At around noon on a bright sunny high desert day, Conor Croskery drove into the parking lot of Reno’s River School Farm in his Subaru Forester. He walked out of his vehicle barefoot and sat in the back of his SUV to put on his ivory white bee suit and shoes. He then walked over to the top-bar hive he had placed inside this farm a few days ago. He was there for an inspection.
“They're going to stay in the box. That's their home,” he said. “And so today I just had to come by. And since it is a different style of hive, I had to make sure everything is doing okay and it looks like all the comb is being built straight. There's no problem. The queen is laying eggs in the little honeycomb cells. They look happy, healthy. Nothing is going on. So just kind of a checkup to make sure everything's running smoothly.”
Twenty-four year old Croskery who was always interested in the natural world pursued mechanical engineering as an undergrad, but has kept up with bees as a hobby.
“So the undergrad that I went in didn't really support [this] at all because it was all math, science, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics. It is cool, though, now that I know those things because I can kind of look at the beehive in more of an engineering perspective,” he said. “Like ventilation wise, how is the heat going? What are the bees doing to move the heat throughout it? And they kind of have a deeper understanding of that. So that's kind of cool. But I wouldn't say anything in my undergrad necessarily, supported my bee hobby.”
Croskery started beekeeping in his senior year of high school after he was inspired by a teacher at Carson High School who used to be a beekeeper. Though his parents never owned a hive, his father helped him build on.
“The new ones I built this year are made from old redwood decking that my parents tore out,” he said. “They used to have a pretty big redwood deck down in Carson City (where his parents live) and wanted more garden space. So they took that out and saved all the wood and I used that to build a couple more beehives because it's important to recycle. And the bees don't really care if the wood is old and gnarly looking.”
“Generally, if you buy bees, they're going to be from California, especially for this area, because they're more local,” he explained but this year Croskery got them from his Reno neighbor. “I got them from a local beekeeper who is actually not that far away from me. He's like three blocks away who has just had his own bees for like six years. He breeds them here. He sells packages and little hives to people,” he added.
Croskery has other hobbies like climbing, skiing and backpacking which he says is “adrenaline seeking” but finds beekeeping to have a calming effect on him.
“What kept me going with it was just that it's such a nice, calming and relaxing hobby to have, which maybe sounds counterintuitive because it's a box full of stingy insects, but just actually getting into the hive and I just feel like you talk to the bees and the bees talk back to you,” he said. “And there's so many little things that you kind of learn about them. The box hums at a different pitch or something depending on how they're feeling. If they're upset, if they're not upset, they'll fly in your face to be like ‘...hey, get out of the hive, we were fine with it ten minutes ago now or we are not.’ So I kept going at it just because it's just such a great and rewarding hobby to have.”
On his bee inspection at the River School Farm, he checked for cross combing in the hives and made sure that the bees were building perpendicular hives. He also checked whether the queen was doing fine and if the bees were producing food and making “bee bread which is pollen.”
Croskery checked each hive carefully to inspect that they were making honey and straightened one comb he felt was not perpendicularly aligned. While doing so, he talked to the bees to calm them down and make sure that they were not being harmed in any way.
“It's like when I'm getting in you have to reassure them, like, ‘hey, I'm not stealing any honey. I'm not coming in here to destroy the hive. I'm just trying to help. I'm not here to hurt any of you guys.’ Honestly I feel like they're pretty receptive to it because I feel like when I talk to the bees and maybe it's just the mental thing, but I feel like when I talk to the bees, they're less aggressive.”
Although he is extra careful, Croskery has been stung often by his bees but says that it doesn't stop him from keeping them. “The reaction your body has to it, gets mellower and then you just kind of get used to getting stung. And so it's just like a needle prick. Or maybe it's like a shot or something. I don't get the whole swelling and big red bump and burning and all that stuff. And again, it doesn't happen as often anymore. Like, it will happen occasionally and, and if you're coming like every three to four weeks, you get stung once or twice, I just feel like it's not that big of a deal.”
Croskery says he has lost a hive recently to extreme temperatures and sudden snow and was deeply affected by it.
“I do move my beehives around because like now we know that native bees are what you're supposed to be supporting,” he said. “And I don't want to deplete the food (for native bees) in an area. So I like to move them around to make sure the natives have food.”
A Reno resident, Croskery insists on supporting native products by people around us. “Make sure the honey you're buying is local,” he said. “You can go to the farmer's markets. Most of the time beekeepers are at farmer's markets. I'm sure you could probably look them up and find them too. And there's organizations too. There's an organization in Reno that does beekeeping for vets who have PTSD and first responders. So you could support them because they're doing good work. They're trying to help people out. But buy local honey, buy any of the products. A lot of them have bee pollen too, and they have lots of stuff and most of them are great people and they'll answer any bee questions you have if you have them. If you want to keep bees, ask them to mentor you, maybe they'll help you out.”