A passionate hobby becomes a thriving local business

By Joan Janzen
joanjanzen@yahoo.com

While farmers are busy seeding and gardeners are planting, another local enterprise has its work crew assembled and working. Janeil Enterprises and Sweetheart Pollinators, located seven km southwest of Eatonia, are gearing up for their upcoming honey and pollination season.

Janine and Neil Specht started bees as a passionate sideline to their struggling grain farm back in the ’80s when interest rates skyrocketed to 16 percent. The Specht’s lost the farm but were fortunate to have a hobby that became a thriving bee operation.

When asked if running a bee operation was a bit of a learning curve, Neil’s laugh said it all. “It was a huge learning curve,” Neil said. “Bees are like that; when you think you know it all, the bees will teach you one more lesson. Keeping them alive is a lesson. We’ve had losses in the 70 percent range. We have had a couple of times of 40 percent losses. In beekeeping, you do that more than two years, and you’re done.”

But Neil kept on learning, taking a course by Simon Fraser. “Everyone in the industry is ready to share, and you learn from them,” he noted. “We became big enough that I was part of the Western Canadian co-operative Bee Maid. I took a board of directors job with them.” Bee Maid Honey is owned by over 300 Canadian beekeepers located in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. If you check out Bee Maid honey, you may see photos of Janine, Neil and their daughter Megan pictured on their containers.

Neil’s daughter Megan looks after their queen breeding program. She has her own bees and continues to train new staff in this delicate process which takes gentle hands and very good eyes. It begins with queen cells in June, which soon become queen bees ready for their new colony. The queen bee is busiest in the summer months and can lay up to 2500 eggs per day.

“We make our own queens, but we also purchase about 1200 queens,” Neil explained, adding that they need queens sooner than they can breed their own because it’s too cold here. They breed the queens for the desired genetics and choose a gentle colony. No disease means the queen is good.

“The queens come into Calgary, and I fly with my plane, pick them up and bring them home,” Neil said. “That’s how we make up for losses during the winter; winter is hard for them. We produce under 1000 of our own queens. The ones we purchase come out of Hawaii. Others come out from Canada later in the season. Queens last multiple years. We generally try to change them seasonally.” The queens cost about 42 dollars apiece and require a multitude of insects to survive.

This year the Specht’s will be running 5000 colonies, but it’s Sweetheart Pollinators that allows their enterprise to thrive. “We went into pollination to have a business that we can thrive on,” Janine said. “Because of where we are located, honey is a bi-product.”

Neil said that because they were offered pollination contracts that were guaranteed for three years, they could grow by 1000 colonies per year. “We pollinate hybrid canola. It can’t produce male and female flowers, so we pollinate for them,” Janine said. Pollination begins at the end of June, primarily in the Medicine Hat and Bow Island area. “Their seed is certified canola, so it has to have isolation, so it doesn’t cross-pollinate,” Janine continued.

The work crew moves the beehives by truck to fields that need pollinators. Bee moves happen at night because bees can’t see in the dark and aren’t flying around. There are many beehives in pollination fields, so there is a lot of work involved to make sure they have room for honey from the canola. The work crew checks the hives to determine if they need one or two supers (empty boxes filled with honey). The supers are placed on top of the hives. If the bees aren’t given an extra box to fill with honey on time, they can form a swarm on a fence post or other object.

“The bees stay in the canola fields for three weeks to a month until agronomists tell you when they need to be removed. There are thousands of bees in a small area, so when crops stop flowering, there’s nothing for the bees, and they need to be removed,” Janine said.

“The seed is so valuable that they can afford to pay us to bring the bees. The seed is sold by the pound, not by the bushel, and is resistant to certain chemicals, which allows farmers to spray the field,” Neil explained.

The work crew at Janeil Enterprises is also valuable. “We have twenty employees, including three new guys this year and four students. There are several Mexicans, Ukrainians, two South Africans, one Filipino and some Canadians,” Neil said. “We are the United Nations of employees of Eatonia.”

Most of the employees return for multiple years. “Seasonal workers are hard to find, and it’s hard work. So they come on their off-season,” Janine said. “We spend all year training, and every day is a different job. The next year they are trained, so you need returning employees.” Janine and Neil found it beneficial to provide accommodation for their employees.

One of those valuable employees is Kostiantyn Tyschchenko, who is originally from Ukraine. Kostiantyn is the Manager at Janeil Enterprises and keeps everything operating smoothly. After a long winter, the protective wrapping and insulation are removed from the hives. Bees are placed in about 200 bee yards, from Oyen, to Consort, Fiske and Bow Island, and the crew checks on them every ten days. Over 12,000 boxes go out into the fields.

“We package about 10,000 pounds of honey a year,” Neil said. “We don’t pay people for having the bees in their yards, so we give quite a bit of honey away and put some in stores in Kindersley, Leader, Eatonia and Oyen, for those people who are asking for local honey. We send ten or twelve semi loads of honey to Bee Maid in Edmonton every year.”

“We now have 5000 colonies of honey bees, mostly for pollination. We produce about 700 barrels of honey (each barrel holds 650 pounds) and two tons of wax annually. We can extract about ten barrels of honey a day when things keep running,” Neil said.

While honey is a bi-product of the pollination work done by Sweetheart Pollinators, wax is a bi-product of making honey. In the process of making honey, the bees make wax which is part of their comb. Bees create wax in a special wax gland on their stomach. The worker bees then chew these flakes of wax to become soft and mouldable, which they then form into honeycomb. Honeycomb cells store not only honey, but nectar, pollen, water and are used as a nursery for larvae.

You will see a small white jelly bean-like spot in each cell in a honeycomb, which are bee eggs. Bees have four life stages: egg, larvae, pupae and adult. The eggs will hatch in about 3-4 days as larvae. From there, larvae will grow quickly and, in about six days, will turn into a pupae. After twelve additional days, the pupae will emerge from the cell as a fully grown bee.

Dandelions are one of the first sources of nectar and pollen for honeybees, and honey can look and taste quite different depending on different floral sources. The crew begins bringing honey home from the pollination fields sometime in July. A leaf blower type of backpack gently blows the bees out of the boxes with frames full of honey; then the crew adds more boxes with empty frames. The frames full of honey are stored at room temperature overnight before the honey is removed.

First, the wax is removed from the frame. “It takes seven pounds of honey to make one pound of wax, so wax is fairly valuable,” Janine explained. “Wax is used for beauty products.” The wax is sold by the truckload to large bulk buyers like makeup manufacturers.

Honey season wraps up in late September when the staff returns to school or to their home countries. But they’ll be back again in 2022, ready to begin the process of making honey and pollinating crops.