100 hive operation | The six-week pollinating season starts with Okanagan apricots and ends with apples
KELOWNA, B.C. — Kevin Dunn was awestruck the first time he peered inside a beehive and saw its 50,000 inhabitants.
“I said, ‘this is it,’ but I didn’t know what it was.”
Now, 15 years after that mind-blowing moment in a Simalkemeen Valley field, the former newspaper photographer has a thriving business as an orchard pollinator in the Okanagan Valley.
Neither Dunn nor his wife and business partner Janelle Parchomchuk, thought their life plan would include hauling beehives though orchards in the middle of the night.
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Dunn had been a newspaper photographer in Moose Jaw, Sask., Kel-owna, B.C., and British Columbia’s East Kootenays and still carries a camera everywhere and shoots weddings 15 weekends a year.
Parchomchuk studied biology and environmental studies at the University of Victoria.
They met at the Desert Centre in Osoyoos, B.C., where she was a tour guide and he was the artist in residence after leaving The (Kelowna) Daily Courier.
She grew up around bees in Kelowna and had helped her father with his pollination business.
Dunn’s experience was limited to an occasional encounter with a bumblebee on his parents’ acreage near Calgary.
Both their lives changed when the inexperienced Dunn successfully applied for a job as an experienced assistant beekeeper.
After working with Keremous beekeeper John Sladen for two years, he and Parchomchuk headed to an apiary in Australia that had 10,000 hives.
“It was an incredibly huge learning experience.”
Dunn said a good beekeeper, like iterenant winemakers, can work anywhere, and they have since worked on apiaries in Hawaii, Belize and Cuba.
They returned from Australia during pollinating season and helped Parchomchuk’s father, Bill Parchomchuk, move his 100 hives in and out of area orchards.
He gave them 20 hives to start their business, and they lost 18 to varrora mites during winter.
“Every beekeeper has to learn how to lose,” Dunn said.
However, they learned, expanded and kept growing until they capped their hives at 100. Now, partnering with Parchomchuk’s father, they have a big part of the Okanagan pollination business.
“It’s a real trip when we’re pollinating,” Dunn said.
“One day — or night — might in-volve delivering 20 to 30 beehives into orchards while avoiding barking dogs and potholes,” he said.
“It’s like a live video game. You have to strategize the best way to get there, the best escape route, the best back door to the next orchard. You’re changing on the fly, improvising and trouble shooting. It’s hard work, but it’s also fun.”
Dunn calculated he and Parchomchuk lifted 10 tonnes on and off their truck this year.
“Pollination will either make you strong or break you in half.”
They make things easier on themselves by reducing the weight in each hive and lifting together.
The honeybee, which comprises seven of 19,000 bee species, also produces beeswax, royal jelly and propolis, a natural crazy glue some claim is a healing agent.
Dunn leaves propolis at the edge of his property for cancer patients, who swear it helps. Some people induce bees to sting them to alleviate the symptoms of arthritis, and a woman has tried it for multiple schlerois.
“She felt it helped her,” Dunn said as he stuck a glob in his mouth.
“This stuff is worth more than its weight in gold. It’s important to note it’s not a cure, but the venom can act as a decoy for whatever destroys the protein around the nerve ends.”
Aging beekeepers are some of the biggest proponents of sting therapy, many needing their morning fix to work their arthritic hands. Unlike most professions, beekeepers don’t retire.
“You’re in it for life,” Dunn said.
“Out there in nature, there are no boundaries on the possibilities of what you can do.”
One of those possibilities for him involved helping start the Community Farmers’ Market in Penticton, B.C., which, with another market by its side, draws 15,000 people on a summer Saturday.
He also has a booth at the Naramata market, where he sets up an observation hive.
“From little kids to seniors, everyone has this intuitive curiosity about bees,” he said.
“Some people are scared and shiver but they’re still drawn, still interested. Some people put their nose against the glass, feel the heat. Some people put their hand on it, close their eyes and then walk away.”
Dunn and Parchomchuk have different approaches to beekeeping — he’s intuitive, she’s linear — but they complement each other.
They also agree, after tossing around their 100 hives in the six-week pollinating season that begins with apricots in Osoyoos and ends with apples in Kelowna, that it’s a mixture of manual labour, brute force, finesse and knowledge, folk art and science.
“I can’t wait to go every day: the mundane stuff, the bees, the people, the landscape,” Dunn said.
“I like the solitude. You don’t really think. You let your mind go. It isn’t that time stands still; it just isn’t there.”
Beekeeping has become a three-generation affair for Dunn and Parchomchuk. Their son, Felix, 3, spent many nights as an infant in his car seat covered in a mosquito net during pollination season.
Now, he has his own suit and gloves.
“He says he goes bee hiving, ” Dunn said.
Dunn has learned many lessons from bees, but the one he learned at 17 helped him to be a better beekeeper, a better photographer and a better person. After high school, he threw a dart at a map and then em-barked on a year-long bike trip to Southeast Asia.
“I learned not to be afraid to make my own decisions and be on my own. It was widening, and the whole sense of possibility opening as a result, that ‘If you can do this, you can do anything.’ ”
