We sat down with David Link, beekeeper and course reserves specialist at ZSR Library, to chat about his honey bees and what’s changed since he was named a Champion of Change in 2016. Read along each week to hear from past champions in the lead up to our 12th annual Campus Sustainability Awards celebration on April 30.
How long have you had honey bees? And how many hives do you have currently?
This will probably be year 15. Right now there’s about 42 hives. By the time everything is split this summer, there will be over 70.
What is the process of splitting hives, and why would you do that?
Part of it is species survival, because with the honey bee colony, you have a queen who is the only reproductive piece of that colony, and she is producing eggs and creating a family. After that colony over winters and in spring when all of the new pollen is coming in, that colony is growing in size and they grow and just just explode. And when the colony gets congested in its current house, that colony has to divide to make room, and that division is part of species survival. If they didn’t, you would just have colonies stay in these individual houses and would only be in specific places. So as the colony is growing during the spring, once it reaches a size that I think is big enough to be able to handle the split, then I do a physical split on the colony, and create a new hive, and that suppresses that urge to swarm. That way, I’m not losing half of my bees. I don’t lose my honey crop that year. My bees don’t wind up in the side of someone’s house or in a garage somewhere.
What do people not know about honey bees?
A lot of folks don’t realize that there are a lot of different breeds of bee and each different breed, just like different breeds of dogs, have different characteristics about them. Most beekeepers will use an Italian honey bee. It’s readily available early in the spring. But with the Italian honey bee, they’re susceptible to a varroa mite that is decimating most of our colonies. In order to control that mite, we have to use some kind of miticide within the hive where the bees are living to control those mites on the bees. My first bees were Italian, and I was determined I wasn’t going to treat them. And I thought there’s got to be – with the number of bees out there – something that’s going to live on its own. So I found the Russian honey bee. They evolved with that Varroa mite and they take care of themselves. And so that’s what I have.
I’m curious: what got you into beekeeping in the first place?
I’ve always had a backyard garden. I live just down the street and when I moved in 20 years ago, there just wasn’t enough pollinators in the area to produce like a garden should produce. So while I was taking horticulture classes, a fella I met in class was a beekeeper, and I had him bring out two hives of bees to my yard. And the following year, there was my garden like I was used to. I had the pollination. It came back. And then when I found my Russian honey bees, literally, I just fell in love with them.
Why is that?
It’s just – you’ll hear some folks say, “A bee is a bee.” No. I’ve had several different breeds of bees all in the same yard, and there are specific characteristics to each colony, especially as they’re growing. These Russian honey bees are easy to handle. I don’t have to use any chemicals with them. If they were difficult I couldn’t have them sitting there while volunteers are out here working in the garden. I have bees up at Reynolda Village on the walking trail. How many people walk those trails? And I’ve got five hives sitting there facing the trails, and the bees never bother anyone. And you know, when I can open a hive and not have to wear full gear and a smoker going heavy to try to subdue the bees, and I can go in there and get my hands down into those bees, the rest of the world drops away. It’s just a very unique experience. And you forget about anything else.
How many hives do you have out here at the Campus Garden?
There’s three down there. One is a bait hive, because we’re coming up on swarm season. When hives are naturally getting ready or building in size, if they’re not physically split by the beekeeper, they’re going to divide. That’s just nature. So I put bait hives around, and I will catch swarms from other places, and will let them set in and grow. Once they’ve been in place for about a month, I will come through and I will replace the Queen that’s with that swarm with a pure Russian queen.
So you told me why you started beekeeping in your own backyard. But what brought up the idea to do the hives here at the Campus Garden?
Well, I used to work the night shift at ZSR, when Starbucks was in the library, and when I was walking away from the counter one evening I overheard some students sitting talking about, “What can we do at Campus garden to complete the garden? We need honey bees.” They had looked into having someone coming up from South Carolina at the time to manage a couple hives. And I’m like, “I live just down the street, and I have bees. I can put bees in the garden for you.” So I actually mentioned it to a student that was with sustainability, and she took it to Dedee. And Dedee called a meeting. I told her that I had bees, and I was more than willing to set them up out here to do the management. Sustainability wouldn’t have to do any kind of formal training especially with the turnover with the students, and it’s a 3 – 4 year learning curve with just a couple of hives. I said I’m more than happy to come out here and take care of this. And she was like, “Well, y’all just got your honey bees fast tracked.”
What’s changed since when you started the honey bee program at the Campus Garden in 2016 and now?
Not long after we set these in I had grown to about 120 hives. And then right around the time COVID hit, my work schedule changed, and the amount of time that I had to put into the bees changed. I had to scale back some. And I’m in the process right now of scaling back up. I’m hoping to go back to 100 this year, and then we’ll jump to 100 – 125 next year. Oh and one big thing: the honey harvested from here at the Campus Garden was sold to Deacon Dining on campus back in the Fall, and it was served in the Pit. I didn’t have enough from last year’s harvest to be able to supply them all the way through the school year, unfortunately, but one of the reasons that I’m ramping back up is to hopefully be able to at least have a bucket of honey every other week for the Pit this coming round. And we’re going to add another stand out here, and the new stand will have three more hives on it, and I’m hoping to be able to produce most of what campus will use here.
I love your honey. I’ve had it many, many times. We always have some in the office to have for our tea, and it’s delicious.
The thing about harvesting your own honey is that where the bees are located and the time of the year that you’re harvesting determines the type of honey it is. The hives here, we normally get two harvest’s off of them. We’ll get a spring harvest that’s very light and fruity, and then there’ll be a summer harvest that is just a little darker, but it’s still light in flavor, but it’s very smooth. Where the spring honeys have a sweet, a very richness to them, the later season honey that is all floral, has a just a smoother texture to it. It takes a little more of it to sweeten whatever you’re trying to sweeten.
So what are you planning to do and show people with the hives at this year’s Spring Equinox celebration?
I will bring an observation hive with me that will have five frames out of a Russian colony. I’ll take a frame that has the queen on it, and it will sit in the top of the hive with Plexiglas on either side so that you can see the bees, see what they’re doing, and actually see the queen. And the bottom of it will be full of support bees. I’ll come out and talk about the bees and pollination. I usually have some pieces of natural drawn honeycomb that folks can see. I also have a set of teaching frames. There’s 20 different photos that explain different things that happen with the bees throughout the year. They’re really good, up close photos, lots of detail, and then we’ll have samples of honey.
You said that you’ve had hives for 15 years. Did you start Hidden Meadows around that same time? Or did that come later?
That came later. It was into the fourth year of having bees, because I had tried Italians and tried them again and it didn’t work. But these bees are a dream. I love these Russian bees. There’s just no other way to put it. And when I found them and saw how easy they were to work with, I couldn’t get enough of them. I just kept building the equipment and buying more hives and putting them in, you know, and we’ve just grown from there. When I first got bees, I never intended to produce honey. I never thought about the other products and stuff that we produce from the hive. But yeah, the bees are just wonderful.
Is there anything else that you would want people to know about you that they might not know or that I haven’t asked?
When I was taking the horticulture classes, I got my license for North Carolina landscaper. I became a certified plant professional. I obtained that certificate. I obtained a greenhouse certificate. I worked on all this stuff, and I’ve had a landscaping business for many years, and landscaping is really hard on the body when it’s just you. And the landscaping kind of morphed into the honey bees. If you’re a gardener you’ve got to have a love of pollinators, because without pollinators your garden doesn’t go anywhere, whether it’s a flower garden or a vegetable garden. You’ve got to have those to keep it going. And that’s just where things morphed into and now it’s all about the honey bees.
As we approach our upcoming 12th annual Champions of Change, what would you say to others on campus – students, faculty, staff – who are budding champions for change in their own way?
I guess, put your heart into what you’re doing. Decide why. Be intentional in what you’re going to do, and then put your heart into it and enjoy. If you can’t enjoy what you’re doing, then you’re probably not doing the right thing.