When you stop by the Booger Hill Bee Company stand at the Athens Farmers Market at Bishop Park on Saturday mornings, you’ll find assorted jars of wildflower honey, bottles of honey vinegar and beeswax candles. It’s bucolic. Calm. Sweet.

The land around Booger Hill Bee Company just outside of Athens in Danielsville, GA is also bucolic, calm and sweet. But trying to keep up with owner Dan Harris talking about his bees is like trying to keep up with a bee itself: speeding in one direction, then zipping in another direction, then hanging momentarily before returning to the original destination. And like the bees, he knows what he’s doing.

Nervously anticipating walking around bee hives, I’d done my Internet research and arrived at his apiary wearing protective long-sleeved and long-legged light-colored clothing. I wasn’t there 10 minutes before he had me holding a frame of honey bees, barehanded. The bees were as relaxed as he was.

Beekeeper Dan Harris pulls out a frame of his Danielsville bees.

“I talk to my bees,” says Harris. “The beekeeper’s rule used to be when a beekeeper passed away, it fell to his best friend to tell the bees that he’s passed on. You tell them what you’re doing. When people are buying my bees and I’m moving frames, I’ll be talking to them and telling them these are your new people. I just talk to them. I had a lady who bought bees from me one time, and she got them home and she had them for a month. Then she called me and said, ‘These bees are just mean.’ I said, ‘Well, they never were mean here.’ And she said, ‘Well, they’re mean.’ So, I went over and I smoked the hive and I opened it up, and they were just as calm as they could be. And she was mad. She said, ‘Those bees remember you!’”

At 50 years old, Harris quit his job with General Electric, moved to Danielsville and went to UGA for a degree in horticulture, where he fell in love with bees. It was, in his words, “a tangled path that blossomed and bloomed.” He now owns approximately 200 hives, which he manages with his assistant Christian Hoadley, a graduate student in Forestry at UGA. In addition to selling bees and honey, Harris teaches a course for beginning beekeepers at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia in Athens and the Smith-Gilbert Gardens in Kennesaw one Saturday a month from December to June, with one more class in late summer to show his students how to get their hives ready for winter.

“May and June is when people want to get bees, and that’s the end of the nectar flow,” says Harris. “Starting classes in December teaches people to be prepared and have equipment ready in the spring, and have the bees ready when the cold weather arrives.” His experience has shown him being unprepared leads new beekeepers to failed hives and lost enthusiasm. “There’s room for anybody who wants to do it, but you have to have passion.”

When Harris explains the inner-workings of the bee community, it’s no wonder he has passion. Bees are fascinating creatures, especially when he talks about them. There’s the biological side, like the queen bee having the power to lay unfertilized (male) or fertilized (female) eggs on command, since males are only required for springtime mating and year-round females handle all the other jobs. And there’s the way the bees communicate with the rest of the hive, like the dance of the honey bee.

“Scout bees come back to the nest and tell the other foragers where the pollen and nectar is. It’s a dance that they do, and the motions have significance in regard to direction, distance and quality,” says Harris. “It’s an amazing thing. They do a little figure eight, and it’s called a wagged-tail dance. And the angle to vertical that their dance occurs gives direction. So, if it’s perfectly vertical, what they’re telling the audience is you go out of the entrance of the hive, look directly at the sun and go toward the sun. If the direction of the eight is down, they’re telling the audience go out and look at the sun and go the other way. Or if it’s 30 degrees to the right, go 30 degrees right. The speed that they travel this figure eight tells them how far it is. The faster they go, the closer it is. And then the vibration of their abdomen, which is why they call it a wag-tail dance, the vigor tells the quality.”

In addition to an early spring speeding up his schedule by three weeks, this past mild winter also presented Harris with some interesting challenges. “Bees flew most of the winter, so they consumed a lot more honey. I bought two tons of sugar last year that I would not ordinarily buy, just to keep them alive all winter long.” On the other hand, he continues, “A cold winter is physically hard on bees, so coming out of a hard winter, it’s not uncommon to have a 10 or 15 percent loss. And I probably had a 5 percent loss this year, so it balanced out.”

But going to the store for two tons of 25-pound bags of sugar was a first-time fluke in his 10-year beekeeping career.

“As a beekeeper, it’s our task to encourage their hoarding instinct so they’ll put up more than they need, and we can take some and leave some,” says Harris. “You give them room to put it or you give them wax combs. If they have empty wax combs, they have this instinct to fill them. Another thing you do is try to keep them from swarming. In the spring, they’ll want to swarm; it’s their instinct.

“There are a gazillion different techniques (to prevent swarming), most of which keep beekeepers pretty busy in the spring,” says Harris. “You can remove the queen, and they’ll suddenly be queenless, and they’ll start making emergency queens. You interrupt the brood cycle—that just sets them back. You can also give them more space. If they’re really crowded and congested, they’re more likely to swarm. So, you’re constantly trying to make sure they have space without giving them too much. If you have too much space, they can become demoralized. It’s like a lot of people I know: if you give them too many jobs, they don’t know where to start and they’ll quit doing anything. Well, bees are kinda the same way. You give them all these empty boxes, they’re like, uhhh, they don’t do a thing.”

Newer techniques with DNA research, like at the UGA Bee Lab headed by his friend, entomologist Jennifer Berry, have resulted in huge leaps in bee behavior and parasitic pressure studies. “It’s that kind of stuff that we didn’t know five years ago that may give clues to some of the massive bee failures,” says Harris.

But for the rest of the community, it’s about the honey.

“I like to put light honey and dark honey on the table,” says Harris about his Athens Farmers Market stand. “It’s good for conversation. I’d like people to think about what they’re buying—that it’s not that homogenized stuff that they see at the grocery store that’s all the same. Different things bloom, and different shades result and different flavors result.”

Grocery store honey “has been pressure filtered, so they’ve gotten all the pollen out of it. It’s been heated hot enough that any of the proteins or enzymes or anything else of consequence are denatured. And if it’s made in this country, 90 percent is clover honey. Which is not bad if you like clover honey, but it’s kinda like a McDonald’s thing. It tastes the same no matter where you get it, whereas real honeys have a diverse range of flavors.”

So, how is honey made?

“The moment a forager ingests nectar from a flower, and she’s carrying it back to the hive,” explains Harris, “she’s actually adding enzymes to it at the same time. She transfers that to one of the house bees at the door so she can go forage again, and when it hits that second bee’s stomach, she continues to add those enzymes. They put that nectar in cells, and they move air around those cells to reduce the moisture content. So, it’s a team effort.”

And in the beekeeping world, Harris is definitely a team player.

For more information on Dan Harris and Booger Hill Bee Company, visit www.boogerhillbee.com.