The low hum of honey bees in flight hangs over Shelley Armstrong's rural Langley property. Her path to becoming one of a growing number of beekeepers in the region has passed from family tradition to hobby to full-time profession.
Now she passes on her expertise, and provides more hives to an industry that's been hard hit over the past few years.
On a warm weekday in late May, Armstrong was at work in her yard, checking out hives for queens and drones, pulling away excess wax comb, and preparing to rebuild hives to create nuclei for new hives.
She worked calmly, picking up the rectangular frames with her bare hands. While she wears a beekeeper's hood, she prefers to work bare-handed to get a better feel for the hives, so she can be gentler.
She also uses smoke to keep the bees docile. The smoke works in two ways, Armstrong said. First, bees instinctively retreat from smoke, and move to eat honey in case they have to flee from a hivedestroying fire. Secondly, it blocks the spread of the chemicals bees release when they're alarmed or have just stung someone.
A sting on her thumb doesn't slow Armstrong down, as she calmly scrapes it out and keeps working.
May 29 was the Day of the Honey Bee in B.C., marking 156 years since the first domesticated bee hives were brought to this province.
Bees are an ancient domesticated animal, and many people have beekeepers, or apiarists, in their family tree.
Armstrong's work with bees started with her grandfather, a beekeeper in England.
"As a really young child, I loved the smell of his honey house," said Armstrong.
She studied biology at university in Ontario, including bees, but it wasn't until 2006, when she and her husband bought their Langley home, that she felt ready to start keeping a few hives.
It started with a few, but the numbers increased.
"It's hard to stop," Armstrong said. It had been 10 years since she had worked with or studied bees in university, and Armstrong said even as a hobbyist, she had some catching up to do on the field.
She took courses at the Honeybee Centre in Surrey and through SFU's Bee Master course.
Then in 2009, she lost her job and her first son was on the way, and she was looking for something she could do closer to home.
Expanding her hobby to a job beckoned.
"It just sort of happened," she said. She wanted to do something she genuinely loved with all her heart, Armstrong said.
50 ACTIVE HIVES ON PROPERTY Now Armstrong keeps 50 active hives on her property, with between 60,000 to 100,000 bees in each hive.
Some beekeepers raise bees for the honey, others truck them from farm to farm to provide pollination services to the many berry farmers in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley.
Armstrong primarily works on creating new hives for others, breeding new queens and drones. She'll casually pick up the male drones from her hives - they have no stingers - and she admires their big eyes and fuzzy abdomens.
At this time of year, she's rearing a lot of queens, said Armstrong.
Like all beekeepers, she also collects honey, selling some of it but keeping a great deal for her family or giving it away to friends.
"We call it the universal currency," she said.
Because she's a beekeeper, her yard abounds in flowers, most of them wild.
"I deal with my yard around food for the honeybees," said Armstrong. "I won't let my husband cut the grass when the dandelions are blooming."
From the perspective of the provincial Ministry of Agriculture, and hundreds of farmers around B.C., the most important factor in beekeeping is making sure there are plenty of both bees and beekeepers around for years to come.
Because numerous crops rely on bees for pollination, a major concern in recent years
has been colony collapse disorder, in which hives seem to simply empty out or die off, particularly over the winters.
Scientific studies have pointed to a number of factors, including parasitic mites, but most new research has pinned a good portion of the blame on certain insecticides used on commercial crops, especially a category known as neonicotinoids.
With the threat of a loss of pollination, supporting bee health has become a more important issue than ever before.
Working to help beekeepers are organizations like the Langley Bee Club, of which Armstrong is the treasurer. It has around 150 members and regularly meets in a local church. In addition, the community of beekeepers tend to help one another out, mentoring people new to the hobby or the business.
There are also various bee education programs that run at colleges and universities including at Kwantlen Polytechnic.
Armstrong mentioned the support of the Ministry of Agriculture's bee inspectors, which provide free support services to beekeepers, and the Animal Health Centre provides diagnostics on bee health.
All that support, formal and informal, is there for a reason: there's plenty of room for new people to enter beekeeping.
'IT'S NOT CHEAP' As many municipalities around the region have loosened their regulations on keeping back yard hives, more amateurs are getting into the game.
"It's not cheap," said Armstrong. A starter hive costs roughly $350 to $500, she said.
The first jar of honey out of a hive is often the most expensive the beekeeper will have ever eaten, she noted.
Then there are the troubles fending off colony collapse disorder and the other issues that plague bees.
But for those who go professional, there is a real market, particularly in pollination.
Provincially, about $250 million worth of agricultural production every year depends on bee pollination. Fruit, berries, and canola crops in particular need bees to thrive.
"Certainly there's a shortage of bees come pollination time," said Armstrong.
Some farms bring in bees from Alberta, but smaller farmers are the ones most in need, as they have the fewest resources. Armstrong said there's a place for smaller beekeepers to enter the market to work with them.
For those looking into the hobby or field, she says there's no substitute for hands on knowledge.
"You learn a lot by doing it," she said. She recommends beekeeping courses as well as talking to existing apiarists. "There's a lot to know, it's a steep learning curve," said Armstrong.
She's still keen to welcome more people to the world of beekeeping, however.