Beekeeper pulling in honey by the barrel

Covered in honey, getting the odd bee sting and lifting 80 lb. boxes on a regular basis is a combination that you only find in one line of work.
It’s just a regular day for beekeeper Rick Neilson who has few complaints about the hours he spends working with his hives.
“When I was just starting out, this guy said he kept bees and said he knew everything there was to know about bees,” said Neilson. “That’s impossible, bees are always teaching you something.”
Neilson has been keeping bees since 1976 and insists he is still learning.
Standing out in one of his 17 bee yards, surrounded by the buzzing insects that many think of as ferocious, Neilson calmly strolls in front of the hives’ entrance of the hives.
Wearing a t-shirt and a baseball cap he pries open the lid of a hive packed full of thousands of bees, giving them a puff of smoke to confuse them.
“I just like working with bees. I produce honey to keep bees,” he explained. “A hive of bees is really like a super-organism, it’s one animal in a sense, and you can go right inside it and manipulate it. When it gets too big you can split it in two.”
Because of his fascination with the insects, Neilson has been taking a keen interest in a new aspect of the business–selling bees themselves rather than bee products.
“I keep trying different things. What I’ve been thinking about lately is just producing bees, there’s a lot of demand for bees right now,” he explained.
Some of the biggest demand is for queen bees as every hive depends on one queen bee. By carefully transplanting eggs into special wax cells and placing then in small hives called “nukes,” Neilson has been producing a number of gentle, productive Buckfast queen’s that are in demand across the continent.
His queens have been sold as far as Georgia, Texas and even South America.
“It’s very precise . . . you have to have the right condition to make the perfect queen. But it’s very satisfying when you do make the perfect queen and send it to other people,” said Neilson.
But for now honey production remains an integral part of the business. In his honey house, it’s apparent as honey sits in jars, tanks, drums and supers as it goes through different stages of extraction.
With a few bees resting on his hat, a few more on his arm, he checks the top boxes of his hive to see if they’re full of honey or brood.
“Those boxes are heavy, they weigh about 80 pounds. That’s why my son is becoming a chiropractor,” laughed Neilson.
Before going in for lunch he has to change his clothes in order to keep the house from becoming as sticky as his workshop because with around 350 hives, each producing an average of 150 lbs. of honey per year, extracting and bottling is a sticky, time-consuming part of the business.
Neilson and his wife Linda also make candles out of bees wax which they sell at the Clover Valley Farmers’ Market throughout September and October. The Neilson’s are honey fanatics and put it in their cooking on a regular basis. Even after spending a morning covered in it, Neilson goes in for lunch and puts two spoons of honey in his tea and spreads some on a bagel.
For the past ten years Neilson has also been the provincial inspector for the Rainy River and Kenora districts, ensuring that diseases such as foul brood and mites are not becoming a risk to Northwestern Ontario’s bee colonies.
“It’s a way of keeping my bees and everyone else’s healthy,” Neilson explained. “If they want to get into beekeeping they have to be aware that bees are susceptible to some diseases. If you don’t look after them you’re not going to get anything from them.”
He is also helping those who are venturing into beekeeping for the first time.
“There’s young people wanting to have a few hives for spending money–that’s a good thing and really it’s a lot of fun teaching people and passing on what you’ve learned,” said Neilson who is encouraged to see others taking up the business in district including Henry Kornelsen of Barwick with 60 hives and Mike Johanson of Rainy River who has 30.