Bee Keeping in Ekalaka, Montana, 1979, by Art King

From MemoryArchive

Who: Art King
What: Bee Keeping in Ekalaka Montana
When: 1979
Where: Ekalaka, Montana

As a college student in the late 1970's, I got a job working for a bee keeper. His name was Joe Barrow and he had been keeping bees in the far southeast corner of Montana for many years. Joe had arrangments with farmers and ranchers to place a "yard" of beehives. The yards were sprinkled around the country, in about a 30 mile radius of his shop in Ekalaka. On harvest days we would take the old International farm truck and make a route to bee yards, where in coveralls and a beekeepers net hat, we would remove the "supers" from the hives and load them on the truck. "Supers" are the boxes filled with wooden trays of honeycomb that are stacked above the hive boxes. In good weather, when the blossoms were out a vigourous hive could fill several 25 pound "supers" in only a few days, and if we got behind, the bees would start building comb all through the hive, causing a waste of honey. During good honey making weather we worked hard to keep up with the bees, and make the circuit of all the yards every few days.

When the truck was full, we would return to the beekeper shop - a metal building of maybe 2000 square feet. We would unload and stack the full supers with a hand truck, and then get busy with the inside job of processing the honey. It was an assembly line process. You would pry the individual honeycombs out of the box, and use a hot electric knife to remove the wax caps that the bees made over each cell full of honey. Then the combs were placed in a centrefuge. When it was full, we started it up and it spun the honey from the combs, which splattered on the sides of the centrefuge, and ran down to the bottom and was pumped into a holding tank. Wax from the caps and honey mixed together on the way to the tank, where the honey was gently heated and the wax rose to the top and melted. The wax was drained away into 3 gallon buckets and stacked in the corner of the shed for later sale. The honey was packaged according to customer demand in glass jars of 2 pounds, 5 pounds or 10 pounds, or in 5 or 10 gallon plastic buckets, or sometimes wholesale in barrels. The crew usually was made up of 4 or 5 people, some processing the honey, some tending the yards, some packaging or delivering the very light clover honey Joe labeled as "Bees Best".

I worked for Joe Barrow for two summers. He was a wonderful boss. His wife Vee an awesome cook. I lived in their cool basement. After a long day we would enjoy supper of fresh garden produce and fruit from the garden - some of the best meals I can remember.

Joe and Vee remained dear friends in subsequent years. They stayed at our home when visiting Oregon in the 80's and early 90's. My older children got to know them, and hear many tales from the bee business. Both Joe and Vee are gone now. They died a couple years ago and we miss them still.