ROANOKE RAPIDS —  Today’s project will not work. This is life in the labor intensive world of a beekeeper.

Lance Martin | Daily Herald Jim Frazier smokes his hives as he begins an unsuccessful task to relocate the queen. The hive ended up being weak and he decided to abandon the project. Advertisement

“Beekeeping today is not as simple as it used to be,” says Jim Frazier, a retired Dominion Power executive who keeps six hives outside Roanoke Rapids.

The bees are subjected to a number of pests, Frazier explained Thursday as he prepared to relocate the queen.

The pests Frazier contends with include varroa mites, wax moths and pollen beetles. “These three little devils can devastate a population quickly,” he explained. “The varroa mite is like a tick on a bee. The wax moth eats the wax, the pollen and honey. They are constantly fighting mites, pollen beetles and moths. They are subject to the same thing as pneumonia.”

Inside the hive the temperature is 92 degrees with 50 percent humidity but quick changes in the weather can cause beads of moisture to drip down in the hive, which can chill the bees and they start dying.

It is a constant fight in the life of a beekeeper and in the life of the bees themselves.

On this warm Thursday afternoon, Frazier will do preliminary checks on his six hives and hive body switching before trying to relocate the queen to give her plenty of room for a new brood.

Unfortunately, he will be unable to find the queen. “Most beekeepers purchase a queen and do exactly what we were going to do,” he said.

Frazier was hoping to start a new hive with a “home-grown” queen and not introduce a strange bee into his bee stock.

Relocating the queen would cause the worker bees in the queenless hive to form a queen and raise their own, Frazier explains, “To keep that genealogy going and gives you another hive of bees.”

At the first hive the bees gently buzz by, circling Frazier, who wears a special jacket with veil and gloves to keep from getting stung.

He finds all is well, the bees survived the winter and then proceeds to the next hive to attempt to split it. He is unable to find the queen and discovers the hive he was going to split is weak.

Even though he was unable to locate the queen there were eggs in the brood chamber, a sign she is there. “Therefore all is well although the queen was not located.”

He packs his equipment and will now wait to see what his honey production will be this season. “The nectar flow is beginning in earnest,” he said, explaining the season lasts through early summer. Afterwards he will begin to extract the honey to give his friends and family. He must also leave enough for the bees to have to feed on for the coming fall and winter months.

Last year he extracted between 160 and 190 pounds of honey. He enjoys the process, the hobby. “There aren’t any wild bees,” he explains. “They wouldn’t make it long without the care of a beekeeper. With beekeepers, bees do a valuable service to the ecology of the planet.”

It goes beyond that, however, said Frazier, who has been raising bees since 1999. “The joy is just absolutely going in and looking at the creation of these little animals. They fly 6 miles one way to a honey source. It requires 3,500 miles of flight to produce one teaspoon ... I just enjoy it but with the beetles, moths and mites it ain’t easy.”