Wearing a beekeeper jacket, gloves and mask, Chip Kelly was in his element as he checked on his seven bee hives nestled in a pollinator garden off Scaley Bark Circle in Ooltewah.
Kelly operates Harrison Bay Honey Farm and has been beekeeping for nine years. This pollinator garden is just one of several other locations where he keeps his hives.
“I took a Master Gardener course,” he said while showing me his hands. “Look at these fingers. They're thumbs and they're black. So, I can’t grow anything. They're not very good at gardening.”
Kelly said he attended a lecture that was all about bees. “I was just mesmerized,” he said. “The way and fashion and form which bees instinctively know what to do just really fascinated me.”
Kelly went all in. He joined the local bee club. He never missed a meeting, spent countless hours volunteering to a point where he finally got, “wrung out.”
“Now I’m more focused on building my own apiaries,” he said. “I got into this thinking this would be a sweet retirement gig, and it's already grown to a point that it's almost interfering with my day job, so it's good.”
The pollinator garden is private property owned by Kelly’s friend Pat Morgan. Filled with a variety of native plants, flowers, nest boxes for birds, owls and squirrels, Morgan allowed Kelly to place his hives here for the benefit of the bees and the community.
Right now, Kelly has a little more than 60 hives, and he would like to grow it to 90. Unlike other beekeepers Kelly only harvests honey once a year typically, in late June or early July
“Some beekeepers harvest honey several times,” he said. “They'll get early honey, middle summer honey, and maybe if there's a fall flow, when the plant still has nectar, and in the fall it's mostly goldenrods and aster, so it doesn't make a particularly good honey. So, what I like to do is leave that fall honey for the bees to overwinter on and let them have sufficient stores. A lot of beekeepers take all the honey and end up feeding their bees sugar water. And that's not really a good thing. You know, what's best for them is their own food that they make. So, I tend to leave a lot of honey on the hives for the bees.”
Kelly said he takes out one frame at a time and uses a hot knife, or an electric knife, and scrapes off the wax.
“You save the wax because everybody needs beeswax,” he said. “Knife makers, candle makers, everybody wants to buy beeswax. And I am a net consumer of beeswax. I don't make enough to satisfy my own use. As a beekeeper, in a growing apiary, you're constantly using beeswax to rejuvenate and refurbish frames.”
Once the frame is ready it is placed into an extractor which spins mechanically and the honey drips down into a bucket.
Kelly had just harvested his honey, netting several thousand pounds this year. He said most of the hives beekeepers care for are European honeybees.
“They are not native,” he said. “The Pilgrims brought them over, and that was to pollinate the crops. They have a reputation for being good pollinators.”
He said honeybee colonies can grow to 60-80,000 bees.
“And every bee has a task,” he said.
Of course, there is the queen bee. She is responsible for laying up to 1,500 to 2,000 eggs per day. The worker bees are females that perform all the operational labor. Their jobs change as they age, transitioning from cleaning the hive and feeding larvae to guarding the entrance and foraging for resources.
Kelly said drone bees only serve one purpose, to mate with the queen bee.
“The first three weeks, they go from egg to larvae to pupa,” he said. “They're in those cells and honeycomb. And after three weeks, 21 days, they come out. And the next three weeks, they spend inside the hive. Their first job is to clean their own cells or the other cells around them where they just hatched from. And after that, they'll assume individual tasks.”
Kelly said the last third of their lives bees are pollinating.
“They’re out gathering nectar, gathering pollen,” he said.
If the colony grows too large some of the bees “swarm,” out of the hive to search for a new home.
“They take some eggs that the queen laid that's from three to six days old and build a queen cell,” he said. “They build a special cell that looks more like a peanut and feed it a special food, Royal jelly. They make a new queen. They usually make several. And supposedly, the first girl out is supposed to kill all her sisters because we all know there can only be one queen. But oftentimes that doesn't happen and you'll see multiple swarms.”
Kelly said when people see a swarm of bees on the side of a car or tree it’s because the queen bee needs to rest. He explained that bees like to keep their hive at 92-93 degrees and they can self-regulate the temperature using their wings and vibration.
The Bee Whisperer used his smoke gun to disrupt their communication. It triggers a natural survival mechanism, allowing him to inspect his hives with a reduced risk of being stung. I stood far away to avoid being stung as well. He pulled out a frame showing me the honey. Another hive was leaning and he worked on straightening it out. For the most part, the bees left him alone as he replaced the frame. I worried about Kelly staying in the bee suit for too long during this recent heat dome. But this wasn’t his first rodeo, and he wore a small fan around his neck. I thought they were headphones until I heard the whir of the motor.
Once finished he removed the bee suit and looked around.
“I don't have another apiary like this,” he said. “The bees have plenty to forage on. An interesting thing about bees is when they go out in the morning and they start foraging, whatever plant they visit first, they're only going to visit that type of plant the whole day. So, if they come out and the first thing they hit is a clover, they're going to stay on clover all day, just per individual bee. One bee might go to the squash. Well, they're going to stay on squash all day. The next day, it starts all over.”
He gave me a small bottle of honey he harvested. I was happy he didn’t get stung and I could tell he was happy tending to his bees. Visit his Facebook and Instagram Pages to see where you can purchase his honey.
Harrison Bay Honey Farm
- Chip Kelly, (423) 665-9101
- Facebook: facebook.com/harrisonbayhoneyfarm/
- Instagram: instagram.com/harrisonbayhoneyfarm/