DEBORAH CORRAO / L’Observateur / May 19, 1999

If you drive to Lawrence Gueret’s house right off the River Road in Reserve, you will discover at once he has a special relationship with Mother Nature.

Every inch of his yard is a garden, abounding in blooming plants lovingly nurtured by Gueret and his wife Elsie. Further on, a lot is given over to awell-tended peach orchard yielding succulent peaches not usually grown in our part of the state. The fruit is almost ripe and will be ready for harvestsoon.

The spring calm is broken only by a steady buzzing nearby – the humming of hundreds of thousands of honeybees, the residents of 32 hives Gueret maintains.

Last year Gueret retrieved 1,400 pounds of honey from 12 of his hives.

Some of his crop he sells to stores in Reserve. The bulk of it he delivers in60-pound pails to a retailer in Norco. Some he gives to friends andacquaintances.

Gueret, 69, is retired now, having worked for American Cyanamid and Freeport McMoran. He moved to Reserve almost 30 years ago and has beenkeeping bees off and on for half that time.

As honeybees are never domesticated, the success of his beehives depends on his understanding of the lifecycle of the bee and his attention to the requirements of maintaining the delicate balance of life within the hive.

In the spring when bees are swarming in search of a place to build honeycombs and reproduce, Gueret begins the work of starting a new hive.

Gueret says he traps the swarm in a box, hopefully trapping the queen bee in the process. If he succeeds, other bees will follow and a new colonywill begin to thrive.

Activity within the hive, Gueret says, revolves around the queen. A goodqueen, he says, will live from 5-10 years, often producing about 3,000 eggs a day.

Besides the queen, an average hive may contain 50-65,000 other bees, all with highly specialized tasks. Most of the bees are workers, female beeswith poorly developed ovaries who cannot mate. Workers serve as guards,scouts, nurses and foragers. They build honeycombs, rear the young, cleanthe hive, feed the queen and drones, guard the hive and collect food.

A very smaller number of bees within the hive are drones, males that exist only to mate and who are not equipped to work or even to sting.

Honeybees are semi-dormant during the winter, but as the days become longer the hive begins to buzz with activity. Bees near the queen feed herroyal jelly synthesized from pollen to provide her the protein to lay eggs.

She lays her eggs at the beginning of spring in vacant cells within the hive, laying future queens in special cells constructed by the workers.

When those larvae begin to build cocoons and go into the pupal stage, the old queen leaves without half of her entourage to form a new cluster.

The first of the new queens to hatch kills the other queens before flying out to mate and the cycle continues.

About three weeks after the worker bees hatch they begin foraging, collecting pollen and honey to use as food for the winter. A bee may makeup to 2,000 trips to a nectar source in order to produce an ounce of honey.

Because the work is so intense, the average lifespan of a worker bee is only a few weeks at the most.

Gueret’s hives are wooden boxes equipped with drawers and movable frames spaced to allow the bees to perform their tasks without interfering with the work of other bees.

White drawers are where the young bees brood. Red drawers hold thehoneycombs. An opening toward the bottom of the structure allows bees tocome and go as they collect nectar from nearby flowers.

Honeybees, by nature, must expend too much energy on their daily tasks to waste it stinging. They sting only when they are threatened, but becauseGueret must open the hive to check it, he dons a long-sleeved jumpsuit, elbow length leather gloves and a safari-type hat outfitted with a mesh veil that protects his face and neck from accidental stings.

Although Gueret is cautious around the bees, he has had a few accidents.

“Yesterday I got stung,” he says. “Sometimes I don’t get stung at all;sometimes I get stung four or five times.”The worst incident, he says, happened when he was attempting to extract a swarm from a tree and received about 40 stings.

The protective clothing he wears to work in the hives is hot during the spring and summer months, so he usually works early in the morning or late in the evening.

To get into the hive, Gueret must first calm the bees with smoke. Heignites pine needles in a smoker, a small can outfitted with bellows to blow smoke through the opening in the hive. The smoke causes the bees tobecome lazy long enough for Gueret to remove trays and check on the progress of his eggs and honey.

“If I open a hive and see a lot of honey, I will collect it then,” Gueret says, “but I collect honey mostly in June and September.”In the fall, Gueret medicates the hives to protect the bees from infestation by mites and other parasites. He spends his spare time in hisshop building hives for new colonies and trays to equip the hives or to replace worn-out equipment in the older hives.

So, while his winged friends prepare to settle down for the winter, Gueret is still, excuse the pun, as busy as a bee.Back to Top

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