One day during the summer of 1971, Ernest Griffiths noticed a swarm of around 5 thousand to 10 thousand bees at the head of the combine he was sitting in. Without a hat or shirt on, he took a leftover paper grocery sack and went to the front of his combine to pull out the weed that the bees swarmed around and put it in the sack. He didn’t get stung.
By the end of the summer he had picked up between six and eight more swarms.
That summer was the beginning of his beekeeping career, although at the time, it was only a hobby. Now, he runs a large beekeeping and honey-harvesting operation typically 500 hives large. He said typical, healthy hives house anywhere from 60 thousand to 80 thousand bees each. This year his hives were downsized to only 75 hives, but Griffiths hopes the number will grow a lot more by next summer.
He learned how to extract honey from his growing beehives thanks to the father of one his daughter's classmates. One Sunday, he brought one of his honey boxes up to the man’s house, and after a Sunday lunch, brought the small, two-frame extractor he had into the house to collect the honey.
“The only thing is when you’re extracting, there’s always a few onlookers called bees. So, we had 15-20 bees or more in the house, and for some reason, the ladies didn’t appreciate that,” Griffiths said jokingly.
He said he did this for a few years before he finally purchased his own extractor, or three. He bought three 45-frame extractors with electric motors to help speed up the honey harvesting process. Just a few years later he decided to upgrade again, this time to a 120-frame extractor which is what he uses to this day.
The extractor takes the frames of honeycombs from the hive box and spins strings of honey out of the combs. Griffiths said he tries to reuse the frames that come out of the extractor as much as he can because the honeycomb wax is already in there. Bees can fill three frames of honey in the time it would take for them to fill up one frame of comb, if the comb was already there.
After it has been extracted, the honey is then funneled into an 80-gallon kettle and then into a 550-gallon white holding tank, although Griffiths said he has never filled that one completely full. From there, the honey is transported via a hose into 50-gallon barrels.
“A bee in its lifetime collects less than a teaspoon full of honey,” Griffiths said. “So if you think of a bottle full of honey, that represents many bees’ lives.”
The barrels are then put in a room heated up to about 100 degrees to keep the honey from sugaring, which is when it thickens and crystalizes. In the room, the barrels are hooked up to another hose, and the liquid honey flows to a small machine in the front of the shed where Griffiths can control what bottles the honey is distributed into. From there, he fills the bottles, puts his business label on them and prepares them for the market.
“I don’t keep it for even a week,” he said. “There is a constant flow of honey out of here.”
Griffiths has been doing full-time beekeeping since his retirement in 2008. He worked in education for roughly 45 years — a junior high teacher for 15 years, a school administrator for 16 years and a college administrator for another 14 years. When he retired, his beekeeping side gig became more than a hobby.
“When I retired, that’s when my wife said I could play with the bees,” he said.
*Originally published in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald on Sep. 6, 2020.
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