Each month, Wild.com will feature a Minnesota Wild player and his pet(s), presented by PetSmart.
Former Wild forward, and current Wild TV analyst, Ryan Carter has four hives of honeybees at home.
Brandon Laxson: Why did you choose to keep bees?
Ryan Carter: "It's a long story but essentially, I got Covid and sat in the basement for 14 days. My daughter, the youngest, has seasonal allergies and a friend said in lieu of taking allergy meds, which we have to give my daughter daily, he takes a teaspoon of local honey. He's a beekeeper and he said that it's helped him.
So, I always had that in the back of my mind when I was sitting down there with a very mild case of Covid. I was losing my mind with nothing to do so I decided to dive into beekeeping; read a couple of beekeeping books, watched probably about 100 hours of beekeeping videos. Fourteen days later I came up from the basement (I envision myself glowing yellow) and pronounced myself a beekeeper.
I bought all the stuff the next day. On day 15 I was buying everything you needed to be a beekeeper. "
BL: "What's the professional term for beekeepers?"
RC: "An apiarist is someone who manages a bee yard … an apiary is the name for a bee yard."
BL: "Do you have a full apiary?"
RC: "I have four hives, so we call it an apiary because we want to use that word. We have a couple of acres and everybody in our neighborhood has a couple of acres with wildflower and prairie. We're also right on a golf course so there's plenty of bee habitat.
They pollinate the area. I think the stat is three out of every four bites on your plate come from something that a honeybee has pollinated."
BL: "What do bees do in the winter?"
RC: "That's the art of northern beekeeping: getting them through the winter. They stay in the hives and (I could really get into the nerdy stuff) their whole goal over winter is to keep the queen alive so that when spring rolls around, she can lay more eggs, the colony can do more work and make more honey.
The reason they make honey and store it is for the winter months so that they have resources to burn energy. What they do is they sit in the hive, they vibrate around the queen in a cluster, they move to the inside and once they run out of energy they move to the outside. They eat some honey, they get more energy, they go to do it again. That's the life of a winter bee.
The beekeeper's job is three or four things: it's that [the bees] have enough honey in there and that the beekeeper didn't take too much because you don't want them to starve, it's managing how much honey they have (it's probably around 120-140 pounds) and to control humidity and moisture in the hive.
The cold doesn't really kill bees that much, they're pretty good at staying warm. They keep the hive and the cluster at about 90 degrees. What can happen is condensation can go to the top of the hive, create a raindrop that can drop down and that's what will actually freeze. Slowly an icicle freezes in all these bees, so the beekeeper's job is to make sure the top of the hive is well ventilated.
I happen to insulate my hives too on the outside. I've never had a hive die over winter."
BL: "What's the most interesting thing you've learned since you started beekeeping?"
RC: "There's a correlation between [bees and myself] that I find fascinating. I'm the only dude in the house and the queen controls it all, all the worker ladies, all the important ones, are female bees. The males can't feed themselves … which is a lot like my house here.
The most fascinating part is how they do what they do. One honeybee will visit over one million flowers to create one teaspoon of honey. Think about that, they will visit one million flowers in six weeks. The summer bee will live six weeks; one million flowers, one entire life, for one little teaspoon of honey.
Also, one bee has three cycles of life. The summer bee lives six weeks: two weeks in the hive, the next couple of weeks they're a nurse bee and the final two weeks they're the forager. They're visiting a million flowers in just a couple of weeks."
BL: "What do you do with all the honey you produce?"
RC: "I'm still figuring that out. I've got a large supply of jars and I harvest the honey every fall. Last year we had, I don't know, 150 pounds. We try to jar it up, we don't pasteurize it so it's the good stuff, raw, local honey. It's too much for my family to consume; really even [too much] to give away because honey's not like maple syrup where people go through it on a weekend. It's hard to even unload it.
I just worked out a deal where it's going to be for sale as a novelty item at the golf course that we live on right now. Hopefully that will help us get rid of some of it."
Ryan Carter's final thoughts:
"There's a big difference between honeybees, wasps, yellowjackets, and all the [others]. Once you get educated on what kind of bee you're looking at, it's fascinating to follow along. Honeybees are pretty cool creatures."
