Exploring all that goes into locally produced honey seemed like a fine idea. But when it came time to observe the workings of Fern Hill Apiary in Marshall, a stinging reality set in.
Bees. Lots of bees.
My fears soon abated, however, probably because of owner Michael Rininger’s calm reassurances that the creatures weren’t “interested” in us. That I was wearing long white jeans, a white long-sleeve shirt buttoned up to my chin and a protective veil helped, too. Though Rininger’s wife, Donielle, had advised me to wear head-to-toe white — bees aren’t attracted to the color, she explained — her husband greeted me in green shorts and a T-shirt. Gloveless.
“I’ve been stung so many times, I hardly even notice now,” he shrugged.
Barely an hour after arriving at Fern Hill on a 90-degree day in June, I poked my naked index finger into a wooden frame half-covered with busy bees, breaking through a pure white, ultra-thin layer of fresh beeswax to return with a dollop of pale golden, delicately floral honey. Pleasant, not in the least bitter or cloyingly sweet. It doesn’t get much fresher than that.
The Riningers, both in their early 40s, describe themselves as hobbyist beekeepers. He’s a full-time telephone technician and installer. She works part-time for an association management firm and tends the couple’s children: Wade, 9, and Jake, 6.
“Michael does most of the beekeeping, and I do the boy-keeping,” she jokes.
Interested in bees since he was a boy, Rininger bought his first three colonies in 2004. Now he and his wife maintain 17 colonies: a dozen on their five-acre property and five others placed with friends around Fauquier County. That way, if bears wipe out the Fern Hill colonies, they have others from which to rebuild.
Before heading to the colonies, Michael Rininger points out the basics. First, he notes that there are two ways to acquire bees. You can buy packages that include three pounds of random bees (about 10,000), sugar syrup and a random queen, but he prefers the other approach — getting miniature working colonies from a local producer — because the bees are acclimated to local conditions and to each other.
Rininger advocates raising bees naturally, meaning he doesn’t use chemicals, such as miticides. Even so, “there’s no such thing as ‘organic’ honey,” he says. “We don’ t use any chemicals in our colonies, but bees forage. Who knows what the bees are getting at the neighbors’?”
In Rininger’s opinion, the fact that bees forage within a three-mile radius of their colony means that most honey would rightly be deemed wildflower honey, as Fern Hill’s is, unless producers have so much land planted with one nectar source (a little over 8,000 acres’ worth, he estimates) that they can know a honey’s precise provenance.
The taste of wildflower honey changes from year to year, depending on climate conditions and the nectar flows of the various flora that endow a honey with a distinctive imprimatur. Donielle counts black locust, clover, autumn olive, dandelion, chicory, Joe-Pye weed and tulip poplar among the plants that influence their honey’s flavor profile.
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