Teen learns how to deal with bees

TYLER, Texas (AP) — Sixteen-year-old Kellie Lenamond pulls on her white bee suit and dons long leather gloves and a gauzy veil.

Today, she is helping to move a swarm of bees that took up residence in a rusty barrel in one of the pastures near her home.

With the help of her instructor Dick Counts, executive director of East Texas Beekeepers Association, the pair is transferring the bees from the barrel to a wooden hive.

As they pry open the lid, thousands of honeybees come pouring out in an angry swarm.

The bees collect on her veil and hat by the hundreds, but Kellie isn't even breathing hard.

"I think part of the appeal is a daredevil sense that I'm out in the middle of stinging insects and laughing because others won't do it," she said. "And they get pretty angry when you move them, oh yeah."

She and Counts scoop the bees and honeycomb into wooden frames with their gloves, working steadily among the unnerving hum of the insects.

"It's fascinating to look into a hive," she said. "You can't understand how the bees work until you actually get out there and open it up and see how many bees there are. Each hive can have up to 60,000 bees."

Kellie said she doesn't see bees as "scary insects" and works with her own hives without gloves.

"They are very forgiving," she said. "Every beekeeper has their own opinion on how they should be treated and certain ways you deal with them, but there are very few things you can actually do to destroy them completely."

The stigma that bees are very aggressive isn't always true, she said, although some swarms are more aggressive than others.

"We took out a swarm last week and they were pelting our veils, but I didn't get stung a single time," she said. "We have our suits and we're good. We didn't use smoke or anything."

With her confident attitude, it's hard to imagine Kellie was ever hesitant about working with the insects.

"Oh yeah, I was nervous around the bees," she said. "Part of the scholarship program I was a part of was classes we took every month until we got our hives," she said. "At first, we didn't get to see any bees, so we were just learning about them from a text book. Then, about the fourth or fifth class, we went outside and there were bees everywhere!"

Kellie became interested in bees about three years ago after taking a bee keeping class in Collin County taught by John Talbert, and she is continuing her education by taking a refresher course in Chapel Hill taught by Counts.

"Honestly, I wasn't interested in bees at first, it was my dad's idea," she said, smiling. "I got a scholarship with the Collin County (Bee Keepers) Association, and they provided all my equipment for my first hive. I had a lot of fun, and it was a year-long commitment that I kept bees."

This year, the young bee keeper was crowned the 2009 ETBA Honey Queen.

The ETBA's long term goal of supporting a honey queen is to help educate young women to become valuable bee keepers and model citizens, as well as a chance to compete for the Texas Honey Queen for a chance to receive additional benefits to further their education.

"When I first heard about the Honey Queen, I thought it was a beauty pageant," Kellie said. "But as I got into the program and went to meetings consistently, I realized how much the girls got to go out into the community and teach kids and adults about bees."

According to Kellie, one reason it's so important for groups like the ETBA to promote honey bees is because honey bee colonies are dying or disappearing in record numbers.

"Honey bees are the main pollinators in our ecosystem, and if we didn't have bees, we wouldn't eat," she said. "One out of three bites we eat we owe to honey bees ... if we lost them, most of our crops would be virtually gone. Everything we eat has to be pollinated, and other insects just can't do the job."

Without bees, there would also be an important ingredient missing from grocery store shelves: honey.

Kellie and her family cook with honey they extract from Kellie's bee hives.

"The first time we extracted honey, we got a five gallon bucket," she said. "My family cooks bread, so we incorporate honey into the recipe, and anytime we can take sugar out and use honey instead, we do."

Like Kellie, other members of the ETBA enjoy using honey in recipes and keeping bees in their own backyards.

"I have one hive, and I live in the Woods (subdivision), but my neighbors aren't afraid," Violent Bourns, member of the ETBA, said.

Members of the club don't have to have bee keeping experience, Counts said, and for roughly four to five hundred dollars, you can acquire all the equipment you need to start your own bee hives.

"Bees are a fascinating insect," he said. "When you get into the biology of it, you know that God had to have made the insect for the knowledge that they have. They are very intelligent, and the things they go through in their lifetime are absolutely amazing. They graduate from job to job by instinct, and no bee tells any other bee what to do. They do it by feel or smell."

One of the main goals of the ETBA is educating the public, and in addition, members will remove swarms and bees hibernating in buildings and structures.

"Some of us remove other stinging insects, such as yellow jackets, and several of us educate children at schools and other types of functions," Bourns said. "We want to promote the value, preservation and public education of the honey bee and pure natural honey."