FAIRVIEW, Alta. – Here, at the northern edge of Canadian agriculture, millions of golden fliers produce the taste craved by sweet-toothed consumers.
And while honey is what we chiefly value in bees, the ruins of their homes, the crushed and rendered remnants of honey chambers, can by themselves create something grander – light itself.
By processing the waxed honeycombs in the hives into candles and crafts, the Tegart family has a glowing example of how a byproduct can become a mainline business.
One could easily miss the Tegart farm. It’s not that big – three quarters of land lying a few minutes east of Fairview in Alberta’s Peace River country.
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It has a few nondescript buildings through which 750,000 sheets of colored beeswax pass each year, supplying a strengthening market in the cities.
“It just seems to be growing all the time,” said Dave Tegart, as wax processing machines whir and clank around him. “I get to do what I want. That’s all I ask for.”
The Tegart wax processing operation is a local phenomenon. It produces candles, wax craft sheets and hive foundation sheets for beekeepers in the buildings that lie just beyond the house. In the summer the Tegarts hire 16 people, and in the winter, when the bees are hibernating, they keep six to eight local people working.
Dave and Gwen have processed beeswax since they were married in 1969, but only recently has it become the centrepiece of their operation.
Dave was an urban British Columbia boy with a weekend interest in beekeeping. One summer, in 1964, he moved to the Peace country to work on a bee farm, and he never went back. Gwen was a Grimshaw, Alta. girl who shared Dave’s willingness to spend his life dealing with bees.
Together they went from a 900-hive bee operation to a 2,400-hive, two-queen operation. They always included wax processing so they would have something for their summer workers to do in the winter.
But the wax processing has now grown to where the elder Tegarts have decided to leave the bee and honey business to their son Dan and concentrate completely on wax processing.
“We don’t have any time for anything else,” said Gwen, as she showed off the large warehouse that holds the hundreds of thousands of sheets of beeswax the family sells through its store in Edmonton.
The warehouse is as warehouses are: Great long and tall shelves holding massive quantities of similar things in long rows.
It stops being mundane and becomes stunning when one realizes that each of the hundreds of shelf spaces is made up of hundreds of sheets of beeswax, and each sheet contains hundreds of teaspoons worth of wax, and each bee only produces a few teaspoons worth of wax in its lifetime. Here, silently sitting on these shelves, is the life’s work of millions of dead bees.
The wax is not only from the Tegarts’ operation. They buy it from other local beekeepers. There’s a ready supply because the Peace country is the centre of Alberta’s bee industry, so often producers’ trucks enter the Tegart yard to unload what most beekeepers consider a waste product.
Color determined by diet
In another part of the warehouse stand shelves of heavy blocks of rendered wax. Each has its own, distinct color, which Gwen says comes from the different materials the supplying bees have consumed, and from the rendering of the wax in different substances. For example, iron pots turn wax green, Gwen said.
Before the shelves of wax blocks stand black barrels of the chalky, powdery, greasy wax the Tegarts process. The wax feels fluffy and yet viscid, greasy and dry all at the same time.
The rendering room looks like the devil’s kitchen. A huge vat of wax bubbles and drips, while a row of stained and wax-coated cauldrons steams and sweats and smells thickly of honey. The floor is covered with layers of dark, polluted, coagulated wax trickling into a clogged drain.
It’s a dark, steamy, elemental place. But it’s where the basic rendering takes place, and from here slowly the wax goes from a crude, filthy mulch to a bland, uniform yellow substance to a pretty, clear, clean and pure form that ends up in candles and crafts.
Colors important
Back in the warehouse there are 48 different colors of beeswax sheets. And even though that’s more colors than most people can name, Gwen said making each one right is even more difficult than just being able to distinguish the shades.
Since each wax has its own base color, making colors uniform to their predecessors demands special attention to each batch.
Once the wax sheets are finished they head down the supply chain, to the retail stores.
In the past, this would have meant passing the product on to a city seller, but because of the information superhighway, the Tegarts retain control of their product.
A year and a half ago they set up a store in Edmonton. They own and manage it from their farm. All the accounting, ordering and supplying occurs from Fairview.
Computers allow them to instantaneously tap into the Edmonton operation and see how things are going. All sales through the till are computerized, so Gwen knows what inventory is needed and can send it before the workers need to call.
It has meant the Tegarts can remain in Fairview, yet run an operation based on direct involvement with a city clientele.
“We run it by remote control,” said Dave, unsurprised at the power he’s able to exert from far north in the Peace. “Nowadays, this type of thing is a thousand times easier. We have all the access to the information.”
