George McAllister was 66 years old at the time of the interview, which took place at the Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He is the former president of the Mecklenburg Beekeepers Association and his family has a long history with beekeeping from the 19th century, in addition to having extensive experience teaching beginner beekeepers in Charlotte.
Tape Log
| 0:00:02 | Beginning |
| 0:00:29 | George’s family’s long history with beekeeping |
| 00:07:02 | Beekeeping as a kid |
| 0:09:37 | How did he know about all of this information about his family’s long history with beekeeping? |
| 0:10:30 | Beekeeping in high school |
| 0:14:00 | Working with the police department as a beekeeper |
| 0:16:15 | His experience with 2008 and working at UNCC |
| 0:20:45 | Beekeeping business and a hobby |
| 0:21:30 | His blog online went viral |
| 0:24:30 | Started website and having more hives |
| 0:30:50 | President of the Mecklenburg Beekeeper Association and what did he do as a president |
| 0:33:33 | Funding of the Mecklenburg Beekeeper Association |
| 0:36:37 | Why has North Carolina become popular with beekeeping over the years? |
| 0:41:10 | Expanding the hives and retiring from UNCC in 2018 |
| 0:46:16 | How his day goes as a beekeeper in Charlotte in November 2024 |
| 0:50:19 | Experimenting and research in beekeeping |
| 1:00:55 | Beekeeping seminars |
| 1:03:40 | Universities research on colony collapse disorder |
| 1:06:00 | The extension of bees in the United States |
| 1:09:10 | Selling his products online and offline |
| 1:13:20 | Having his hives next to the lake |
| 1:18:38 | Is anyone in his family working in beekeeping like him? |
| 1:20:30 | Advising a beginner beekeeper |
| 1:22:45 | His mistakes with beekeeping |
| 1:26:30 | Hopes and dreams with the bees |
| 1:31:21 | Is there any other questions I should have asked? |
| 1:32:35 | Closing |
Transcript
George McAllister
Thanks for inviting me. Thank you very much.
Hossam Yasser
So why did you initially get interested in beekeeping?
George McAllister
Well, I guess you would say that my family on my mother’s side has a very long history of beekeeping. Matter of fact, we’ve got it documented all the way back to my great, great grandfather, Daniel Picney Meachel. Well, yes. He was born in 1837 and he had bees. He lived right outside of Raleigh and he had his bees about five miles outside the city. He had enough bees that it required that he build what we call a honey house. That’s basically a shed or building to store your equipment and extract honey. I’m guessing it was probably about the size of a two car garage. Anyway, so that is where it all began as far as our documentation goes. He had a son, Frank Thelopoulos Meachem, and he was born in 1869 and he learned beekeeping from his father, of course, Daniel Picney Meachem. What’s also interesting about my great grandfather, Frank Thelopoulos Meachem, was he was the second student to enroll at NC State University in Raleigh. He was with the first graduating class, which was from 1889 to 1893. He earned his BS degree in agriculture and then he went on to get his master’s degree from NCSU. And NCSU, of course back then it was called North Carolina College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts. He was actually the first graduate student at NC State to graduate. Back then it was a one year program and he was the first student to complete that. What was interesting about all that is George Vanderbilt heard about this and wrote the chancellor of the college and said he was looking for someone who could manage his dairy at a house he had just built, an actual Biltmore house. And so my grandfather ended up right out of school going to work for George Vanderbilt at the Biltmore house and he was the foreman of the dairy. He lived in the foreman’s house at the dairy there. He married his wife who worked in the kitchen at that time.That was E.P. Benard. They had a son, Frank Benard Meacham. Frank Benard Meacham was born in 1897 and he was my grandfather. And he was first introduced to beekeeping when he was around seven years old, I guess around about 1905, when he was visiting and hanging out with his grandfather’s bees. That was Daniel Pickney Meacham. Unfortunately Daniel Pickney Meacham died about a year later so he didn’t really get much experience from his grandfather. However his father, Frank Thelopoulos Meacham, who I just mentioned earlier, also had bees and Frank Benard Meacham, my grandfather, had to manage him. So he was introduced to beekeeping, my grandfather that is, around seven years old and then again in his teenage years when his father began keeping bees. At that time he became hooked in bees. He too enrolled at NC State College, now NC State University, like his grandfather and so forth. And in 1918 he enrolled and got his degree in agriculture in 1922. He then received his master’s degree at NC State in 1925. Finally after graduating he became a part-time instructor in the bee culture, teaching bee culture, excuse me, in the rehabilitation division of State College, teaching, returning World War I veterans beekeeping. So those veterans coming from World War I who were interested in beekeeping as a vocation, he started teaching them straight out of college. A year later he was promoted and became an assistant professor and started teaching the college level course of fundamentals of scientific bee culture. And he did that up until 1943. While teaching at the university he was also the extension beekeeping specialist serving beekeepers across the state of North Carolina. NC State being an extension university has outreach programs and one of them involved beekeeping which he was a part of. He also was a lifetime member of the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association where he was the secretary treasurer of Alphanone for almost 30 years starting really 1923 and was getting out of school. Now he also had bees and this is in Raleigh. He kept up to 75 bee hives and it would fluctuate of course depending on what was going on but he had up to 75 hives and he kept bees pretty much his entire life. And that’s how I got introduced to beekeeping. So you can see there is a long lineage of beekeepers in our family. I guess you would say I’m the fourth generation by now. And so as a kid I learned beekeeping from my grandfather and would go into his hives with him and help extract honey and so forth. I got, I guess I was probably in middle school at the time and helping extracting honey I would get a nickel for every comb of honey that I would extract. And then I thought I was making tons of money at a nickel frame. I don’t look back on it now. I don’t know if you would call that child labor or not. But it was good money at the time and I enjoyed it and I probably would have done it without the nickel anyway. So I learned through him and I started keeping bees when I was in high school in the early 1970s and I would cap them. I also raised bees and sold bees. I sold honey. All this is again in Raleigh, North Carolina. When I got my driver’s license I started a little business of taking bees out of houses and retrieving swarms of bees that were in people’s yards that they wanted to get rid of. At that time there weren’t that many people doing it in Raleigh and I went around and talked to the police stations and the fire departments and gave them my name and number and said if somebody calls about a swarm of bees give me a call.And they started, the phone started ringing. Of course this is typically in the spring when bees swarm and I would go and collect bees out of trees on sides of houses and so forth. At the same time I would take bees out of houses that had gone inside a saw fit or a wall or something like that to make extra money. I could make in a weekend taking bees out of houses that my friends working in fast food and wherever would take almost a month to make. So it was pretty lucrative and at the same time I really enjoyed it. We were in high school at this time.I was in high school. 16.
Hossam Yasser
Okay so before going after like what happened after high school I want to know like more about how did you know all of this great stuff about your great grandfather? How did you get to know this kind of information?Was it like your father told you this information or did you have like some kind of documents or how did you get to know all of this kind of information?
George McAllister
Two ways. One beekeeping as you can tell was a big part of our family for many years. So there was an oral history passed down about beekeeping.We have documents that are newspaper articles, articles in bee journals, letters, things of that nature that would talk about it.So all the dates and the specifics I’ve told you here are facts from documents rather than oral. Possibly he said or did this but we don’t know. So I just want to make sure in discussing this that I was as factual as possible. So yes everything here comes out of documentation. If you want to see it give it to you. Yes that’s very good.
Hossam Yasser
So let’s go. So what happened like after high school?
George McAllister
So high school so what’s interesting about whatever happened in high school? One of the first, matter of fact I think it was the first phone call I got from the police department when I was 16 years old and I put out my name and number. I got this call on a Sunday around 7, 8 o’clock in the morning and the policeman called and said there was a swarm of bees downtown in a shop in the doorway and could I get them out because it was causing havoc Sunday morning and I said sure be glad to. So I was all excited my first job. I dropped downtown, Raleigh. Sunday in the police had blocked off the entire block and they were of course standing at a significant distance pointing towards the swarm of bees that were in this doorway. I looked at it and it was an adult bookstore. So here I am 16 years old. There’s an adult bookstore with a swarm of bees in the doorway and people trying to get out and I’m like okay this is going to be interesting. So I went and got the bees out of the doorway. The owner of the bookstore was extremely happy that I did it. Matter of fact he offered me anything in the store that I wanted free of charge for doing this. Of course I declined and also mentioned I was only 16 years old which immediately shut the door and that was that. That was my first experience with collecting swarms which I thought was pretty funny. So anyway no other I guess noteworthy or interesting activities since then. So after high school I sold my bees and went to college, went to NC State and also UNC Chapel Hill. Did not keep bees during that period of time just too much going on. Life got in the way of beekeeping I guess you would say.
Hossam Yasser
But at high school were you also beekeeping?
George McAllister
Oh in high school I was beekeeping throughout high school. Yeah not just swarms. Oh yeah I had hives I had up to yes maybe a dozen hives in our backyard and I would extract honey and I would sell bees. A lot of times what I would do is I would get a swarm of bees and I would put them in a hive and grow that swarm out to a nice big size hive of bees then I would turn around and sell it to beekeepers. So I would get the swarm at no cost if it was in a tree or something like that where I could access it. I would pick it up at no cost because I knew more likely I would be able to sell it to a beekeeper once it had grown to a good population and the queen was laying in and I knew that it was going to be.
Hossam Yasser
Could you tell me more about the scene of beekeeping in Charlotte at this time in the 70s? Were there many beekeepers at this time? Did you have any?
George McAllister
Okay now in Raleigh I was in remembers in the 70s I was in Raleigh. Raleigh okay. Not a lot of beekeepers, very few. That’s why I was able to go to the fire departments and the police departments and give them my name and even to some of the exterminators because nobody else was doing it. So it was very unusual. My grandfather introduced me to several beekeepers in the community because he knew pretty much all of them. But it was not that popular of an activity back then.
Hossam Yasser
So nothing like it is today.
George McAllister
Nothing like today. I know just in Raleigh, the Wake County Bee Club they’ve got several hundred members. They’re one of the largest bee clubs in the state. Mecklenburg County is the largest bee club. We have over 350 members. So it’s nothing like that.
Hossam Yasser
Was it Just in Raleigh or in the United States as well back in the 70s?
George McAllister
I’m sorry what?
Hossam Yasser
I mean like back in the 70s beekeeping was not popular as you mentioned. So was it Justin Raleigh or in the United States as well?
George McAllister
In the United States it just wasn’t as popular. It really wasn’t. And of course now it’s extremely popular. And for example now we have bee school here in Mecklenburg County where we’re teaching people how to raise bees. And every year we’ll have anywhere between 150 and 180 students every winter going through a nine week program on how to raise bees. Probably I would say there are probably 600-700 hives in the city limits of Charlotte I would guess. There are quite a few bee hives in Charlotte, places you wouldn’t even think. But they’re all tucked away 578in back of houses on top of buildings and things of that nature. So anyway.
Hossam Yasser
So what happened after your university?
George McAllister
After university and so forth. Had a family, raised kids the whole bit. Life got very involved with the family and so forth.
Hossam Yasser
And you didn’t do anything attached to beekeeping at this time?
George McAllister
Nope, did not a thing with beekeeping. Did not a thing with beekeeping. So 2008 rolls around. Of course we’re having the recession starting at that point. For the, at that period of time I was the regional director of UNC Charlotte’s Small Business and Technology Development Center. Previations SBTDC. And this is an outreach program of the university system, all the universities within North Carolina. And of course here at UNC Charlotte this outreach program provided business counseling and consulting services to area businesses. And I was the director of the program and actually was the director, worked there as a director for 25 years before retiring. But in 2008 when you had the recession you can imagine we were extremely busy and we were, whole staff was working easily 10, 12 hours a day just helping businesses try to deal with the recession. At that time I was talking to my wife about how I needed just a break. I needed to do something different. Needed to just sort of, you know, do something to take my mind off the job periodically just as a way of regaining a little bit of balance in life. And she said, well did you think about going back into beekeeping? And I went huh, I hadn’t really thought about that. But you know it’s not a bad idea when you think about it. It has nothing to do with business, business consulting. Someone knows me so I won’t be going somewhere where somebody wants to pick my brain on their business ideas and so forth. It’s outside, it’s using your hands, it’s a different way of thinking about things. And just so radically different from what I was doing at the time, I’m like yes, that is what I want to do. I went to my first Mecklenburg County Bee Club meeting in I think it was October of 2008. At that time I was expecting to walk into a room of I don’t know maybe a dozen of old guys with blue jeans and flannel shirts and maybe even bed overalls. Since that was sort of the group that I was familiar with back when I was in high school I walked in the door and it was nothing like that. There were over a hundred people there of all walks of life back in 2008. I mean there were families, families with kids, kids, all walks of life which was totally surprising yet very refreshing and I was glad to see that. That beekeeping had evolved to the point where it was of interest to a wide range of people. Not just the old guys, of course I was in high school at the time so anybody over 30 years old was old to me but you know I was very surprised to see the diversity within the club. I joined the club at that point, attended the bee school they had in 2009. Immediately bought two or three bee, I think three bee hives. I put them on my back deck rather than in my yard. Not to the chrugrin of my family, my kids were in high school at the time but they didn’t mind too much. I had to put them on my back deck because we had, we have a creek in our backyard here in Charlotte and a lot of kids around and I know growing up around bees, a creek, a five year old boy, a bee hive, sticks and rocks just all come together. Some kids in bee hives, they just got to put a stick in that bee hive, they got to throw a rock at it and playing around the creek I just knew that all that together was going to cause problems in the neighborhood so I kept them on my back deck which was fine. So I started off beekeeping that way. That was 2009.
Hossam Yasser
Was it like making a business or more like you wanted to have like a hobby?
George McAllister
At first it was, I mean it’s always been somewhat of a hobby but at first it was just a few bee hives and playing around with it. What was interesting at the time, I started it, like I said before my kids were in high school but they were getting ready to move into college. So this, I think it was the second or third year I was in beekeeping, the kids moved off to college and they wanted to keep track of what I wanted, what I was doing, they were still interested, they would help me a little bit with extracting honey and so forth and they would give it to their friends. They were not interested in going into the hive but they were interested in the honey. And so I started a blog just showing what I was doing, taking pictures and so forth and posted that on the internet so that they could see what I was doing from college. I guess the interesting thing about that was I actually had a little comment section in there where they could email me or comment back or send me a message back and for some reason or another my blog got popular and someone broadcasted it pretty broad. All of a sudden I started getting questions from around the world on beekeeping and then all of a sudden I would get like 5, 10, 15 questions a day then 20, 25 questions a day from people wanting to know about beekeeping and specific questions having seen my little blog. So I began spending 1, 2, 3 hours a night responding to emails. It didn’t take long for me to go, “No, this is too much work for no money and a lot of work to get done responding to these emails.” So I had to shut the blog down. So that was my first entry into the internet with blogs. Subsequently I’ve got several websites I’ve developed but it was very interesting and it showed beekeeping was popular and people saw what I was doing and they started asking questions and which you know it’s good, you know it’s good from there.
Hossam Yasser
What kind of questions were you asking a lot?
George McAllister
Oh they would see it. My kids were interested in what I was doing so I posted a lot of pictures and I would describe what I was doing and so they were following up a lot on I see that you just put a new queen into the hive.
Hossam Yasser
How exactly did you do that?
George McAllister
I put a queen in this one. I introduced a queen into my bee hive and they killed her.
Hossam Yasser 24:30
Like practical beekeeping questions?
George McAllister
Yes, all practical beekeeping questions. Practical beekeeping questions. So that was just it starting with that. As I moved forward in beekeeping what really attracted me going forward besides the things I mentioned earlier with the recession and I kept on doing the beekeeping. The interesting thing about beekeeping is it is something that you can do and never learn everything. It’s one of those things I tell people the more you learn about beekeeping the less you know. And you can take it in so many directions. You can raise bees and sell honey. You can raise bees and sell queens. You can raise bees to sell more bees. Raise bees increase your apiary. Apiary is what we call a bee yard. You can raise bees for pollen, for pollination, for propolis, for beeswax, for candles. There are so many avenues in which you can go down as far as beekeeping goes. Just fascinating. And that’s what’s always held my attention is there’s always something to learn. Always learning something. It’s just never ending as far as what you can learn. And they’re just fascinating animals. So after the recession that’s what kept my interest and held my interest was just how fascinating these creatures are. And how much you can learn from them and the learning just doesn’t stop. So I kept building my business. I mean the bees kept building them. Absolutely, those are mine. Yeah, after 2000, so like two or three years later I added more hives and kept adding hives. Started a website called charlottehoney.com and I would sell my honey through charlotte.com and that got very popular. And at the same time– And you were still working at the– I still worked at the whole time. Still working. So this was, at this time I was not making a ton of money but I would call what I was doing and still am doing, I would call it a profitable hobby. Now it’s a hobby is typically not profitable like a boat. If you have a boat, there’s money going into your boat but you’re not making any money.That’s a hobby. Yeah, so if you’ve got something that’s to pure hobby that is not generating any revenue, it’s just an expense. That’s fine. I call a profitable hobby one and in this case beekeeping that I was doing, that I’ve been doing. I do generate enough money to cover all my expenses, travel to conferences, anything like that, gas, so forth. Labor to the extent that I guess I’d probably make a quarter or an hour, maybe 50 cents an hour. So it’s still a hobby because I’m not making minimum wage or not making a profit like you would in a for-profit business. But I do make enough money to cover all my expenses plus some and gives me the luxury to travel and go to conferences. As I got into beekeeping, why this is important is I started teaching beekeeping. Again it goes back to my great grandfather and grandfather who were educators and so forth. So it would just sort of fit that that would interest me also. After being in beekeeping, I guess maybe three or four or five years, I started teaching bee school here in Mecklenburg County. So I was teaching beginners how to do it and then I would mentor beekeepers. They would come to my apiary, place where I keep my bees and I would teach them the practical aspects of beekeeping. Then I expanded and people wanted me to come to their bee clubs and talk about beekeeping. And so I developed several talks on beekeeping. I also developed more or less a way of keeping bees where I keep bees in more of a self-sustaining environment so that everything I need for my bees is in one place. If I need a queen, I’m raising queens and I have queens there available. If I need some extra food, I’ve got it there. If I need extra bees, I’ve got everything I need to keep my bees healthy and live a long life. And so it’s a self-sustaining, self-sufficient kind of operation which is starting to catch on in beekeeping. It hasn’t quite taken the traction that I think it should take because it takes a little more effort to do that. But it is gaining a lot of momentum. And Charlotte. And in the country.
George McAllister
I probably started teaching what I call supportive beekeeping where the hives can support each other so far. I’m probably teaching that along with different techniques probably around 2011, 2012. At the same time I became president of the Mecklenburg County Beekeepers Association. I was president for three years. But with the teaching given seminars, bee clubs would ask me to come and spoke. And I have, to this point in time, I’ve probably spoken to half the bee clubs in North Carolina. Spoken to a lot of bee clubs in South Carolina. I was invited to speak at the Eastern Apiculture Society, one of the national conventions.I’ve spoken there. So I’ve gotten to a point, I’ve spoken our statewide, our statewide beekeeping association, statewide conferences, done that several years. So it’s taken off pretty good. So now my beekeeping is keeping bees, raising them for honey for sale. And matter of fact I give probably half of them, half the jars, half my honey away anyway. And then education. And thirdly, I like to do a lot of experimentation. So those are sort of the three legs of beekeeping that I’m doing right now. And it just makes it just very interesting, diverse and so forth. And that’s where I’m today. Now my bees, I move my bees to Katoba County, where we have a house up in Katoba County. So my bees, I move them up there in 2022, the fall of 2022. So they’re up there now. So my current website is beesoflakenormand.com. And I gave my Charlotte Honey website to another beekeeper. And they’re using that. So that’s sort of where I am now. And I really enjoy it. And I would say that it consumes most of my days, not 100%. I’m technically retired. But as my wife says, I think you’re a full time beekeeper. But when you’re doing things you enjoy, you’re never working. And so I probably do more than I need to. But I’m always out trying to help people. I get phone calls, text messages, emails every day about somebody asking a question or wanting to know about something. And I’ve got people coming to my AP area on a regular basis to learn about beekeeping. I don’t mind them coming. I mean, I’m going to be in the yard working anyway. So they want to come and hang out and see what I’m doing. That’s fine.
Hossam Yasser
So which year were you like the president of MeckLenburg beekeeping?
George McAllister
So what did you do as a president of Mecklenburg?
George McAllister
So as the president of the club, of course, I had my offers that I worked with. I ran the meetings, had an executive committee, and we put together strategic plans and goals and operations that we were going to do each year. And worked with the volunteers on running the bee school, having the monthly meetings. We would be at the farmer’s market periodically selling honey, working with fellow beekeepers on getting swarms from folks around the city and the county, answering hundreds of questions from the general public, speaking to elementary, middle school classes, churches. Our club did a lot of speaking. So I’d line up a lot of speaking engagements for club members to speak to kids. It’s important that beekeeping, just like anything else, keeps going year after year and has a long-term future and a prosperous and successful future. And one way of doing that is educating the young. I think there are, when you’re introducing kids to bees in a safe, interesting manner that it sticks with them, especially if you give them some honey. And they’re eating honey. They’re like, oh, this is even better. And so I think the more people we can expose, especially earlier in life, just never know what they’re going to do. Because that builds some pretty fine memories. I mean, I’ve had, like I said, I’ve been doing this now since 2009. And I’ve taught a lot of kids that back in that age that now we’re in college and still have bees or now have kids and have bees. And so it’s just going from generation to generation, which is something that’s really rewarding to see. And I don’t see beekeeping at this point getting any less popular. It just keeps growing every year. More and more people become interested in it.
Hossam Yasser
Could you tell us more about the Mecklenburg beekeeper association?Is it like an NGO or is it like supported by the government?
George McAllister
Okay. So interesting thing about the bee club, it is one of the oldest bee clubs in the country. I believe it was started around 1917, 1918. You have to go to the website to verify this. I think it was around there. And the way we did research to determine this was we went to the archives of the Charlotte Observer. And there’d be announcements about bee club meeting at this date or so and so it was just elected the president of the bee club. So we were able to document the evolution and growth and development of the Mecklenburg County bee club since then. So it’s over a hundred years old, just over a hundred years old. Now I don’t know if it was in existence continuously since then. There may have been gaps. For example, there may have been a gap during the depression or a gap maybe during World War I or II. But for the most part, when our documentation will show how it has evolved over the years and on the website, if you go to Mecklenburg County website, you will see the history that you can read about that. And it was data gathered from the newspaper. As a result being it existed for so long, we were, again, as I mentioned before, the largest bee club in North Carolina, county bee club in North Carolina, we’re 350 members. We’re one of the largest county bee clubs in the country. Matter of fact, the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association that represents the state, that is the largest state beekeeping organization in the country. No other state has got that many members in a state organization as us. I think the membership at the NC State Bee, North Carolina State Beekeepers Association is probably between maybe 5,500, 6,000 members. So it’s quite a bit.
Hossam Yasser 35:54
Is there a reason behind this?
George McAllister
You know that’s a good question because I remember my grandfather talking about it and so forth. I think that there are several reasons why North Carolina has got so many beekeepers. That we’re not the largest when it comes to the number of hives, nor do we have a lot of commercial beekeepers. We’re just very large when it comes to hobbyists.A lot of hobbyists. But we’re not one that has like, you know, our state doesn’t have beekeepers that have like 10,000 hives or anything like that. I think there are probably several reasons why North Carolina over the years has become so popular with beekeeping. A lot of that has to do with the university, NC State, because they taught beekeeping since the 20s. My grandfather started, you know, probably before, I don’t know if before that, but definitely since the 20s. So they’ve been teaching beekeeping at the university level for over 100 years and that spawns a lot of interest and gets it out there. Along with that, they had beekeeping extension specialists like my grandfather, which they currently do, which are folks that are funded by the state, Department of Agriculture, to go out in the community and work for beekeepers. So we have even today these representatives that you can call up and say, “I have a problem with my bees,” and they will come out and look at your hive for you. That is tremendous and that gives people the security and sort of, you know, that there’s somebody that they can ask for help at the academic university level. So there is, at the university level over the years, there’s been a lot of interest in beekeeping. Secondly, our climate, it’s a nice warm climate that bees thrive in. In our mountains of North Carolina, we have sirewood trees. Sirewood honey is one of the most popular honey types of honey in the country, so that doesn’t hurt that we have honey in the mountains that is world-renowned, that people know about. And so I guess, you know, between university, education, climate, those things just sort of fueled, you know, and then it just took a life of its own and just continues to grow. We’re in the process, NC State’s in the process of building a brand new bee lab, a state-of-the-art bee lab. The North Carolina State Beekeepers Association is spearheading a fundraising drive to get a professorship in beekeeping and agriculture, tenure professorship, and that looks like it’s going to happen. So I just think that these activities, especially at university level, even UNC Charlotte, has got beekeeping going on here, there’s their hives here on campus. So I don’t can’t say for sure, but I bet most of the universities have bees on campus around here. So with all that being said, I think that that has just helped fuel it. And with the number of bee clubs we have as a result of this interest, we have bee clubs almost in every county. Some counties, there may be three counties that make up a bee club, but there are probably, in the hundred counties in North Carolina, I would dare say we probably have 60, 70 bee clubs that are running, that are here, and each of them teaches beekeeping and you’re beginning beekeeping and have seminars and talks and folks like me will go around the state talking about bees. So that’s another educational component and it gives people the comfort to know that if something’s going wrong with bees, not only can you call a specialist from university and so forth, the Department of Agriculture, you’ve got all these fellow beekeepers that you can call up and hang out in meetings and so forth.
Hossam Yasser
So clubs like McLinbury Association for Beekeepers, do they get like funds from the government or just membership?
George McAllister
It’s not an official nonprofit, we do not have a 401(c)(3). It is a club that gets no funding from anyone except members. It’s all member funded. No outside support whatsoever. As far as I know it’s always been that way. And that’s pretty much how all the clubs are. The clubs are pretty much all member supported. We will raise money through dues, membership dues, bee school. We’ll raise money through bee school. And those are probably two, that’s the two main, we don’t have a lot of expenses and so it doesn’t really take a lot of money to run the club. And it’s very popular. Like I said, with 350 members, it’s an energy club, 150 to 180 students a year in the winter learning beekeeping. It’s pretty active.
Hossam Yasser
Did you expand your hives after being president?
George McAllister
Yes, so I expanded the hives and after retired, I retired as first day retirement was January one of 2018. And I retired and expanded my operation. And it varies just according to what I’m doing. And I’ll have anywhere now between 15, 20, 25 hives that I’m running at a time, just to be on the time of year and what’s going on. And it’s, you can say there’s just like a big operation or like 25 hives in Mecklenburg County would be in the top 10%. Yeah, Katalba County where they are now easily the top 3 or 4%. So most beekeepers in the state and Mecklenburg is reflective in Katalba’s or those people have 5, 6, 7 hives at most. Just enough honey for themselves and friends and relatives. The thing is once people know you have bees, all of a sudden you have friends and relatives you never knew because they’re like honey, oh we love honey. And so a lot of people come down to the woodwork and ask him for bees. When you got bees, I mean that’s part of the fun of it. I mean I don’t mind giving bees away. I know that we always tell beekeepers when we teach them bee school, when you have bees in your backyard you let everybody know, which is typically fine, and give all your surrounding neighbors honey. It’s always just good neighborly things to do. And a lot of times we’ll have neighbors that are like oh my friends got bee hives, I won’t be hives. So it just multiplies that way.
Hossam Yasser
So are you doing this like kind of one man job or do you have like people helping you or is this speaking?
George McAllister
Oh I have, I typically have people helping me as mentors. Again I’m teaching so we teach by doing. Okay we teach by doing. So I have a lot of people helping me, which is good because what we call a super of honey which is a box of honey that has 10 frames in it, a medium box. When it’s full of honey it weighs around 50 to 55 pounds. So it’s really nice to be able to say I’m going to teach you all today about honey and you know going into the hives and so forth and seeing what’s going on with the bees. But we’ve got to take these boxes, full boxes of honey off before we can get to the nest, to the brood nest and they can help me do that. So I’m not pulling off 40 boxes that weigh 50 to 55 pounds a piece. They’re helping me do it. And the same thing with extracting honey. I’m not moving a lot of heavy equipment around or honey boxes and stuff. They help me. When I extract honey I typically have 6-8 people helping. Coming and going all at one time. I’ve had up to 35 people come and I just have a sign up sheet and people come all like on half an hour basis, half an hour 45 basis and help out to learn beekeeping. I’ve had garden clubs come and want to help me extract honey. So just a lot of different people are interested in it. I will say and you didn’t ask this question because you probably took this for granted. I can’t stand honey. I don’t eat it. I did not like it. I grew up with it. It was something that was like salt and pepper. Put some honey on those eggs. Put some honey on those potatoes. Here, here put some honey on that steak. And so I just got tired of eating honey. So no, I don’t eat honey. Do not do it. As I tell folks why eat inventory. So that is I guess a unique trait that …
Hossam Yasser
Not even honey come?
George McAllister
No. It’s funny. We’ll extract honey and when we’re extracting honey we’ll get honey on our hands and everybody around and we’ll lick it off and I go and watch it off. And so it’s like, I mean it’s okay but no it’s not something that I eat on a regular basis. Matter of fact, I started a honey tasting competition with our Mecklenburg County Bee Club and we would have a competition where it was all on taste. All the jars were anonymous. We had numbers on them so you didn’t know who’s honey you were tasting. I was the emcee because everybody else wanted to taste honey and I didn’t. So they’re like, George you need to run it because you don’t like honey. And so I’ve been running that. I think this year we had was our 12th year with honey tasting. So that goes back to if you don’t like honey be careful what you get volunteered to do as a result.
Hossam Yasser
So how is your typical day goes as a beekeeper right now in Charlotte?
George McAllister
Right now is, we’re talking about November. Not a lot is going on in the beekeeping world because we’re trying to get the bees transitioned to the winter. So when you ask that question, my involvement varies based on the season. So as you ask right now, I just finished feeding my bees and making sure they have enough food to carry through the winter. I checked them just the other day to make sure that there was enough population of bees to go through the winter. If there’s, if a hive looks like it has sort of low population that might not make it through the winter, I’ll combine two hives together to build up that population. So right now, I just want to make sure that they get the population and they’ve got the food that they need. And so they will go into, you know, don’t really have to touch them much. Bees do not hibernate. That’s the misnomer of bees in the winter time. They cluster. So they go into a very inactive state almost like they’re sleeping, but they’re not, they’re not hibernating. And they stay in a tight ball and they stay in that ball when the temperature drops below 50, 50 degrees, they’ll stay in this tight ball. The center of the ball is typically hollow or close to hollow and that’s where the queen can move around and do stuff. They keep their brood nest. The brood is where their eggs and larvae are, where the bees are being raised or before they emerge. So they’re either in an egg or larva stage. They keep that area at 92 to 94 degrees year round. So it can be 15 degrees outside and the center of that cluster is 92 degrees, 94 degrees. Keep that, you know, not many, the queen doesn’t raise very many bees in the middle of winter, but there are typically, she does typically in this region will lay eggs throughout the year, but just a small bit. Therefore while they’re in this cluster during the winter time, you don’t want to touch them. You know, they’re cold blooded animals, you know, insects. This means they can’t warm themselves. So if you open up the hive, they can freeze and expose them where there aren’t, you know, get them out of that cluster where they’re keeping each other warm. So therefore you keep the hive closed. I’ll go back into, I’ll go into the hives usually December, January, February, we’ll have maybe a 55, you know, 55th degree day and that’s warm enough for me to go into the bees and just check again to see if they got food and enough population. Bees fly typically when it’s in their low 50s and higher. When it gets down into the 40s, they have a hard time flying. It’s just too cold for them to fly. I mean, they may go out for 30 seconds if it’s in the 40s, but for the most part they don’t fly unless it’s in the low 50s or higher. So because of that, because they’re cold blooded and they just can’t handle the temperature, the muscles don’t work for that reason. So therefore we don’t go into them and disturb them and move them around when it’s cold like that. But when it’s 50 something, you know, 50, 50 degrees during the winter, we’re all jumping in to see how they’re doing. And then in the springtime it ramps up and it’s all day, you know, working each day on it. You mentioned like there’s three reasons behind you being in the beekeeping industry, of them education and experimenting. I think we spoke a little about education. Could you tell us more about experimenting?
George McAllister
So experimenting, the question. I started weighing my beehives probably around pretty quick in my process, probably around 2010, 2011. And the reason I started weighing them, I would weigh them every night at 9 o’clock, go in and I have scale where I’d lift up the hive and take the weight, drop it back down. I was curious on what was going on with the bees from a weight perspective because you could see changes in weight within each hive and start seeing trends in weight either gaining a lot or not gaining, losing before you could visually see what was going on with the bees. So it was sort of a precursor to what you would notice maybe a week or two later visually because a hive may only, you know, may lose a pound or two a day. You can’t see that what’s going on in the hive because that had to happen. So that was really fascinated me as far as really trying to understand bees. So I would weigh these hives. Also that would tell me when the nectar flow began. The nectar flow is when the bees are able to collect enough nectar from the surrounding plants to turn into honey that would then store that and cause their weight to go up. So I was always interested when that began because that’s when you needed to start adding more boxes for bees to store the honey in. I was always curious when that started and when that ended and how that was impacted by weather. You know, when it rained, of course, hives didn’t gain much weight. If any, sometimes they may lose half a pound or a pound because they couldn’t go out and get any nectar. So you could see that in the temperature, how that would affect the weight gain of a hive. And of course, really this weight gain or the weight changes in weight, the factors that caused that were several. One being the plants. You had to have plants with nectar. So if your bees were in a bad area, they didn’t have a lot of plants that the bees could get nectar from, then no matter how good your beekeeping is, you’re not going to get much honey. So you had to make sure they were in a good environment, which around here is pretty easy to do. I mean, pretty much everywhere, everywhere in North Carolina, you can get, there’s enough there for the bees to make honey. And then the second thing was keeping a healthy hive. So even if you had a great source of pollen all around you, if you did not have a healthy hive, that could go out and get the nectar that that wasn’t going to help you. So having all the bees in one location, I knew that the constant was the environment. So any change in weight that varied, like this hive might gain three pounds today, but that hive only gained a pound, that was all based on what was going on inside the hive. That was all hive management. So I would weigh all my hives and then again, I would compare and contrast. How did this hive gain 15 pounds these last three days and that hive only gained five and kept copious notes to try to figure that out. And that’s how I improved my beekeeping activities by experimenting with that. Then what I would do at the end of the season, I would weigh the honey that came out of each hive. So I would know exactly this hive only produced 100 pounds of honey. This hive produced 200 pounds of honey. Let me look at the weights over time and let me look at my notes on my inspections on seeing what happened to that hive.Did the hive lose a queen? Did the queen not lay many eggs? Is it a low population? What was causing all this to happen? And by doing all those steps, I was able to better refine my beekeeping activities to try to maximize honey production. And that’s really what I’m doing right now. It’s a goal. It’s something to strive for. Just a way of keeping score is how can I improve my beekeeping activity, my beekeeping management skills so I can manage my bees in a way to maximize honey production. But you’ve got to realize you can’t get a bee to do something it doesn’t want to do. So it’s not like I can force a bee to do something because it is going to do what it’s going to do. So what I’m trying for in order to be a really good beekeeper and I stress this in everything that I do educationally, you need to understand bee behavior and bee biology. If you understand bee behavior and bee biology, then you can figure out how to manage your bees for whatever purpose it is, whether it’s for pollination, honey, wax, whatever you want. If you understand bee behavior and bee biology, then that is the building blocks for basically managing bees. And that’s sort of what I’ve been doing and just refining it and taking notes and observations and going back each year and saying, “Okay, this hive did this this year. This year didn’t do that. What happened?” But having the weights, having the inspection sheets, and then at the end of the year knowing exactly how much honey each hive produced, then I could go back and sort of see what’s going on. But I do want to make a caveat. I typically get more honey per hive than most beekeepers. So when I’m saying I get, “This past year in Catawba County, I averaged 111.4 pounds per hive. In Charlotte, I’ve actually averaged up to 150 pounds on average per hive. That is very, those are very large numbers. Most, pretty much most beekeepers do not get those numbers.
Hossam Yasser 56:50
What is the reason behind this?
George McAllister
And the reason behind it is what I just told you. I’m very diligent in my inspections. I inspect in the summertime, spring and summer and fall, a weekly basis, close to it. None of the, there’s several, I guess, keys to what I’m doing. Not that we’re going to get into a whole course here in beekeeping. But what I have learned is, first thing, if a hive swarms, then your honey production for that hive is going to be almost nothing that year. Because what happens when a hive swarms is half the bees and the queen leave and set up a colony two or three miles away. That’s the way bees naturally reproduce geographically by swarming. Consequently, what’s left behind in the parent hive are half the bees and no queen. They’ve got to raise a new queen. So there’s no brood production going on. So now there’s interruption in brood. And it may be three weeks, could be a month before, depending on when they swarmed and when that queen is going to come out. It could be three, four, two, three, four weeks before you got more bees being raised and more production. That queen, new queen swarming. So that is another hit in population. Because in the summertime, a worker bee only lives about 42 days. So if you’ve got a queen that’s not laying for two or three weeks, that’s going to put a dent in the population because those bees only last about 42 days. And so you can lose even more bees going forward. So I learned, and it’s pretty common knowledge, that swarming will pretty much kill your honey production for that year for that hive. So consequently, most of my beekeeping in the springtime, a significant part of my activities are trying to prevent my hives from swarming. If they don’t swarm, then all those bees stay in one place and they collect nectar and make a lot of honey. So that’s one of the things I strive to do is to try to keep my swarming to a minimal. Now, I’ll never say I can prevent swarming, but I can sure manage it almost to zero. And that helps. Second thing I learned through weighing and all the research I’ve done and analysis on my hives is lack of queens. If you need a strong queen that is consistently laying throughout the nectar flow, because you want a large population of bees, the larger the population of bees, and bees of all ages, not just one age, the better your chances are of having a good honey crop for that year. So those are the two things. Third thing would be managing the health of the bees. Make sure that they’re not infested with the rowamites, small hive beetles, wax malls. So you want to make sure they’re healthy, you treat them so that they don’t have diseases. And because a diseased bee, logically so, is not going to produce much honey. I mean, it’s going to have a short life and the disease is just going to run rampant throughout the hive. So those are the comments. So through the experimentation I’ve done, weighing hives and so forth, these are three things that, and I won’t go into more detail, but these are the three main things you can do to maximize your honey production.
Hossam Yasser
So was this the research and analysis? Do you publish those kind of stuff or do you share with other beekeepers this kind of information?
George McAllister
Oh yeah, so these are the seminars I mentioned earlier. This is the type of seminar that I’m giving to the bee clubs throughout the state, national and so forth. This is this sort of way of beekeeping that taking the three ways of making sure, managing your bees to improve your honey production along with having all the resources you need within your apiary, meaning if you’ve got a beehive where the queen’s not that productive, you can put more, you have resource colonies where you can drop more bees in, you can drop more, brood in, you can replace a queen, have everything on hand so that whatever goes wrong with your bees, you can take care of it right there immediately. There’s no calling around trying to find a queen, to buy a queen from somebody or whatever. Everything, basically your inventory. Everything you need, if you want to call these resource colonies inventory, everything you need to keep your honey production hives at optimal condition is right there. Because I keep two different types of colonies. I have honey producing colonies, so those are my colonies obviously that are producing honey, and then I have resource colonies or support colonies and their purpose is not to produce honey, that’s not what I’ve got them for. Their purpose is to support and provide resources to my honey producing hives. So they’re the ones that are raising new queens for me, they’re the ones that if I need brood, deer bees, I take them out of my resource or support colonies and give them to my honey producing colonies. But that’s the philosophy and the way I keep business, that’s sort of based on sort of my own citizen scientist research that I’ve done, nothing published per se except power points and things of that nature. And that’s sort of what I taught primarily about with beekeepers.
Hossam Yasser
So those seminars look like a really big thing, is it like just beekeepers? Do you have more researchers, biologists, people that participate in those seminars? Do you have more people that participate in beekeepers? Do you have more people doing research than beekeepers?
George McAllister
Oh yeah, Dr. David Tarpe has a whole apaculture course and department at NC State. They’re probably, I want to say that probably a third of the states universities have beekeeping or sometimes apacultural courses and research going on. US Department of Agriculture has bee labs throughout the country. So there’s a lot of government involvement in research, a lot of university involvement research. And this really came to a head when we had colony collapse disorder back probably around 2010, 2015, probably around that period of time, it might have been a little bit early, but we had Varroa mites come into the country and then just colony collapse disorder. A lot of money went in to be researched because the beehives were all dying and they didn’t know why. And so tons of money got into research. Which was it in 2015? I guess you have to go back, I don’t know the exact date, I’m guessing 2015 probably is when it first, and it lasted for quite a few years. 20, yeah, probably maybe 2010, 2015, probably around that period of time it lasted. And still they never really figured out what caused colony collapse disorder. Right now the current thinking is that it’s a combination of just viruses, just different viruses that got into hives, but there’s not like, they haven’t really been the pinpoint one source like it was this virus or this bacteria or anything like this. They think it was just a culmination of things that basically led up to a hive just flying away. It was sure a lot affected by this. Everybody was. Yeah, nationwide. And so a lot of research went into beekeeping at that point and that just really helped and then it just kept going. I mean people, once the research started it took a while and more projects and so forth. So there’s quite a bit of research now going on across the country in beekeeping, which is good. And a lot of people are in it and I think it’s got a pretty bright future ahead. I think it’s only going to keep growing.
Hossam Yasser 01:05:50
Do you think there’s like some kind of problem with what they call bees extension right now happening in the world, not just in the United States?
George McAllister
A bee extension? Yeah. The range of bees, well of course native bees, because see the bees that we keep, the Italian honey bees, they’re not native to North America. They came over from England in the 1600s. But the native bees along with all other insects are really suffering because of the lack of the environment. They don’t have the ecosystem to support them and there hasn’t been a lot of research on native bees. A little bit, but not a lot. Most of the research is on the Italian, the bees that we would keep, Italian, Russian and so forth, the bees that we would normally keep in our hives. So the native bees really haven’t been researched that much. It’s hard to find them, they’re small. There are thousands of species of them around, but just not a lot of research that is going on.
Hossam Yasser
Do we have them in Charlotte?Native bees?
George McAllister
Oh yeah. So most of them are solitary and most of them do not produce honey that we can eat. They just produce enough food for themselves. They don’t produce some. These are one of the only insects that actually produces more food than it actually needs. I mean it just keeps going. I mean if it’s got the space it’s going to fill it with honey. So it always produces more than it needs, which is, most insects are not that way. But not a lot of research on the native bees, so we don’t really know what’s going on, but I would say insects as a whole are suffering.
Hossam Yasser
All pollinators?
George McAllister
Yeah. Pollinators in the whole, all pollinators. Insects pollinators a whole bit. Are suffering as a whole just because their ecosystems disappearing. And then pesticides, all the pesticides that are sprayed on crops and stuff, and neonicotinoids and things of that nature, they’re going to impact all insects, not just bees.
Hossam Yasser 01:08:15
Is it just best size or do we have any other causes for this?
George McAllister
I think it’s a combination of chemicals and it’s a problem of decreasing landscape available for insects. I mean look around Charlotte. I’ve been in Charlotte since 1983 and places that were in the country in 1983 are now pretty much in the center of the city. So just their environment is disappearing.
Hossam Yasser 01:08:56
Okay, so you sell your honey online, but are there any other ways you distribute your products until you participate in markets, collaborations with other businesses?
George McAllister
Yes. So the way I sell them to ship mail hunting online, beesoflakenormand.com, I get a lot of orders that way people will ship it and people come by the house and pick it up. They’ll avoid the shipping cost. Do that. I’ll go to farmers markets and sell it. There’ll be little church parking lot markets, things of that nature. I’ll sell there. I will sell honey to beekeepers, fellow beekeepers that ran out that maybe did not get as much honey as they had hoped so that they can keep their customers. I’ll sell them to them. I get a lot of it away and it’s amazing. Give somebody a jar of honey. They don’t turn you down. I mean, me some interesting people that way. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had a bunch of bee boxes in the back of my truck and I was getting gas and this woman next to me, I said, “Are those bee boxes? Are you a beekeeper?” And I went, “Yeah.” She goes, “I love honey.” And I went, “Oh, wow.” And she said, “Can I buy some honey from you?” And I said, “Sure.” And I said, “Oh, do you take Venmo?” I said, “Sorry, I don’t.” She goes, “I don’t have any cash. You take a credit card.” I said, “No.” I said, “On line I do, but not right here in front of you.” I just said, “Here, just take a jar.” “Here, have a jar.” Well then she emailed me last week and ordered 20 jars. And then she told me, for Thanksgiving, coming up for Thanksgiving, she would give to friends and stuff. And she told me to order another 20 or 30 jars for Christmas. So you never know when you get somebody to jar honey where it’s going to go. I don’t typically sell it to restaurants because it’s more expensive than other places they can get honey with a bat and bolt. And also, you don’t have that much. I don’t want somebody to take all my honey, so I don’t have any. I mean, I’ve had some grocery stores approach me to sell my honey, but they would sell me it. They would take all my honey within two or three weeks or month or two. It’d be gone. And that’s not what I’m trying to do. I mean, I’d rather my honey go to a lot of different people and be able to hand it out and give it to whoever I want to than just have it go through one location and one source. But to answer your question, yeah, all different avenues. All different avenues.
Hossam Yasser 01:11:30
Do you also sell bees, hives, queens?
George McAllister
I do also sell bees, what we call nukes, which is a five frame colony of bees, small colony of bees that can build out into a full size hive. Queens the whole bit. But very few, not a lot. In North Carolina, in order to sell bees commercially, if you’re going to sell bees or queen, 10 or more, you need to be inspected by the apicultures here. And I know them all. I’m not licensed or inspected to do it to sell bees or queens above the 10. So I sell less than 10 colonies or queens a year. Most of it’s kept for me, for my internal use. I’ll probably, that’s something I’ll probably get into over time. But right now, just with experimenting and everything I’m doing, that’s sort of keeping me busy. And I’m really like devoting more of my time to the education and managing my own bees. Selling, don’t mind doing that. I get my plants that get a lot of it away. Selling is fine. I like to be able to focus on that research and managing my own bees and sharing what I do with other people.
Hossam Yasser
Okay, regarding the location of your hives, is there a reason behind having them next to the lake and also do the pollinate other forms?
George McAllister
Yes. So a bee will typically fly two and a half to three miles to collect nectar, just as far as they’ll go. Now, if there’s a dearth or lack of food, they may go a little further. But for the most part, two to three miles, and they collect, they start collecting nectar as close to the hive as possible and then radiate out. I mean, they’re very efficient in the way that they collect nectar. Bubbies are probably a few hundred yards off the lake, even that. And it, it doesn’t seem to impact them negatively. I don’t know if it does positively. I mean, it doesn’t negatively. That does sort of limit the forage ability, because if they’re up against water, that’s half their forageable potential in water rather than landscape. So it does reduce the amount of forageable area since they’re up against water. However, I tested the area before I moved them up there to see if there were any bees in the area. Very few bees, very few bees. I was very surprised that the lack of bees were in the area. Very surprised. And so I didn’t know if there, if that was, the reason was because nobody up there brought bees, had bees in the area, so therefore there are no bees. Or if it was just a bad place to keep bees, and bees were staying away from that area. I would say that it’s, when I brought my bees there, that it’s not a bad place to keep bees. I don’t quite have the pounds per hive numbers that I had here in Charlotte, but it’s like 111.4. That’s fine. I mean, it’s not like, say, 150 or so that might, 140, 150 or so that might average here in the city. But it’s still manageable. It’s not a bad place to keep bees. They’re making more than they should. I had my bees here off of Runnymede Road, which borders Myers Park High School, Selen Elementary and A.G. Middle School. The beautiful thing about having those bees just across the street from those schools is there’s tons of clover in those schools. More clover than you can, you know, acres of clover. And that really helps in honey production to have, you know, probably, I don’t get it, 10, 15, 20 acres of clover if you add it all together. And you don’t find that in many places. So that really was a major boost to my honey production. But when you keep your bees in the city, and I’ve tested my honey as far as determining what sources of nectar or pollen or pollen sources are in my honey, and in the city you have a wider spectrum or palette of plants because people are bringing in plants that are not grown in the wild. And so you have a lot more diversity of plants in the city than you do where I do in the country. You don’t have all those landscape plants that you have in the country, you know, the country, more wild plants so that you don’t have the diversity of plants that you have here in the city. Not that it makes honey any better or worse, but it’s just a different environment, you know, because they have all the people, all the landscaping that’s done in this area. You just don’t see that in the wild, you know, in the country.
Hossam Yasser 01:17:19
So could an individual have hives in the city? Like if you have a place like Uptown Charlotte, could you have like, honey’s there?
George McAllister
Yes, a matter of fact. I don’t know if it’s still there now, but the Ritz, Ritz Carlton, Uptown had bee hives on their roof and there are a lot of people keep hives in cities on rooftops. And around here, they’re probably, like I said, I think the Ritz Carlton still has the bees on their roof. I think there are a couple other places that do too, Uptown. And yeah, they’re able to get enough foraging. There’s enough. The interesting thing though is you’ve got to realize our Uptown is not that big. So if they’re driving two, you know, if they’re flying two to three miles away, they’re definitely getting out into the neighborhoods. They’re just not isolated in, excuse me, they’re not isolated in, you know, just the downtown, the Uptown area where they’re just bricks, you know, concrete. But they’re all over.
Hossam Yasser
Okay, so speaking of your, like, Ritz family history with bees and beekeeping, do you have anyone in your family beside you working in this?
George McAllister
I wish. No, I don’t. It’s funny, my kids, like I said before, I started back beekeeping right when they’re sort of, when they’re in high school, getting ready to go to college just a year or two away from college, they were not interested in beekeeping at all or anything that I was doing until they started talking to some of their friends and some of their friends were like, that’s really cool. That’s really cool. Then it became cool to them. And actually, they would bring their friends over to help me extract honey, which I thought was really neat. They don’t mind helping me with extracting and those other activities. They’re not really into going into their, into the bees. My son’s wife, she’s gone into the bees and is intrigued by it. I don’t know if that’s something that they’ll pick up down the road. So too early to tell if they’re going to pick up the beekeeping gene or not. Yeah, but we’ll see. They definitely know about it and they can talk about it. So we’ll see where they go. Hopefully they will down it. So when it’s the right time in their lives.
Hossam Yasser 01:19:30
So if you could give like a beekeeper again or one piece of advice, what would it be?
George McAllister
Beekeeping advice. Wow. I would say what I mentioned earlier, if you, if you really want to get into beekeeping, first thing to realize is that they’re animals that you’ve got to work with. You just can’t put bees in a box and ignore them. You’ve got to work with them and manage them. So realize that there is an obligation if you have bees. And then secondly, as I said earlier, understand bee behavior and bee biology. That is key to anything in beekeeping and a lot of other aspects of life too is understanding the basics, the fundamentals, and then you can build upon that. So really work towards that. A lot of beginning beekeepers, they focus more on tell me how to do something. Whereas what we should, what they should be asking is why I need to do so and so. I need to replace my queen. How is the best way to do it and why do you do it the way you do it? So why do you do what you do? Understanding the bee behavior and bee biology versus give me step one, open beehive, step two, take out a frame, step three, look for the queen, that kind of thing. To really, I mean that goes hand in hand, but to really understand the basics and just don’t go, don’t, you understand why, understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. Understand the reasons why. And then lastly is this is a community based hobby or endeavor. So embrace the community. The community will definitely embrace you. Beekeepers are not short of talking about bees. So join a club, interact with other beekeepers. They are more than willing to help you out. So I think that’s several things that I think a beginning beekeeper should take to heart as they’re getting into this.
Hossam Yasser 01:22:30
Okay, so kind of the same question.What about like getting your past self like a piece of advice? Did you make any mistake like at the beginning with beekeeping?
George McAllister
Oh, did I make mistakes as a bee? Oh gosh, yes. Oh yeah. And that’s why it led up to weighing the hives and trying to experiment and figure out, what am I doing wrong? Why did this happen? And because yeah, I might talk to a couple of beekeepers and they’re like, well, it could have been this, this, this or this. Of all these three or four things that could have been, was it all four of them or did one of these things cause it? So it just me trying to dig deeper into the mistakes I made and why they occurred. Yeah, I would say first year or two, I think I lost half of my bee hives each winter off my colonies each winter, first year or so. And that was mainly a result of not treating for Varroa mites. First year I did not treat for Varroa mites and lost almost all my, you know, half, half my hives, if not a little bit more than that. Second year I didn’t treat in time. It’s too late. I did it too late. Same thing happened. So learned that pretty easy, you know, pretty quick. Also learned that you cannot procrastinate and beekeeping. If you want to practice non-procrastination, if you think you procrastinate and you want to try to work on that, get into beekeeping. Cause you can’t procrastinate and beekeeping. You’ve got, you know, if, if you need to feed the bees, you need to feed the bees. You can’t put it off a week. You can’t put it off for very poor days. They’ll starve. You know, if there’s something you need to do, you can’t procrastinate. Now there’s some things you can, you know, there’s some aspects of course beekeeping that you know, you say, okay, I can do that next week or I’ll watch it and, you know, do it the week after or, you know, a week or so. But there’s certain aspects of beekeeping that, you know, you got to act immediately. If they need food, you got to feed them. You know, if they need treatments for Varroa mites, you got to do it now. You got to do it, you know, at the appropriate time. You can’t delay those kind of things. If they need more boxes to put honey in, you can’t say, oh, maybe I’ll give them another box for honey next week. No, they’re full. They’ll leave. They’re like, you know, if you don’t give them space to store honey, they’ll leave. So you learn that too, that you can’t, you can’t delay on certain things. And so, yeah, I made all the mistakes and that’s the, that’s what I always tell folks that I’m, especially in bee school that I’m working with, I’m going, you got to realize I said, folks, I’ve been doing this since, you know, my first call is in 2009. I said, you got to realize I started in 2009. So, you know, I’ve got 16 years of beekeeping experience and what you’re seeing is a culmination of that. So don’t feel like or think that you’re going to be able to do what I’m doing today. You’re going to have to cut your teeth and you’re going to learn some things too. By being here, hopefully you will avoid some of the mistakes that I made and that’s what I’m here to help you with is to avoid some of the mistakes I made. But you’re going to make mistakes and you got to realize I made mistakes and, but you figured it out and you work through it and you make less and less mistakes as, you know, as time progresses and that’s what I stress that, yeah, you’re going to mess up. We all do. We’re all starting out. But guess what? If you stick with it, you’re going to be fewer and fewer issues.
Hossam Yasser
Okay. So what hopes and dreams do you have for your future hives?
George McAllister
Hmm. Hopes and dreams going forward with the bees. You know, at this point in time, as you talked about earlier, I’ll see my operation grow a little bit, but I like doing a lot of different things with beekeeping. So I do not want any one aspect of beekeeping to consume my entire life or entire time. So where do I see the future going with myself and so forth? I see it going in as many directions as I can to educate people. I think education is extremely important and I want to look at ways that I can educate more folks that want to be educated and hear what I’m doing and be operation, be able to use that as part of experimentation and to be able to support my education. Because I do not want to, I do not talk in any of my seminars or presentations. I never say anything that I haven’t done myself. I never say, “Oh, you need to do so and so because I saw it on the web,” or someone told me that. If I haven’t done it, I don’t say it. And so as a result, I want to make sure that all my beekeeping activities are in place where I can continue learning, continue experimenting, and finding the way I keep beekeeping so then I can take that experience and be able to talk about it. So in a roundabout way, my future in beekeeping is being able to do all those different things and be able to manage that so that not one aspect of my beekeeping gets out of control. So I’ll do the education. I’ll raise the bees for honey and production because I love the bees and I’ll experiment with them at the same time. So all of that is where I see my future going and doing as much of it as I can. If that makes sense?
Hossam Yasser
So what do you envision for the future of beekeeping in Charlotte?
George McAllister
Gosh. You know, since I started, it has just exploded and I continue to see it explode. I think it will continue doing that. My only concern is if the local politicians or the local powers to be put constraints on keeping bees in the city that will kill beekeeping. If for some reason they put, say, you can’t have more than two bee hives in your yard, that’s just going to kill beekeeping. Not that a lot of people want more than two hives, but it’s just the idea of somebody’s watching you, that someone is, you have to register your bee hive, someone is making sure you don’t have two hives versus three. I think if you’ve got government regulation, local government regulation on keeping bees in the city, that will kill it. But besides that, let people do their thing and what they’re interested in, it will just take off. I mean, people have common sense. They’re not going to abuse where they are as far as beekeeping goes. They’re not going to abuse the privilege or the right to keep bees. So I just see it just expanding and I see future generations coming on board because I see a lot of young people in our classes and that’s a good thing. Younger than, you know, having a lot of young folks that come in are interested. I see a lot of interest in our public schools or in schools in general, K-12, because they’re always asking us to come and speak to their class. So we’re speaking to, you know, these classes on a regular basis and I think that can only just help. You know, not only encouraging people to keep bees, but to understand and respect bees, rather than be afraid of them. So I think that’s worse. I think that’s sort of the future. I think it’s bright.
Hossam Yasser
So before ending this, are there any other questions I should have asked you?
George McAllister
Good question. Now, I think we’ve covered quite a bit. I’ve enjoyed this talk. I’ve rambled a lot and I hope that hasn’t been distracting or, you know, I hope you’ve got the information that you need. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. It will be interesting, you know, somebody that listens to this in the future, how to compare what I’m saying to where they are there at that point in time. I think this is very important in that if you don’t understand the history, you’re doing to repeat it, you know. And I think that by us educating people and keeping, you know, education component going, then we just, we’re building up, we’re everybody’s building upon each other and it’s just going to make it, you know, get better and better because everybody’s going to build on each other’s shoulders, sort of build from each other’s shoulders and help each other out. And I think things like this and seeing what we’ve done in the past and what we experienced only helps those in the future to become better beekeepers.
Hossam Yasser
So thank you.
George McAllister
Thank you very much.