When a swarm is brewing in your neighborhood, who you gonna call?
If you’re Rocky Mount Academy, the answer is one of your eighth-graders, who also happens to be one of the state’s youngest certified beekeepers.
A honeybee horde numbering in the thousands took over the school’s interior outdoor courtyard around 10:30 a.m. on March 15. That’s when Katelyn Boone, 13, an RMA student from Sandy Cross, and her aunt Sherry Boone got involved.
“The school called and said they had a swarm, and wanted to know if I could bring Katelyn’s equipment, and could we get the bees,” Sherry Boone said. “And so I frantically grabbed all the essentials, suits, equipment boxes. … My main concern was, where were these bees? A lot of times when they swarm, they’re really high up in a tree. That’s what I was worried about, that there was going to be a swarm there, but they were going to be so high, and dangerous for us to get them. But once I got here, Katelyn showed me where they were” — at eye level and centered around some shrubbery, it turns out.
“They could not have been in a better spot.”
The bee busters surmise that the queen in a nearby hive had run out of space to lay eggs. In such a case, half the hive will migrate away, taking the queen with them, and leaving the remaining garrison to create a new queen. The self-displaced half swarms at a given location — in this case the RMA courtyard — while “scout bees” look for a permanent home.
Katelyn said the gathering operation started around 12:30 p.m. The bulk of it was completed in about 15 minutes, once she was able to locate and isolate the queen bee in a box; the queen produces pheromones that attract the other bees.
“Basically you just want to find the queen, and have the queen in a box, and they’ll just march right in,” she said.
“Like little soldiers,” Sherry Boone added. “It was amazing.”
The captured bees have been relocated to the Boones’ apiary.
Katelyn said she wasn’t stung while getting the buzzing multitude under control.
“In the swarms, they have nothing to protect, so they’re usually pretty docile,” she said.
Although this was the first swarm she’s had to deal with, Katelyn has been raising and caring for bees since she was 9.
“One day I was sitting in my bed, and I asked my dad for a dog, and he said no,” she said.
It turns out the family already had two of those, so Katelyn pivoted from pooches.
“I think I had seen something about beekeeping somewhere, and I [thought], just to try it for fun, let me see if he’ll let me do it,” she recalled.
She enlisted the involvement of her aunt, who told her, “only if we learn for a year,” Katelyn said.
“A lot of people just jump into it; they have all their equipment; they have all their stuff; and then they get out there, and they decide they don’t want it anymore,” she said. “So that’s why we said we would learn for a year before we did it, to make sure that it was something that we wanted to stick with.”
The two joined the nearby Wilson County Beekeepers Association to bone up. After a year’s study, they got the necessary equipment, and Sapony Creek Apiaries, near West Mount, gifted her a “nuc,” a mini established hive that draws its name from “nucleus.”
At 12, after passing a test and completing a clinical evaluation, Katelyn became one of the state’s youngest certified beekeepers.
“It takes a lot of time and effort, you have to love it, but it’s worth it in the end,” Katelyn said. “It’s really interesting to see from where it began to now and getting honey, now you can see where the honey comes from. It’s very interesting to see the process, because they’re very smart. They’re organized, they know what they’re doing. You just have to manage them.”
“Managing them” includes looking out for mites that can cause wing damage to the bees or bring diseases into the hive, she said. Getting stung is rare but does happen, she said.
“It really depends on the queen, whether she’s aggressive or calm,” Katelyn said. “Usually, when you get stung, it’s your fault because they don’t want to sting you, because they die when they sting. … So usually when you get stung, it’s because you didn’t zip your veil up all the way, or you bend over and the suit gets too tight, and she can sting you through there. If you kill a bee, it emits a pheromone that smells like bananas, and it lets the other bees know that something is wrong, and they’ll get more aggressive.”
That’s when beekeepers use a smoker to mask the banana pheromone and calm the bees, she said.
Katelyn lives with parents Brooks and Stephanie Boone and siblings Nathan, 12; Briley, 10; and Brenna, 9. She has four established hives, she said.
What do the other Boone children think of her beekeeping operation?
“They’re just there for the harvest,” Katelyn joked.
While not keeping bees, she attends RMA and she’s appearing in a school-friendly version of the musical “Grease.” She also plays softball and sings in the Tar River Chorus.
Beth Murphy, head of school at RMA, wasn’t surprised by Katelyn’s swarm-wrangling heroics.
“What you see is what you get; she is mature beyond her years,” Murphy said. “And when she takes on a responsibility or project or interest, she sees it through right until the end.”
Honeybees are a vital part of the ecosystem. About one-third of all food consumed by humans requires insect pollination, and honeybees do the majority of this work, according to a study by Clemson University. Honeybees pollinate $15 billion in crops yearly in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports.
However, bee colonies are under pressure, declining by about 40 percent annually, according to the USDA, largely due to pesticides, exposure to mites and a decline in food sources due to overdevelopment.
“If you can’t be a beekeeper, at least plant some plants or flowers for the bees,” Sherry Boone said.
Katelyn’s advice to aspiring beekeepers is, “Definitely join a club. There are so many people who are willing to help you, and you just have to give them a call. So many people want to see you succeed and expand the beekeeping community. You can’t learn it all off YouTube.”
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