To Be or Not to Be a Beekeeper Is the Question Facing Hobbyists - WSJ.com

To Be or Not to Be a Beekeeper Is the Question Facing Hobbyists - WSJ.com: "To Be or Not to Be a Beekeeper
Is the Question Facing Hobbyists
Towns, Neighbors Abuzz Over Hive Control;
For Mr. Ghayebi, a Sting from City Hall
By ROBERT TOMSHO
July 11, 2008

To Be or Not to Be a Beekeeper
Is the Question Facing Hobbyists
Towns, Neighbors Abuzz Over Hive Control;
For Mr. Ghayebi, a Sting from City Hall
By ROBERT TOMSHO
July 11, 2008

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine -- At first, some neighbors thought the wooden boxes tucked into the bushes behind Omid Ghayebi's house were rabbit hutches.

That was just fine with Mr. Ghayebi, a fledgling beekeeper who didn't intend to advertise the pastime he took up in 2006. "I didn't want anyone getting all worked up," he says.

In a neighborhood of closely built homes and tiny backyards, the 31-year-old engineer's hobby didn't stay a secret. Soon, he was caught up in a far-reaching debate over where beekeepers are meant to be and not to be.
As honeybees mysteriously abandon commercial hives, nature lovers around America are trying to replenish the bee population with backyard hives, stirring up trouble with their neighbors. WSJ's Rob Tomsho reports.

Honeybees add an estimated $15 billion annually to the value of the nation's agricultural production. Every year hundreds of thousands of colonies are trucked around the country to pollinate everything from apples to almonds.

But these are tumultuous times in beekeeping. Rural areas that once served as home base have been gobbled up by development. For the past two years, a mysterious syndrome dubbed "colony collapse disorder" has led honeybees to abandon commercial hives in droves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that beekeepers lost about 35% of their managed hives in 2007, up from 31% in 2006. Scientists still don't know the cause of CCD but suspect it may be due to some combination of factors, including pathogens, parasites and pesticides.

As experts work to solve that mystery, more nature lovers have taken up backyard beekeeping in hopes of bolstering the ranks of European bees, the breed used commercially to make honey and pollinate crops. Bee Culture magazine estimates the number of beekeeping hobbyists has risen by about 10% to 100,000 in the past year or so.

The boom hasn't been without mishaps. Last month , a number of residents of Marblehead, Mass., were stung by bees that swarmed out of a hobbyist's hive as it was being moved from a backyard to a farm.
[Omid Ghayebi]

Fears of raging bees and bumbling hobbyists have helped prompt dozens of communities to put the clamps on beekeeping. The city of Rancho Mirage, Calif., bans it outright and Garden City, Mich., now requires beekeepers to live on at least a quarter acre. Bill Lewis, president of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, says restrictions throughout the L.A. region have become so tight that some beekeepers have gone underground. "Many actually keep bees in the cities and just don't tell," he says.

Omid Ghayebi (pronounced: oh-MEED goy-e-BEE) isn't the first to raise bees in South Portland, a coastal community of 24,000. Fred Hale, reputed to be the world's oldest man at the time of his 2004 death at age 113, was a well-known local beekeeper who sometimes attributed his longevity to a daily dose of honey.

Agricultural Roots

But through the years, the city has also struggled with its agricultural roots. Although its shopping mall is built on the site of a former pig farm, the city bans all farm animals from residential neighborhoods. Or at least it did until last year when a 10-year-old gained overwhelming public support for her successful campaign to win the right to raise chickens.

Mr. Ghayebi didn't think his buzzing pets would get the same reception. After determining that South Portland had no ordinance that mentioned beekeeping, in the spring of 2006 he put two hives with about 24,000 bees in his backyard without telling a soul.

"I was kind of trying to live a quiet life with the bees," says Mr. Ghayebi, who has been enthralled with them since childhood, when his parents kept hives on their farm in Iran.
[Go to graphic]

A wiry man with a ready smile, Mr. Ghayebi and others like him strictly breed bees as a hobby. They think doing so is good for the insects, but most don't have the resources to travel around the country pollinating crops. When farmers hire beekeepers for pollination purposes, they typically "rent" hundreds or thousands of hives.

Little Flying Parades

In the spring of 2007, Mr. Ghayebi's bees began familiarizing themselves with a neighbor's backyard. One day, a half dozen of them landed and began drinking rainwater from the track of Mark Tinkham's sliding glass door. After they flew away, other bees took their places. No one was stung, and for a time, the Tinkham family got a kick out of the little flying parades. But soon there were bees in the puddles, bees in the birdbath and bees in the kiddie pool.

Mr. Tinkham couldn't figure it out until one day, from his deck, he noticed Mr. Ghayebi in his own backyard wearing a net-covered beekeepers' helmet. "I said, 'You got to be kidding me,'" recalls Mr. Tinkham, who contacted City Hall.

Pat Doucette, the city's code-enforcement officer, told Mr. Ghayebi that his beekeeping amounted to farming in a residential area and asked him to move the hives. He said she had no legal basis to make such a request. Ms. Doucette recalls that she "tried to get some kind of compromise, but there wasn't any."

While the bees were dormant last winter, Ms. Doucette reviewed other cities' beekeeping ordinances and began drafting one for South Portland. The proposal that evolved called for $25 annual registration permits, hive limits based on acreage and tall barriers to dissuade bees from flying into neighbors' yards. Violators could be fined up to $1,000 a day.
[Omid Ghayebi tending to his bees]
Omid Ghayebi tending to his bees

Backup From Beekeepers

Mr. Ghayebi sought backup from the Maine State Beekeepers Association, which had gone to bat for a similarly besieged beekeeper in a neighboring town a year earlier. Erin Forbes, the group's newsletter editor, says most of its 300 members are still so leery of attention that she advises them to paint their hives to look like compost bins.

When the city council debated the bee ordinance in public hearings, Mr. Ghayebi was usually joined by at least a half-dozen beekeeping brethren. City officials say few local residents spoke up in favor of the ordinance.

In March, Ms. Forbes drafted a letter to city officials and posted it on BeeSource.com, a beekeeping Web site. She said the proposed ordinance "sends a message to potential beekeepers and the public that beekeeping is something to be feared and regulated."

'Inundated With Emails'

Beekeepers from around New England and beyond took up the cause. "Make South Portland a city that can say 'We are Honey Bee Friendly' and 'We Support Pollination,'" wrote one Massachusetts beekeeper. City officials "were inundated with emails" against the ordinance, recalls Ms. Doucette.

Even so, on May 19, the City Council adopted the ordinance by a vote of 5-to-2. Not that they've used it so far.

These days, there is only one registered beekeeper in South Portland and it is not Mr. Ghayebi. By the time the ordinance finally passed, he'd mended fences with his neighbor and moved his hives to a friend's farm in a rural area outside of town.

The half-hour drive has become a chore and, after all the aggravation, Mr. Ghayebi says he has grown tired of the taste of his own honey. But the beekeeper says he is still committed to his hives. "I'm not going to take up golfing instead," he vows. "We need more bees."

Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@wsj.com