A Day in the Life: Beekeeping is one of the sweetest jobs on earth

By Alexia McCulloch, Bluebonnet News reporter

This offering of the “Day in the Life” series is the first that spanned two mornings, technically making this “Days in the Life” – and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Beekeeping, and all manners of homesteading, has interested me for a long time. I go into every addition to this series with a want to learn everything I can in my limited time on the job, but with beekeeping I was harvesting much of the information for my own benefit. My family has recently purchased bee boxes, and we are now waiting until spring before fulfilling our beekeeping aspirations, so I was thinking about how I might manage to do all this in our fields and our shop.

Early Monday morning, July 24, I met up with Ricky Catchings, owner of C&B Honey, at his house in Hardin. I caught a lucky break with this connection because Ricky is my cousin’s father-in-law, and my cousins, who I see at least once a week, were able to join us on both days. Pretty quickly after getting to their house, I was given a bright white beekeeping suit and told to follow behind.

Ricky has an arrangement with some of his landowner friends in which they let him keep a few beehives on their property, and, in return, he gives them honey.

Although bees have been on my to-do list for a few years, I was a little spooked driving behind Ricky to get to this property, where we would collect the boxes before returning them to the hot house. A fun fact about me is that I have never been stung by a bee! A less fun fact is that I have no idea if I’m allergic to bees!

Spooked or not, I knew going into a field with AT LEAST 400,000 bees meant I had to be cool, calm, and collected, and not panic if a bee wiggled its way into my beekeeping suit. Luckily, the process of collecting the boxes required the bees to be smoked and driven down to the bottom brood boxes.

Blowing smoke into the beehives tricks the bees into thinking there’s a forest fire, so the bees gorge themselves on their honey to prepare for a possible evacuation.

As Ricky explained, “They’re just like me after I eat a big Thanksgiving meal. I don’t want to fight anybody.”

Although I was a little startled by the occasional bee smacking itself against my bee suit hood, I felt more at ease knowing most of the half-million bees were too full to fight. I was less at ease from seeing a spider the size of a small cat on one of the hives than the bees themselves. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a picture of said spider before Kaden, Ricky’s oldest grandson, dealt with it.

We collected 30-40 honey boxes, the upper sections on the hives where the bees store a majority of their honey, using a pallet and tractor, making it simple enough to grab one of the heavy boxes, take a few steps and add it to the pallet on the front of the tractor. When we were done with one section of hives, Ricky simply moved the tractor to the next location to minimize walking distance. We knocked out all of the hives in maybe an hour and a half, but in the blistering hot Texas heat, we produced a day’s worth of sweat in the bee suits.

After an interview back at Ricky’s house, we parted ways for the day and I returned the next morning for the fun part: extraction.

Ricky explained that he began his beekeeping journey with only four beehives, and with bees captured in a neighbor’s field using a swarm trap. In his first year, they produced about 15 to 20 gallons of honey.

“My wife Mary and I extracted the honey in our living room with this hand-crank extractor that I loan to people now. And then we just kept getting more bees and more bees from splitting,” he said.

He also talked about how valuable talking to other beekeepers was in the beginning phases of C&B Honey, which stands for Catchings and Brashier. Brashier is the last name of his son-in-law, Matthew, daughter, Dana, and grandchildren, Kaden, Kinley, Kolston, and Kaitley. Kaden and Kolston were out in the field with us on Monday. On extraction day, we were joined by six of Ricky’s grandchildren who typically join to help harvest a portion of the staggering 10,000 pounds of honey that C&B Honey Farm averages each year.

Legacy is a very important thing to C&B Honey, and you could see that while we were in the hot house, where a majority of the beekeeping operations are on Tuesday. When not busy, Ricky almost always has a grandbaby in his arms, or cracks jokes or offers instruction to another grandchild.

“I hope to leave it to them some day,” he said.

The extraction process was right up my alley, even though I dropped a few frames in the processor (pictured above), where the frames are run through to scrape the excess wax. This is where I spent the majority of the processing day.

The whole process went like this: Kaden ran the frames through the machine pictured below, which cut off the wax that the bees cover the honey with, leaving it in a pile on a metal strainer at the bottom of the large metal tub, where it sits for the next day to allow the honey to drain out. The frames are lined up above the tub, where they continue to drip until I got to them with my scraper tool, getting rid of the wax the processor couldn’t reach.

After scraping them, they are stood upright in the centrifugal force extractor where they are spun for about 15 minutes, and all the honey is carried out through a system of pipes. This is much like a washing machine spinning and centrifugal force removing excess water from clothes.

The pipes carry the honey and wax to a large separator that uses heat to bring the wax to the top of the vat and honey to the bottom. The honey is then brought by the barrel to a system that strains out anything that was missed, and then it is finally bottled.

If you are interested in becoming a beekeeper, Ricky recommends, “Just find a beekeeper and go see them and talk. If you can develop that with them – you’ve got a friend. You know, take them out to eat or something. Let them pass on their knowledge and be a customer to them, too. There’s also an organization called the Liberty County Beekeepers Association. I haven’t had time to join, or make any meetings or anything, but that’s another recommendation.”

Small businesses and the people of Liberty County give it its character, so the next time you’re needing honey, please remember that C&B Honey is carried at different locations around the county. It can be found locally at Potetz Home Center in Liberty and Maci Feed Store in Hardin, or at the Faux Real Trade Days each month at the TVE Fairgrounds in Liberty.

Note: If you have an occupation to recommend for the Day in a Life series, we would love to hear from you! Please send an email to newsdesk@bluebonnetnews.com.