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Beekeeper Enjoys Sweet Rewards

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By STEPHEN HAMMILL, The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 29, 2007

KEYSTONE - Jim Lee, 80, has been working with bees for 35 years. He can't recall the number of times he has been stung.

"More than anybody could count," he said.

Lee keeps about 50 hives at Cee Bee's Citrus at 16907 Boy Scout Road, a 300-acre, family-owned grove near his home.

"They're like his kids," said Mike Dennison, manager of Cee Bee's Citrus. "He takes really good care of them."

"It's pretty much all he does," added the grove's business manager, Brent Harmon.

Born in Jacksonville, Lee moved to the Odessa area at the age of 2. Minus a tour of duty in World War II, he has lived in northwest Hillsborough since.

As a kid, his dad kept hogs and turkeys while Lee raised crickets.

"I couldn't sell them, though, so I turned them loose," he said. At 16 he joined the Merchant Marine, serving four years in the war. In 1947 he settled in Lutz with his first wife.

After a stint flying airplanes - the hobby proved too expensive - Lee bought his first box of bees.

"I just loved to mess with the bees," he said. "Sometimes I got stung up real bad, but it's not the worst thing."

In his wife's last few years before she died in 2005, he devoted his attention to her.

Dennison has known Lee for most of his life - "Since I was 15 years old," Dennison said. "His wife got sick, and he quit beekeeping for a long time, and now he's back into it."

The grove needed somebody to work on the honey operation. To Lee, it seemed like the perfect situation.

"This is a beautiful grove," Lee said. "It makes it fun to come here."

Though retired, he treats the hives as a full-time job. During the hectic periods he tends to the bees every day.

At peak time he'll keep up to 80 hives with 20 active supers. A super is the traylike part of the hive where honey is stored and produced. Twenty supers will produce a 55-gallon drum of honey a year.

The average hive has 50,000 or more bees. Each hive contains one queen that can lay 2,000 eggs a day.

The male bees, the drones, are there only to mate with the queen. When wintertime comes, the worker bees, all female, carry the drones out of the hive, leaving them to die.

"They don't need him anymore, believe it or not," Lee said. "I guess it's good while it lasts."

He has to be vigilant. Hive beetles are a concern. Like "small armored tanks," if left unchecked the parasites can kill off a colony.

"They don't take too long to die if something goes wrong," he said. "You learn a lot from just watching them work."

Lee typically works in shirt-sleeves and bare hands. Sometimes he forgets to wear a protective veil.

Gladys Lee, his current wife and assistant, fills a smoker with burning pine needles in preparation for Lee's trek into one of the newer hive boxes. "That calms the bees down," she said. "If you don't have that, you're in bad luck."

"There is no way in the world I'd walk right up there like he does," Dennison said.

Dennison recalled how three weeks ago, Lee moved a box that was supposed to be screened so the bees couldn't get out.

"It wasn't," Lee said.

Dennison continued: "Well, once he got it in his hands, there was no letting it go. He had to set it where it had to be."

Lee was stung more than 40 times that day. He works slowly and deliberately.

"You can tell he cares about what he's doing," Dennison said. "I've seen guys throw the boxes around and the bees fly all over the place."

The bees are free to feed on wildflowers planted especially for them by Dennison, who is often asked why he sacrifices precious real estate to plant otherwise useless flowers. "The honey is only as good as the flowers they can feed on," he said. "Some people think that's crazy, but it makes a difference."

The grove sells the honey in 16-ounce and half-gallon jugs, alongside baskets of grapefruits, oranges and tangerines. Most of the orders come from the grove's Web site.

Dennison hopes to start selling more honey now that the grove's storefront has opened to the public.

"We'll see what kind of walk-in traffic we get," he said.

Cee Bee's Citrus is online at www.ceebeescitrus.com.

Reporter Stephen Hammill can be reached at (813) 865-1523 or shammill@tampatrib.com.

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