SEBASTIAN — Sebastian resident John Truckner is a mailman by trade with a Vero beachside route. But the Saginaw, Mich., native possesses the heart and drive of an entrepreneur, always on the lookout for any interesting enterprise that catches his imagination.
So when his son Jeff mentioned his pal Jeremy Crews wanted to start a retail honey business, Truckner was interested because “I’ve been eating raw honey my whole life, due to allergies.”
Jeremy’s dad Jerry is a retired state bee inspector for Indian River County and knows virtually everything worth knowing about bees – “the master of pollination” Truckner calls him – and passed that knowledge to his son. Jeremy worked for his dad since he was 12 and admits, “I never really liked bees, I just did it for the allowance. Until no one was making me do it. Now I love it.” He has been in the business for 14 years now, and has also served as a state bee Inspector.
Truckner was acquainted with Eric Granitur, an attorney he’d had gotten to know on his beach mail route and someone he thought might be interested in the bee idea. He was.
“We formed the Indian River Bee Company on a whim,” says Truckner. The three new business partners chose the name “because ‘Indian River’ means its good.” John purchased 1,500 hives, and a friend created a peppy little bee mascot to jazz up the recyclable “bee bottle” labels and collaterals. Initially, it was a “cottage business” operating out of John and Danette Truckner’s home.
As they were getting their feet wet, they introduced small bottles of clear, golden raw honey at various community events, and donated proceeds to the Save the Simpson Home fundraiser for the family of Vero resident Brian Simpson, murdered by an intruder in 2011. Wherever they bring the little yellow-labelled jars, they explain the benefits of raw, pure honey, “unfiltered and straight from the beehive.”
They have just closed on about an acre of property, Truckner says, on which they plan to construct a building with kitchen, bottling area and retail space. A commercial-grade kitchen, he explains, is required to operate a retail enterprise. “We hope to start within a month.”
As Truckner moved along the beekeeper learning curve, he discovered his new endeavor was extremely labor-intensive and realized there was more to know about bees than he’d ever imagined.
Like most other Florida residents, honey bees are not native Floridians, but migrated from Europe with the colonists, probably in the 1600s. One of the first commercial beekeeping operations in Florida was established in 1872 by a fruit company from New York, near Daytona. Early Florida beekeepers moved their colonies from one honey flow to another long before migratory beekeeping was practiced elsewhere. Hive transportation at that time was by boat.
Truckner and Crews move their bees by flatbed truck, usually four or five times a year, based on where the bee-friendly blooms are. In the spring, they go to the orange blossoms; later it’s cabbage palm and palmetto; mangroves flowers follow, and then wildflowers and Brazilian pepper tree blooms beckon. When hives are moved, Crews explains, they must be at least a mile or two away from the original location, because the foraging bees find their way back to the hive using the earth’s magnetic fields. If they are moved too short a distance, they will simply return to the spot where the hive was last located, and just mill about, so they have to be moved far enough to come under the pull of another magnetic field. “They are little flying GPS systems,” says Truckner, still amazed at the complexity of the tiny creatures.
Late afternoon is one of the two times of day when the bees are in the hives and not out foraging for nectar-producing blossoms, when Truckner and Crews come to check on their bee inventory on an overgrown plot of land covered with a blossom-rich variety of plants – blackberries, pepper trees, citrus, various wildflowers – close to an old grove. With bees, as with humans, the perfect real estate is all about location, location, location.
At the end of a narrow, brambly path, in a small clearing, sit several hives, each hive containing about 50,000 small worker bees and one, much larger, queen. The bottom box, taller than the top two, is the brood chamber where the queen resides, eating, laying eggs and being waited on by the other bees. The top two are the honey boxes, which need to be relatively small because of the weight of the very dense honey. Within each honey box are five frames containing the comb and the busy honey-making bees. During a honey flow, four or five times a year, 10 hives will produce approximately one barrel – 55 gallons – of honey.
The bees receive sugar water when blossoms are not available, definitely never the corn syrup some beekeepers give their bees, which, says Truckner, can compromise the taste of the honey. Bees eat honey, except for the queen, who only eats royal jelly produced by special worker bees. While most of the bees live only a couple of weeks, the queen can live from 1 to 5 years, but, these days, says Jeremy, pesticides have shortened her lifespan – closer to one year.
Living in a highly structured, matriarchal society, each bee has her own task to perform, which changes as she ages. There are far more females than males in a hive, Jeremy says, and when the females get tired of the males lazing about, they tear off their wings and boot them out.
The honey-making process begins when the bee visits a flower to gather its nectar (essentially sugarwater), which the plant has cleverly produced to lure the bees over. While poking about in the flower, drinking the nectar through a straw-like proboscis, the worker bees get pollen grains on their feet, which they then transfer from flower to flower, thus pollinating the flower, which creates a seed, furthering the species.
Meanwhile, when they are full of nectar, the worker bees return to the hive as their bodies’ enzymes break down the nectar into simple sugars. They pass the modified nectar to the hive bees, who further break down the sugars and place the nectar into the honeycomb cells, where thousands of bees, working together in a great symphony of furious wing-flapping, evaporate any remaining water from the nectar, thickening it into honey. The hive bees then cap the cells with beeswax to seal the honey in, for future bee meals and to be “pulled” by beekeepers.
Truckner gathers handfuls of dry weeds and hands them to Crews, who is preparing the bee smoker, essentially a set of bellows attached to a fireproof can with a nozzle at the top. He stuffs the weeds into the smoker bowl and strikes a match. The smoke flows over the hive, keeping the bees inside. It also serves to mask an alarm pheromone, released by the queen to encourage her sisters in the hive to sting anything nearby. A hat with protective netting on his head, Jeremy carefully lifts a frame from one of the hives, revealing rows of honey-laden comb around the edges, cells containing eggs toward the center and numerous worker bees bustling about.
Because queens are key to the life of a hive, a new queen is specially raised from an egg, usually before the old queen dies, or leaves. If several queen eggs are hatched, they will play their own game of thrones – a fight to the death for the right to rule. Truckner plans to buy 100 or so queens when the operation expands, explaining that each comes in her own little box along with servant bees to meet her needs. Later, he says, the lndian River Bee Company will raise its own queens.
With Granitur’s legal expertise, Jeremy’s bee knowledge and experience and Truckner’s outgoing personality and people skills, the Indian River Bee Company is ready to take it to the next level.
