Beekeepers find sweet success in N.J.

By ANDREW MARTINS
Staff Writer

 From the Garden owner Drew Madzin endures the August heat to check on one of his honeybee hives. In a healthy colony, worker bees like the one pictured below can number in the tens of thousands and all of them are female.  PHOTOS BY STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER ERIC SUCAR From the Garden owner Drew Madzin endures the August heat to check on one of his honeybee hives. In a healthy colony, worker bees like the one pictured below can number in the tens of thousands and all of them are female. PHOTOS BY STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER ERIC SUCAR Standing among his beehives, Drew Madzin is calm, despite the bees feverishly buzzing around him.

With the hot, August sun beating down on him, Madzin, a Freehold resident, eschews the protection of a bee suit when approaching his hives. He’s done this many times before, so he instead opts to adopt a more slow and deliberate approach while attempting to remove the top of a Landstroh hive with a folding knife.

Soon, he’s holding a frame coated in a writhing mass of drones and worker bees, within a foot of his face while noting the insects’ increased agitation.

“On a hot day like today or on a rainy day, bees can get particularly nasty,” Madzin said nonchalantly.

Having owned and worked with bees the better part of five years as the coowner and founder of From the Garden, Inc., Madzin is no longer afraid of being stung. It’s an occupational hazard.

Like roughly 2,000 other beekeepers in New Jersey, Madzin’s business is a part of a growing $7 million industry

And while the beekeeping hobby and industry is seemingly buzzing with increased profits and interest, outside influences continue to threaten the insects’ existence despite new state legislation aimed at protecting them.

The state Department of Agriculture (DOA) estimates there are approximately 20,000 bee colonies and hives throughout the state. Each hive, according to officials, is valued at approximately $350.

According to the National Honey Board, the price of honey has risen nearly three dollars, from $3.83 per pound in August 2006 to $6.75 this year.

 Freehold resident and From the Garden owner Drew Madzin carefully inspects a tray from one of his beehives.  STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER ERIC SUCAR Freehold resident and From the Garden owner Drew Madzin carefully inspects a tray from one of his beehives. STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER ERIC SUCAR Thanks to industry growth and a high demand for honey and beeswax related products, many business owners throughout the state have managed to claim a piece of the sticky, golden pie with each harvest.

“If it’s a healthy hive, we will get between 30 and 80 pounds of honey,” Madzin said. “If the average is about 50 pounds, we will get about 20,000 to 23,000 pounds of honey in a year from all our hives.”

Much of the industry also produces other related products, including candles, lip balm, hand moisturizers and various wedding favors.

And while the number of bee related businesses and hobbyists continues to climb within the state, there are a number of outside forces, both manmade and natural, that threaten not just an industry, but a large part of nature as we know it.

In recent years, a lot of attention has been given to the plight of the world’s honey bee population.

Since 2006, most of that attention has gone to the onset of widespread colony collapse disorder, which happens when most of the worker bees in a hive abandon their home and queen, leaving enough food and a small number of nurse bees at the hive to care for young bees and their queen. When that happens, the colony can no longer sustain itself.

The state Department of Agriculture estimates that more than 150 different food crops throughout the country rely on bee pollination and help facilitate the growth and reproduction of “about a third of the food Americans eat.”

According to a 2009 Bryn Mawr/Rutgers study, bees pollinate “half of Pennsylvania’s and New Jersey’s top fruit and vegetable” crops.

The study also states that there are approximately a dozen bee species native to New Jersey. With each different species of bee comes a different set of fruits and vegetables that benefit from their pollination.

For example, both the Common Eastern Bumble Bee and the Golden Northern Bumble Bee are integral to the pollination of watermelons, while the Dark Sweat Bee is excellent for the state’s tomato crops.

In conjunction with the economic contributions of the honey bee industry, the agriculture department credits bees and beekeepers with helping ensure the “successful production of nearly $200 million worth of fruits and vegetables annually.”

State Apiarist Tim Schuler said the honey bees have a far-reaching effect on the world, not just on the food consumed by humans.

“Honey bees are important for many different reasons,” Schuler said. “Honey bees pollinate plants that benefit wildlife and insects and birds and just natural things in our environment.”

Schuler, who inspects honey bees for health, parasites and infestations, regulates all aspects of the beekeeping industry for the state Department of Agriculture.

“There’s really no way to measure the positive [effect] bees have on our society as a whole,” Schuler said.

Noticing the potential loss that could result from a diminished bee population, a Tinton Falls business is working to address colony collapse disorder and other damaging bee maladies by selling special products for fellow beekeepers.

E&M Gold co-owner Mary Kosenski said she and her husband Ed are proud to be certified by the Department of Agriculture as one of eight vendors certified to sell nucleus hives, also known as “nucs,” and one of five to sell selectively bred queen bees.

As a nearly 20-year veteran of beekeeping and honey collection, Mary Kosenski can recognize the peaks and valleys that regularly characterize the state’s honey industry.

One issue that hits particularly close to home for E&M Gold is the onset of infections caused by Varroa mites and Acarapis mites, both of which have been known to significantly weaken existing hives.

“My personal belief is that all of the problems that are hitting honey bee colonies world wide are associated with these parasites,” Mary said. “They just weaken the bees enough so that other things kill them as well.”

Nearly five years into their foray into beekeeping, Mary Kosenski said she and her husband were at a loss as to what they could do to address their hives’ rapid decline.

“It was around that time that we noticed a major decline in our bee population,” Mary Kosenski said. “We were following the instructions from experts in the business….but we started to find that they weren’t working.”

Having spent weeks using regular treatments to get rid of the mites, Mary said a state official inspected her bees, revealing that the mites had developed an immunity to the treatment.

With the chemical treatment rendered ineffective, Mary said she and her husband came to the conclusion to try a more natural approach.

“We decided that we don’t want to keep putting chemical treatments on our bees that produce a product that we are going to feed people,” she said.

After conducting her own research, Mary said she traveled to Baton Rouge, La., after learning of a specific species of Russian honey bee that had developed a natural resistance to a host of parasites.

After seeing the heartiness of those bees herself, Mary said she has since purchased those specific bees for breeding daughter queens and producing nucleus colonies that other beekeepers can purchase to reinforce their existing colonies with desired traits.

“We aren’t always successful with it, but that’s just the way we’ve been thinking about [the problem] for the last 15 years,” Mary said.

While other beekeepers like Madzin agree that parasites, mites and diseases are a major concern for the overall bee population, he also points to what he believes is a vast push for overdevelopment throughout the state.

“You have got to get more habitat for the bees,” Madzin said. “You can’t keep on building the blacktop and malls without leaving something natural.”

The insistence from developers and the average homeowner to plant non-native plants for decoration and use chemical pesticides has also negatively impacted the state’s bee population over the years, Madzin said.

“Because of the overuse of pesticides by homeowners and farmers, there are fewer and fewer bees available to pollinate naturally in anybody’s yards,” Mary said.

While colony collapse disorder and the amount of protected open space are causes of concern for New Jersey beekeepers, a handful of manmade issues were recently addressed by lawmakers.

On July 31, a trio of bills were signed into law by Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno that grant special protections to the state’s commercial and recreational bee industry and heighten public awareness about its importance to the food supply.

Penned by Assemblyman Ronald Dancer (R-Monmouth, Ocean, Burlington, Middlesex), A-1294/S-1328, extends “Right to Farm” protections to commercial beekeepers; bill A-1295/S-1975 protects hobbyist beekeepers by authorizing the state to regulate beehives while giving municipalities a role in managing the hobby; and bill A-1296/S-2302, establishes a fine of up to $500 for each offense when someone intentionally destroys a man-made bee hive.

For beekeeping hobbyist and Eatontown resident Maria Escalante, the bills are the sole reason why she dropped her civil suit against her municipality.

Since 2010, Escalante has maintained a maximum of four beehives in the back yard of her one-third acre property. She hand extracts upwards of 250 pounds of honey and has no aspirations to turn her hobby into a business.

Yet in 2012, Escalante said she received a notice of a zoning violation for her beehives since they were neither listed nor exempted from the list of prohibited uses of a residential property. She challenged the violation with the zoning board before ultimately taking the case to civil court.

Escalante said she ultimately dropped her case against the township once the legislation took effect.

“I was going to do a civil suit and then bills started showing up in the state,” Escalante said. “Once the state started doing things, the township backed off and left me alone.”

For Schuler, the new laws give much needed concrete guidelines for everyone involved in beekeeping.

“I think there is now some uniformity with what’s allowed and what’s not allowed,” Schuler said. “I know that’s one of the things that the beekeeping industry in New Jersey really wanted – they wanted uniformity and regular guidelines for zoning and code enforcers to understand what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable.”

Mary said the public’s inherent, yet unfounded, fear of bees led to Escalante’s situation, stating that the laws were a necessary step to make beekeeping a more widely accepted hobby.

“When silly fears are the reason that a zoning board wants to limit those kinds of hobbies, that’s what we’re trying to protect people from,” Mary said. “The laws give the state some scientific basis that makes sense.”

Meanwhile, Madzin touted the newly approved laws as a major step in the right direction for beekeepers as a whole, though he noted that there needs to be an equity between potential hobbyists and their neighbors.

“When people say they want bees, the first thing I ask them is ‘do you have neighbors and do they have pools,’” Madzin said. “You have to be fair both ways…I have people who come to buy hives from us and they live in the middle of Long Branch. You can’t do that – it’s not right.”

Regardless of the various problems and issues surrounding beekeeping as a hobby or a vocation, almost everyone involved in beekeeping agree that the yellow and black striped insects are as equally fascinating as they are vital.

“If you like nature and you like honey, beekeeping is something cool to do – I would highly recommend it,” Escalante said. “It’s great for the town and it’s great for the neighborhood and it’s great for the planet.”