Walker Honey Farm - Commercial Operations

WALKER HONEY FARM; ROGERS, TX

BEGINNINGS:

My grandfather, G.C. “Clint” Walker, Sr., started beekeeping in 1930 at the age of 40. My father, G.C. Walker, Jr., was ten years old at the time and already had experience “bee lining” and marking and cutting “bee trees” with his woodsman uncles and cousins. “Grandpa Walker” and his younger brother had lost their grocery business in 1929. They closed their doors in September of that year because their customers couldn’t pay up their bills due to a local drought—not due to the stock market crash which happened a month later in October of 1929. Grandpa had enough cash from closing out the store to buy 150 beehives the following spring. That first year he sold his entire honey crop in friction top cans out of the back of his “Model A” Ford. He also sold every queen out of every hive to a local queen and bee shipper. With a lot of hard work and humility, the bees paid for themselves and turned a profit in the first season. Our family has been beekeeping ever since.

TRANSITIONS:

In 1937 the family sold a house that they had been renting out. They invested the $500 in buying bees and a truck for G. C.—the oldest son still at home--to get started in beekeeping. With a good crop of honey (and a moonlight business of buying and selling hogs), G. C. was able to pay for his bees and new truck in the first year. Boll weevils and arsenic sprayed on cotton to control them soon changed the economic model for this fledgling family beekeeping venture. Faced with the decision to “get all in or get out” the family took drastic measures. In 1941 they relocated the business 300 miles south from Central Texas to the citrus groves of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. “The Valley” was full of northern beekeepers who overwintered there. Spring orange honey crops were big in those days. Every spring--after orange honey was “canned up” each spring--bees were moved north out of the Valley up into the “brush country”. This semi-arid area of South Texas—famed for Huajillo honey that made one Texas city the “Honey Capital of the World” for a time—is bounded by the Gulf of Mexico to the east, the Rio Grande to the west, the Valley to the south, and “San Antone” and the Texas Hill Country to the north.

By the late 1940s, post-orange bees had found a new summer home 1000 miles to the north in the largest alpine valley in the world—Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Before potatoes, barley, wheat, and canola took over the landscape, the San Luis Valley was full of irrigated clover and alfalfa raised for hay. The haying methods in those days were such that there was plenty of standing bloom at any given time. By the 1950s the Colorado operation was phased out in lieu of closer-by north Texas where clover was being utilized in crop rotations on cotton and maize fields. In 1963, Walker Honey Farm re-established a presence in Central Texas. G.C.s younger brother, Ed Walker, continued with honey production in the LRGV and managed that part of the operation until the early 1990s. When we moved our last hives out of The Valley we had operated continuously there for over 50 years. We had several citrus growers and one big vegetable seed pollination contract that we had relationships with spanning five decades and three generations of their families and ours.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, the crop year progressed from orange honey in The Valley, clover honey in central Texas, followed by cotton honey in central Texas and/or cucumber pollination and cotton honey in west Texas. During these years, the queen and package bee business was expanded--peaking in the 80s and 90s at 2500 mating nucs and a few thousand packages per year.

In the late 90s almond pollination was added to the beekeeping calendar. This continued through 2010. Over the last ten years or so we have gradually begun to “pull in our wings” in our beekeeping efforts. Our expanding packed honey business has allowed us to focus on honey production with emphasis on producing varietal Texas honeys. 2014 was the first year without any pollination contracts as we gave up our last watermelon account. We have not produced queens commercially in several years. We have steadily trimmed our package bee operation and spring season of 2015 will be package bee free. Our last crop in south Texas brush country was 2008. We only go to the coast for tallow honey when our central Texas crops drought out. While we still occasionally run a few hundred hives out to the hill country in the infrequent wet summers for “white brush”—a varietal specialty--we are primarily operating for honey production in about 5 counties in Central Texas. In 2014 our farthest apiary was less than 50 miles from the house.

TODAY’S OPERATION:

One of the primary motivators for us to run more local in recent years is to provide clean forage for our bees. We strategically avoid row crops—attempting to stay two miles (Jim Frazier says that 3.7 is the normal foraging radius!) from corn and cotton. We can reliably do that in some of our eastern area that is characterized by sandy soils that are best utilized for truck farming and cattle operations. The creeks in that area are rich in pollen and nectar sources that span the calendar year. But along the deeper soiled Blackland Belt where “corn is king” we sometimes fail to keep our distance from the monoculture desert that has come to characterize so much of the American landscape. It is still a goal that we keep in mind when siting apiaries.

2014 marked our 85^th crop of honey. It was a good year that came in at about 100#s per colony—well above our 60# local average. That puts it in the top two or three crops in the last 50 years. The last four years have seen two failures and two large crops. We wonder—like many of you—if this is the new norm, namely, radical swings in weather and crops?

In 2014 we were fortunate enough to produce five local specialty varietal honeys: Pecan Honeydew Honey—the first time we ever produced enough to extract this rarity, Sesame—on a local sustainable see growers 100+ acres crop, Clover honey—from both Dutch and Hubam clovers, Yaupon Holly—in the understory of the post oaks where Grandpa made his first crop 86 years ago this spring, and our local spring Wildflower honey—a bee-mixed blend of Gaillardia and various Monardas (Bee Balm, Lemon Mint, Horsemint, and Sandyland Horsemint).

NUT AND BOLTS:

We operate our 1200 or so colonies in mediums--“Illinois modifieds”. We get around our small sphere of influence with only three trucks—a 3 ton, 1 ton, and ¾ ton. One Swinger suffices for all our beekeeping and warehouse needs. A small John Deere with a front end loader serves as backup fork lift when the Swinger is in the field. For extracting equipment we are using the same Bogenschutz uncapper that Dad bought used in 1970! I was 12 when we hung up the hot knives. I remember the day that my father said, “Here’s your “new” uncapper—figure out how to use it!” No bells and whistles . . . but it still works like a charm—thanks to Pat Keuhl (http://www.cooknbeals.com/)and lots of TLC. Our two radial extractors are old enough that we have replaced the bearings in each multiple times. Even with this smallish setup we can turn out 12-15 drums of honey per day. One year a three man crew—comprised of my wife, Janice; my sister, Jan; and one fast moving and talented high school boy--ran a 400+ drum crop through this little system.

HIVE MANAGEMENT:

We feed protein supplement. For the last several years we have used the Hackenberg patty (http://hackenbergapiaries.org/). We prefer a protein supplement that is high in the amino acid isoleucine (found in dried eggs--among other sources) for hypopharyngeal gland stimulation. Our carbohydrate supplement of choice is liquid sucrose. We almost always feed a very thin mix for brood stimulation. Due to normally strong fall nectar flows, we rarely have to feed for winter stores. To our sugar syrup we add vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential oils (spearmint and lemon grass), and citric acid (to achieve a pH of <4 for ease of digestion and bacterial and viral protection). We use a one gallon division board feeder that permanently resides in the hive. We sometimes feed in two gallon buckets as trickle feeding seems to provide more stimulation of brooding. (Cf. Fat Bees Skinny Bees : A manual on honey bee nutrition for beekeepers : a report for the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. Doug Somerville. http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3538979.)

We make nucs by putting together supers of 7 frames of shaken brood and two frames of honey/pollen from one or more hives and then placing them over a queen excluder on one of those same hives or another hive with excess population. We then send a crew around the next day to pull off all the splits and relocate them to another site where they are fed and queen cells installed. We will make up splits any time we are working through bees—even occasionally when we are pulling honey. We graft our own queen cells from good CA Italian stock.

As I write this at the end of January our bees have one to two supers of goldenrod, aster, and broomweed honey in stores from last fall.It is sunny and 75 degrees today. The water elm trees along the creeks in the post oak woods are in full bloom yielding a high protein pollen that stimulates egg laying. We are out today providing stimulative sucrose feeding. The fresh pollen and thin syrup will hopefully produce a big jump in egg laying. After a dry winter last year, we have seen abundant rains lately and our spring prospect look good.

We just completed our first “spring” sugar rolls for mites. At the same time and from the same individuals hive we also do a phoretic mite count and collect bee samples to send to Beltsville for testing for varroa and nosema. (http://ars.usda.gov/services/docs.htm?docid=7472) This “triplicate sampling” of randomly selected hives gives us confidence in our sugar rolls and phoretic mite counts. We have not treated for mites with synthetic (hard) chemicals since 2010 and have used no antibiotic prophylactically since 2008. We have little or no nosema (based on lab analysis), had only one diagnosed case of AFB in six years, and have mites under control (One hesitates to say that mites are ever “under control”!). We use essential oil patties and thymol patties for varroa control and we suspect that we get some nosema control from the essential oils as well. We feel like we can “get away” with softer treatments because we don’t go to almonds and we don’t run in Big Ag and Big Chem territory. Our bees have cleaner forage and more diversity which we believe makes them healthier and less disease prone. We are very aware that the techniques that we employ for mite and disease control are not practical in all--or even most—commercial beekeeping situations. We are thankful that for us they are not only practical but beneficial.

MUSINGS:

When I was young I swore I wouldn’t spend my whole life working bees like my father did. So, I shook the hometown dust off of my boots and headed out for greener pastures. I spent some time going to school in the Midwest. That worked out pretty well for me as that is where I found the love of my life and acquired a damn fine business partner! Then, after marriage and with a couple of kids on the ground, we lived and worked on the West Coast for a time. That was nice too! Beach and mountains and good weather and stuff they do out there made for great living. Then one day--in a reverse Jed Clampett moment--we loaded up the truck and moved back to Texas. After a time resetting our internal gears from freeway speed to gravel road pace, we determine that, “Yes!”, we wanted to pursue farm life.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have a song entitled Southern Accents. It opens like this:

There's a Southern accent, where I come from.
The young 'uns call it country . ..

The Yankees call it dumb.
I got my own way of talkin',
But everything is done,

With a Southern accent where I come from.

I have only lately come to realize that all of us partake in some form of a “local accent”. Our businesses also partake in this “locality”. I no longer apologize for my southern accent. Rather, I have come to embrace it. By extension, I think it is true that all of us fit and shape our businesses to match the opportunities afforded to us in our locale. At Walker Honey Farm, we have enjoyed life and work a durn sight better since “going native.”

POSTSCRIPT:

I very much enjoyed Jan Lohman’s description of her’s and Vince Vasa’s Eastern Oregon “accent” on beekeeping in the November/December ABF Newsletter. I am greatly anticipating reading about Brent and Bonnie Woodworth’s Western North Dakota “accent” in the next edition of this newsletter. We all can learn from each other and benefit from our shared stories. Thank you Jan and ABF for creating this forum to share and learn and grow.

--Clint Walker III