A honey of a hobby

Gerry Walsh's fascination with bees is all the buzz at Stegman & Company

member spotlight

Gerald A. Walsh
Supervisor, Stegman & Company

By Bill Sheridan
MACPA Electronic Communications Manager

Gerry Walsh's hobby isn't for the birds. The bees sure love it, though.

With some enthusiastic help from his family, the Stegman & Company supervisor shares his three-acre home in West Friendship with nearly 95,000 bees, the occupants of three hives he established when he took up beekeeping last year.

Like any hobby, the bees help Walsh relax after a long day at the office, but they're more than mere stress relievers. They're also one family's small contribution in a nationwide effort to replenish a honeybee population that had dwindled in recent years. And they've brought the Walsh family closer together in the process.

Most of all, he said, they're a never-ending source of fascination.

"The thing about bees is there's so much to learn," said Walsh, 43. "And there's research going on all the time, so new things are continually being discovered. Even if you've been a beekeeper for 20 years, you can still meet with other beekeepers, read articles, learn a lot and continue to grow — and then teach others, too."

Walsh's education began in April 2002. He and his wife Doris, a horticulturist, had been interested in bees for years, but when their son Ben expressed an interest as well, they decided to take the plunge.

Doris and Ben took a series of how-to classes presented last spring by the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association. Gerry, who was buried under a pile of tax season work at the time, couldn't attend but read the course materials and studied with his family in his spare time at home.

When the busy season ended and the bees they had ordered earlier arrived, the Walshes were ready. It didn't take them long to realize they had picked the right hobby.

"We wanted a way that we could connect with nature," Walsh said. "I spend a lot of time in the office and work a lot of long hours, and I like to come home and do something that allows me to enjoy the property that we have. And the nice thing about bees is that you can choose to spend as much or as little time as you like with them. We try to monitor our bees pretty frequently because we really enjoy going in and watching the progress of the hive."

After spending their first year on the Walsh property establishing their hives and increasing their numbers, the bees now are ready to produce a bumper crop of honey. Walsh said he expects to extract up to 100 pounds of honey this year. He also hopes to extract enough wax for his family to learn how to make candles.

Perhaps the bees' most important job, though, is pollination. The importance of that task has been magnified in recent years by a drastic reduction in America's honeybee population, caused by microscopic mites that invade the bee's breathing tubes. By some estimates, up to 90 percent of the nation's wild honeybees had disappeared by the summer of 1996. And since bees pollinate an estimated $10 billion worth of crops a year, the decimated bee population posed serious problems for the nation's farms and economy.

Walsh's three hives certainly haven't solved the nation's bee shortage, but they have provided adequate pollination for his family's gardens and others in a three-mile radius around his property. And with the number of hobbyist beekeepers growing across the country, domesticated bees like Walsh's arguably have become more important to pollination than wild honeybees.

Not that he intends to make a job out of it.

"I don't see myself going commercial," Walsh said. "I think we'll end up expanding a little bit, but if you get beyond eight or 10 hives, it becomes work."

For now, he's enjoying his hobby — the relaxation, the connection it gives him to nature, and especially the time it allows him to spend with his family. Both of the Walsh children — 13-year-old Ben and 11-year-old Hilary — share their parents' enthusiasm. Though she was initially apprehensive about the new hobby, Hilary has been drawn into the family's conversations and projects. She now is looking forward to making candles from the wax that the bees produce. Meanwhile, Ben built the boxes that hold the hives and won a prize at the Howard County Fair for a bee-related display he put together.

"He has really gone gangbusters," Walsh said of his son. "It's really something he has embraced. It's almost a part of his identity and it's something he can be an expert in. It's been exciting because it's given us some common activities that we can do together."

That makes Walsh's hobby one sweet deal, indeed.

Contact this Author: < William Sheridan > bill@macpa.org

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