A backyard beekeeper from 108 Mile Ranch and his thousands of carniolan honey bees recently produced some of the best sweet stuff in the province.
Mike Cober won three first-place awards – for best beeswax, best white honey and best white cream honey – at the British Columbia Honey Producers Association 2013 AGM Conference and Trade Show in Kelowna on Oct. 25-27.
He also took home the Premier Honey Exhibit Award for all-around achievement.
Cober’s honey is very bright and light, and very sought after. The bees produce it with the clover, dandelions, alfalfa and fireweed they forage in the area.
“The judge told me my liquid white honey is the highest scoring of any in the competition. I scored a total of 98 out of 100 points available.”
Furthermore, for the golden and smooth block of wax Cober submitted, the judge wrote “Gorgeous” on it.
“You would not believe the amount of people I talked to at this convention who would love to get more bees in the Cariboo because there is such a diversity in forage.”
Judging is based on characteristics, such as appearance, uniformity, colour, freedom from foreign materials and air bubbles, brightness, flavour, aroma and density.
They use a spectrometer, a device that detects material the human eye can’t, to scrutinize the jars of honey.
It’s all about patience and handling during the extraction and filtering process, Cober says.
“I’m very meticulous in what I do. I’ve always been that way. It’s patience and not rushing things.”
Although he attends the conference every year, it was Cober’s first time submitting his product. This season, he extracted 320 pounds from four hives – currently winterized behind an electric fence in his yard – after starting with only one hive last year.
“I was pretty proud,” Cober adds of his accomplishments in Kelowna. “It was pretty good.”
Cober’s father was a beekeeper and Cober first tried his hand at it in the late 1970s, but he didn’t have much luck. His interest in the hobby peaked again two years ago when his son started as an urban beekeeper in Richmond.
“They’re so interesting to work with. A lot of people get afraid of bees.
“They think bees are like wasps, and they aren’t. Bees are very calm little insects that mind their own business and they work.”
As pollinators, they’re also very important to our agricultural system.
“When you sit down for dinner and look at the food in your home, one out of three plates of food is totally supplied by the pollination of bees.”
Bee populations around the world have decreased significantly in recent years. Cober is familiar with the problem and says Canada should take the lead from Europe, which has banned all systemic pesticides.
“What they found in the early years, when they found there was a lot of colony collapse, really what was happening was these bees were collecting pollen from plants that were sprayed [with harmful pesticides].
“The bees will collect the pollen that’s contaminated with the pesticides, they store it, and then they feed it to their brood, and they’re virtually feeding them poison.”
He says there are other things to worry about with respect to managing bee populations, such as watching for swarming, mites, disease and fungus.
“I only use natural stuff to medicate my bees. If I have a mite problem, I use icing sugar. I dust them with icing sugar three times over 21 days once a week and they groom and they knock the mites off.”
He adds it’s important to monitor what’s going on, but not to over manage.
“When you go into a hive, there has to be a precise purpose of why you’re going in there. We can be a problem.”
