vial where Hobbs marks it with yellow paint so those observing the bees at The Center will be able to pick her out.

Normally, he said, he would release her from the vial to the hive. But he didn’t want to do that until he knew she had been accepted. Instead, he kept her in the vial with a couple of attendant who clean and feed her and hung the vial in the hive where the other bees could hang out getting to know her.

Older bees will sometimes reject a queen that is introduced to a colony that has lost its queen because they see her as an invader. But that shouldn’t be a problem with these bees, Hobbs said, because she’s not replacing another queen mother. When they accept her, they will chew through candy her cage to release her.

Hobbs became captivated by bees when sitting on the deck of his wife’s family cabin near Flathead Lake in Montana.

He couldn’t take his eyes off thousands of wild bees that were feeding on yellow cinquefoil flowers.

“It was awesome, and I became infatuated,” he said. “It’s amazing how much of what we eat depends on bees. Our almond crop is entirely dependent on them.”

Hobbs returned home and promptly began reading everything he could find on bees. He decided to get a hive, but ended up with three.

“It was scary at first dealing with 10,000 stinging insects,” he said. “You can tell they weren’t agitated today. If they had been, they would have been hammering our head nets.”

Hobbs is now a year into beeraising, but he continues to learn something all the time.

“I work in construction so to me it’s amazing to watch this organized colony that they build. They’re all females but they all have different jobs,” he said.

He watched as bees from last year’s hive swarmed to the new hive he just finished establishing, lured by the smell of sugar and honey he slathered it with to feed the new brood.

Bees can fly up to five miles, he said. His usually go towards Griffin Butte a quarter mile away.

The new bees will venture out in search of pollinator plants and find their way back to their hive by the smell of their queen, he said.

“You can tell they’re starting to figure the hive out,” he said, as he bent down peering into the hive.

He kneeled down on the ground, sliding the bottom board out of last year’s hive to examine the color of the pollen that had fallen off the bees as they entered the hive.

“It’s yellow—the first flower of the year must be the dandelion,” he said. “You get to where you can tell what flowers they’re eating by the taste of the honey. Each flower produces slightly different tasting honey.”

Hobbs scraped 120 pounds, or 10 gallons, of honey off two hives last year—enough for his wife Caroline to sell a line of “Foxglove Honey.”

“Hopefully, every year we’ll sell enough to pay for the operation,” he said. “The honey makes great Christmas presents, and pressing the honey is a great family activity.”

Hobbs doubled the number of hives to six this year. And this winter he plans to move them south of Bellevue, having lost two hives to the cold last year. He’s also learned a few other tricks, like leaving a little stem exposed when cutting plants back in the fall so bumblebees can nest in them.

Bumblebee queens nest in leaves, he said.

A day after installing the hive, Hobbs opened it to check that the queen bee had been accepted by the colony. That ascertained he transported the observation hive to The Center.

There bees can leave and return to The Center through a see-through tube set up in one corner. Signs outside The Center warn passersby of the chance of a bee encounter.

“I just hope I’m a better beekeeper this year than last,” said Hobbs.”