A sweet hobby

For local beekeeper Matt Reed, it all started with a single, hungry bee

By Ellen Spitaleri

The Clackamas Review, May 26, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Matt Reed demonstrates how to remove a honeycomb from one of the top-bar hives in his Oak Grove backyard. The hive will ultimately house nearly 40,000 bees.

ellen spitaleri / clackamas review

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It started with one bee. “I walked into the kitchen and there was this bee – it was exhausted. I thought, ‘I gotta save this bee,’ so I grabbed some honey and heated up a plate, because I knew bees were cold blooded,” said Oak Grove resident Matt Reed.

“The bee spun around and started drinking the honey, and when she had more energy, I took her out to the front porch. She looked at me, and then spiraled into the sky.”

The next day when his wife Jill McKenna came home, there were a bunch of bees on the porch.

“I figured the bee had communicated to her friends where there was a good source of honey – that’s when I became obsessed. The next month I got my first hive.”

Less than a year later, Reed has 22 hives; five in his yard, and the rest in friends’ and neighbors’ yards. He builds and maintains the hives, and they provide the space.

When he harvests the honey, they will receive several quarts; he expects to extract about 1,000 pounds of the sweet stuff this year.

And of course, the friends and neighbors also benefit from the bees pollinating their trees and flowers.

For his “day job,” Reed works in IT for Pacific Crest Technology, and described the beekeeping as an “ever-growing hobby.” He has even converted one room in his home into a woodshop, where he builds his own hives from scratch.

Busy bees

Reed installed the hives in early April, starting with 10,000 bees per hive; he expects the hive populations to reach 50,000 to 60,000 bees eventually. They have already created about 14 honeycombs per hive.

He really has to stay on top of the hives, Reed said, or the bees will think the hive is too small and they’ll swarm and fly off.

“The hive will be empty and you’ve lost $80 worth of bees,” he said.

Right now the bees are gorging themselves on the flowers of Hawthorne trees, blackberries, maples and clover, and soon fruit trees will be in bloom.

Reed is already thinking ahead to selling the honey and is working on a label.

Another thing that sets his style of beekeeping apart from others, he noted, is that he is not going to use any medication in conjunction with raising the bees.

He said he knows he will experience some losses, but he started with bees that have “good genetics” and will “endeavor to create [more bees] with good genetic stock.”

He works with two breeds of bees; Carniolans, an Italian bee, and the Buckfast bee, developed by a German monk working at Buckfast Abbey in England. Reed also captured a swarm and put it in a dead tree in his backyard, and said the “feral bees” were doing well.

Sustainability

Reed considers himself a sustainable beekeeper, whose main goal is to be less intrusive of the lives of his bees.

He doesn’t want to use chemicals, because “we should want the bees to survive on their own. Why should they need us? We are only creating a bee that relies on us.”

Large professional beekeepers want to get the largest harvest of honey that they can, whereas, Reed said, “My focus is more on the breeds and the bees’ health rather than the profit.”

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