Near the town of Rodeo deep in southwestern New Mexico, only miles from the Mexican border, Dan Shultis rides herd on 1,000 hives filled with . . .
Story by Marjorie Lilly
Photos by Bob Cook
The stainless-steel counter of the "decapper," which scrapes the wax off honeycomb cells, is slathered with honey. There are patches of honey on everything. The soles of your shoes pick up honey from the floor. Harriet Shultis apologizes that she can't shake hands because her hands are all gooey.
This is the "honey room" where Rodeo Honey has been processed by Dan and Harriet Shultis for about three decades.
Rodeo Honey is organic and often "raw and unfiltered," as honey enthusiasts prefer it. It's especially free of chemicals because of the minimal pollution level in Rodeo -- a town of about 100 people tucked away in New Mexico's bootheel between two craggy mountain ranges: the Peloncillos of New Mexico and the Chiricahua range in Arizona.
"It's one of the cleanest products around," according to Dan.
Their honey is rich in minerals, too, because of the desert soil. "It's virgin soil, broken down from rocks," according to Dan. "And because of the lack of rain, there's less bleaching."
It's the end of last May and the Shultises are in the midst of their largest honey flow of the year. Mesquite bushes across southwestern New Mexico are putting out their flowers. Dan and Harriet's bees have been busy, filling their combs with sweet pollen from the mesquite flowers.
Honey production worldwide is a multi-million dollar business. China produces about 400 million pounds a year, the U.S. produces half that, and Argentina and Mexico follow close behind.
Dan and Harriet process honey on a micro-scale. They work in a dark, cave-like room in the house that Dan built himself in the 1970s from local rocks. Today's end product collects in several white 5-gallon buckets on the floor.
Their bees produce about 18 different kinds of honey, representing the scents and textures of the southwestern New Mexico landscape. There is yellow sage, cat-claw, rabbit bush, summer flowers, mountain aster, desert buckwheat and burro weed in addition to mesquite.
Mesquite produces a light and popular honey but the Shultises prefer the darker kinds that have a spicy flavor, as Dan puts it.
But the bees are busy with mesquite now. Dan went out in the morning with his bee smoker fuming in the back of his pick-up truck to bring in boxes of honeycomb for processing in the honey room.
The bees were surprisingly compliant as he tranquilized them with the smoke and brushed them off the "frames" that hold the combs. He then brought the heavy frames laden with honey to the honey room.
Harriet and Missy Knapp, their assistant, pass the combs through the decapper (their word for what is most commonly called an "uncapper"). They insert the opened combs into eight slots arranged in a circle in an extracting machine, which removes their honey.
The extractor rocks noisily back and forth until Missy repositions the frames to get them in balance. As the extractor spins, the honey gets sucked out by centrifugal force. "It's almost like cotton candy," says Missy, who doubles as the driver of their distributing truck.
The honey flies out of the frames and hits the metal sides of the extractor, then drizzles down until it gets funneled into the plastic buckets below the machine. It's as simple as that.
Bees in Good Times and Bad
During the 1980s, income from the honey business supported the family, even sending their three kids to college. But now, during the prolonged drought, Dan is maintaining his roughly 1,000 hives mostly for the love of it and makes his living doing other things.
They didn't come to Rodeo to make money. They originally bought a 5,000 acre ranch dirt cheap to "live off the land," as so many did in the 1970s. The Shultises did so with a passion and rare success.
They raised chickens, cows, grew their own vegetables, bought cast-off jumbo and broken beans by the truckload, shot all kinds of animals to eat -- rattlesnakes, jackrabbits, coyotes, hawks. Dan says they only spent about $3 a month on food. They also got eight or ten beehives from a woman in town, Vivian Martin.
When the bee business got rolling after a few years, they had their most successful seasons. "When you get a honey flow going, it's for six weeks, and you're on a high. You can't describe it," says Dan. "It's amazing -- it's the power, and the amount of work the bees do, and the tons and tons of stuff they produce."
With a Hint of Danger for Good Measure
Dan loves beekeeping in Rodeo because he can work in the middle of nowhere. "You're out in places where there are no roads or telephones," he says. "You can sit around and no one's looking over your shoulder." To reach all his hives he has to drive 30 miles in his truck.
Tall and heavy, with a beard and thick eyebrows that swirl upward, Dan is half Norwegian and could have just stepped out of a Norse saga.
He wears a beekeeper's helmet and netting, and white clothes because, as Harriet claims, dark clothing evokes the image of a bear to bees and they may attack. Holes in Dan's clothes are covered with duct tape.
He says his bees recognize him because of the smell of smoke on him. The Shultises' bees are 30%-50% Africanized, as are most bees in the southwest now. But Dan, like some bee experts, thinks their danger is blown out of proportion by the press.
He says they're usually gentle, but have a chemical -- called an "alarm pheromone" -- that makes them more likely to attack if provoked.
He recognizes the danger in his work, though. He says when he came back late from the hives recently, "Harriet put supper on hold and went out with the truck looking for me." He admits to getting a rush from this element of this job.
Held Together by a Do-It-Yourself Philosophy
As a compulsive builder, Dan likes "trying to get new ways to do things" in raising bees. He builds his own hives from scrap wood, which he doesn't paint due to the almost non-existent humidity in the desert.
He says the instruction literature he uses says in big letters "DO NOT MAKE YOUR OWN EQUIPMENT." But, he adds, "I make equipment that's better. I'm a practical beekeeper," he proclaims. "I do what works."
He's invented his own style of pollen trap and crafts his own wooden frames. Store-bought frames have a habit of falling apart, he says, but "I can swing my kids around on [his own frames]." The frames weigh from as few as two to as many as 12 pounds. Tending the hives requires muscle -- "It's hard work," Dan says.
Shultis likes the physical part of beekeeping. One of his role models is his Norwegian grandfather, who was a carpenter until he was 95 and died when he was 107.
He also loves the mental challenge of beekeeping. He estimates there is "four times more literature on bees than on any other animal--than chickens, cows, or pigs." Bees display a fascinating collective intelligence as they build their combs, reproduce, and maintain their colonies, he says.
And the Mysteries of the Bees
As zoologists with degrees from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, both Dan and his wife like beekeeping because it engages their intellect. "There are mysteries," Dan smiles confidingly.
One of the mysteries is the way worker bees learn to process nectar into thick honey with no one teaching them. It is somehow built into their system, as neither parent -- the queen and the drones -- make honey.
The nectar, made mostly of water, is put in the comb cells and enzymes are added to it. The bees then evaporate the water by collectively fanning the nectar with their wings. "At night when you go out there, it sounds like an airplane getting ready to take off," says Dan.
Worker bees also fan to keep the hive warm in winter and cool in the intense summer heat. To cool the hives, bees "spread water all over every surface," Dan says, and then beat their wings.
"Sometimes deer or coons knock over the water barrels and the hive will melt, leaving wax and honey all over the ground." He loses a few hives every year this way.
He loses hives to bears, too, which eat the bee larvae (and not so much the honey, as is commonly thought) and to Mexican border crossers, who Dan guesses are coming more and more from urban areas and "aren't as careful as the old farm people."
Rodeo Honey, Pollen and Wax Combs
Herbicides and pesticides also take their toll on the hives when he puts them on some of his neighbors' land to pollinate their crops or fruit trees. Dan has kept his hives as free of chemicals as he could since the beginning. Organic honey producers and those who keep hives to pollinate crops generally are separate breeds of beekeepers.
The Shultises sell pollen, which Dan thinks is a food that could "save the world" because of its high level of protein, carbohydrates and vitamins, to a distributor in Phoenix. Because of its high mineral content, a woman in Hachita once bought some for her racehorses.
Rodeo Honey also sells comb honey. Older people like it, Harriet says, because "it's like the old days," when New Mexicans used to get a comb in their honey jars.
Some of their income comes from the things Harriet makes from beeswax, like taper candles, votives, a "fertility goddess" that has been a best-seller, a clown and a Christmas angel.
With their philosophy of self-reliance and libertarianism, the Shultises home-schooled all three adopted kids. Like a lot of people in rural New Mexico, he and Harriet like living away from cities and government.
To live his philosophy out, Dan does a lot of what he calls "scavenging." He says neighbors will say, "We'll let you have this building, you can do something with it." And he does. "We heat this house, and do all of our cooking on scrap wood."
Over the years they have sold off all but 160 acres of their land, sometimes building houses on the lots. Dan created a lumberyard in Rodeo and sold it. He'll take a trailer, fix it and sell it, or take a tree down for someone in town.
A Passion for Independence
Dan revels in his independence, living by his motto, 'You can't afford to have a job.' He says. "If you have a job that pays $15 or $20 an hour, you're locked in."
True to their philosophy, they still wear only used clothes and drink water from mason jars at their kitchen table. After all these years, they still feel uncomfortable eating food from a store. "It's hard to eat it," says Dan.
And he still tends his 1,000 or so hives. He admits wryly that he can do this during a drought because "I'm the only one that doesn't need the money."
At age 60, Dan has no plans right now to rein in his energy. He says, with what may be a touch of bravado, "I'm going to keep raising bees until they're all gone."
Want to Know More About Bee-Keeping?
Here are three books that will give you a good start on the mysteries of beekeeping.
The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture: An Encyclopedia of Beekeeping. By Roger Morse, A.I Root Company, 1990. An omnibus practical handbook that has been through forty editions. Dan Shultis swears by it.
The Honey Bee. By James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Scientific American Library, 1988. A surprisingly readable text on the theoretical side of bee behavior by experienced science writers. Includes a discussion of bee dances and other issues of bee communication and perception.
The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men. By William Longgood. A beautifully written book of introspective essays on beekeeping and bee behavior with a lot of colorful bee lore.
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