Click Here if you listened. We’d love to know what you think. There is even a spot for feedback!
Read along below!
Jason Davis photo. Credit: Matthew Smith
Working Bees on the Big Island
An Alaskan Beekeeper’s Brief Immersion in Hawai‘i’s Queen-Rearing World
By: Jason Davis
The ad in an email from Bee Culture caught my eye: “Help Wanted at Kona Queen Hawaii for November & December…bring your bee expertise to the Big Island.” The idea had an easy logic to it. By late October my thirty colonies in Homer, Alaska are wrapped and buckled down until April, and I spend the dark months turning their honey into mead for my tasting room at Sweetgale Meadworks. Heading south for a stretch of sunlight and hands-on experience inside a major commercial outfit felt like a chance to grow as a beekeeper while also fortifying my Vitamin D reserves for the Winter ahead.
When I spoke to Kelly O’Day, the owner of Kona Queen Hawaii (KQ), he explained that the operation’s seasonal rhythm had left them short-staffed. Their usual team of Nicaraguan beekeepers were home renewing H-2A visas and wouldn’t return until January, so the company was looking for experienced beekeepers from the Mainland to help bridge the gap. I joked to friends in Alaska that I’d signed on as a migrant farm worker. By my second day in Kona, the old adage about the grain of truth in every joke felt uncomfortably apt.
The first thing that struck me when stepping onto the tarmac at the Kona Airport wasn’t the heat but the scent. For a nose accustomed to frozen subarctic air, the warm, humid smell of tropical flowers and damp vegetation was almost euphoric. Mike O’Day, the owner’s son, met me at the airport, drove me to my apartment in Captain Cook, and handed me the keys to the Toyota Tacoma that would be my transportation to KQ headquarters and the grocery store. Initially I had the apartment and truck to myself, but by the end of the first week I was sharing both with two other guys, a beekeeper from Michigan and another from Kentucky. Three women from the Mainland shared another apartment & truck.
Reporting for duty at 7 a.m. the next morning, I found an open-air Quonset hut shop and a scattering of outbuildings on a lot already buzzing with activity. Around twenty full-time KQ employees were swinging into motion — some lighting smokers, others recaging a few hundred large, vigorous queens bound for customers on the mainland. I signed the employment papers, tapped my new timecard, was issued a smoker, hive tool, holster, and veil, and then pointed toward my team’s truck.
Each day the full-time local crew — male and female beekeepers, predominantly Native Hawaiian along with others originally of Mainland origin — would split into two or three teams, joined by one or two of us new arrivals. Each team traveled in a pair of trucks loaded with syrup tanks, water tanks, pallets of pollen substitute, stacks of heavy wooden candy boards, and a few dozen queens for requeening underperforming colonies. Smokers were transported in small compartments built into the rear of each flatbed. On my first day I was lucky to have grabbed a couple of small locally-grown finger bananas from the common table before we headed out; with no formal lunch break and limited opportunity to buy food during the middle of the work day, anyone who forgot their lunch (or, I learned later, neglected to ask for a grocery stop on the morning drive to the first yard) went hungry until late afternoon.
That first day we drove an hour south to an apiary beyond South Point Road, serviced it, and then worked our way back north. As on subsequent days, we visited seven or eight yards, each holding anywhere from a couple dozen colonies to nearly two hundred. Most were standard ten-frame deep brood boxes with supers above queen excluders; others were “double-ups,” two side-by-side nucs sharing supers. At each yard we opened every colony, assessed brood health, requeened if necessary (rare), fed pollen sub and syrup, replaced candy boards when needed, and topped off watering stations. The foreman I worked with didn’t offer a formal orientation to KQ’s methods, but he was quick with corrections, and coworkers were generous with practical tips — like sliding supers forward and tilting them back to read the brood nest from above without breaking down the whole stack.
Over the first week I learned that KQ’s yards were scattered across the western half of the island. Some sat high along Saddle Road, where mornings started in the upper 30s and afternoons climbed into the 50s — temperatures that would feel fresh in Alaska but were warmer under Hawai’i’s intense sun. Other yards perched along rough lava tracks overhung with wild guava trees, where we could pluck ripe fruit from the truck window as we bounced along. Lower-elevation yards baked under full heat in sun-parched grass. The variety was constant. Hawai’i’s climate is mild compared to many tropical locations – highs were typically in the low 80’s – but humidity varied a lot. Many days I barely touched my quart-sized water bottle, but one sweaty day in my second week I drained it by noon and was reduced to begging to “waterfall” water from the larger bottle of a colleague. After that I brought two quarts a day.
The vast majority of the bees we worked were Italians, and whether due to the climate or good long-term selection, they were exceptionally gentle. I wore my veil the first week out of habit, then followed the locals and abandoned it. No one used gloves. A few remote yards held pure Carniolans — the stock used for KQ’s Carni-cross queens, said to be popular in northern Canada and other cooler climes (I ordered ten of these for June delivery to me in Alaska). Even in Hawai’i’s warmth, the Carnis had noticeably reduced their brood nests and colony sizes for the “Winter,” responding to day length rather than temperature. According to my co-workers, Kona Queen maintains around 16,000 colonies in the off season, and exports roughly 360,000 queens annually to the Mainland.
Varroa appeared to be well managed, with minimal interventions needed in November. Small hive beetle was new to me, and I noticed that treatments weren’t used in the high Saddle region, where cooler temperatures were said to suppress beetle reproduction. That was good news to me, given that Alaska saw its first-ever detection of small hive beetles this past Summer, in packages imported from Mississippi.
After a couple of weeks, the experience of conducting a hundred or more inspections per day rewired the way I’ll approach my own yards. Instead of breaking colonies down box by box and going through the brood nest frame by frame, I’ll read the brood from above, going deeper only when something looks off. The weekly use of pollen sub — rather than only for a few weeks during our April pollen dearth — is another practice I’ll apply at home, with the aim of maximizing buildup before our short, intense fireweed bloom. Armed with these new practices, I’m thinking I’ll expand my hives from 30 to 50 this Spring.
Working in Hawai’i was more intense than I expected. The pace, the heat, and the physical demand had shades of the Kenai Peninsula fish processing plants I worked in years ago: fast, repetitive, methodical. Even in KQ’s “slow season,” the work had an assembly-line rhythm. But stepping into that rhythm as a beekeeper from Alaska was valuable. Listening more than talking, watching the practiced movements of the local crew, and immersing myself in a landscape and workflow wholly unlike my own taught me things I might never have learned puttering around my own yards at home.
Home in Alaska, I found my mind drifting back — sometimes even in dreams — to the people, the yards, and the bees on the Big Island. That palpable sense of nostalgia, in fact, is what gave rise to this article, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to contribute, even briefly, to KQ’s important mission.
Jason Davis is the owner and mead maker at Sweetgale Meadworks in Homer, Alaska, where he uses honey from his 30 hives and from other local beekeepers to create meads that highlight the flavors and aromas of Alaska’s wild herbs and berries.
