Blog > Hear What All the Buzz is about in Camarillo with Commercial Beekeeper Larry Pender
Hear What All the Buzz is about in Camarillo with Commercial Beekeeper Larry Pender
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Larry Pender, owner of Jubilee HoneyBee Corporation, sits down with Paul Ward and shares his over 20 years of beekeeping experience. In this episode, discover why Larry drove his hives almost 2,000 miles to Minnesota- for three summers – as well as uncover what makes for a good flow of honey. Listeners may be surprised to learn that it’s not just honey that supports Jubilee HoneyBee’s six full time employees!
Curious about starting your own backyard honey bee operation? Larry assures us it’s very possible and hives are available for purchase as well as bees by the pound. What are specialty honeys and why are there so many in California? What is the biggest threat to the honeybee and can it be stopped? You’ll have to listen to find out!
Buzz, business, and bees – oh my!
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TRANSCRIPT: Hear What All the Buzz is about in Camarillo with
Commercial Beekeeper Larry Pender
Paul Ward:
Hi everyone. It’s Paul Ward here and welcome to another edition of Farm Talk. I’m very excited today. We’re gonna be talking about honeybees and making honey here in Ventura county. Our guest is Larry Pender with a Jubilee Honey. Welcome to the show.
Larry Pender:
Good morning. Thank you for inviting me on this is going to be an exciting day. You probably got some questions for me that I haven’t prepared for, but that is okay.
Paul Ward:
It’s all part of the fun. And of course we wanna thank our sponsors, The Escrow Hub and The Money Store. Thank you so much. So Larry, tell us, how did you get into beekeeping?
Larry Pender:
Very interesting story. When I was about 11 years old, my dad; my parents owned a fish market and seafood business in Santa Barbara and he liked bees and wanted to buy a few beehives. When I was about 11, he bought five beehives from a guy as a little side hobby. And by the time I was 16, he had about 300 beehives as a very busy side hobby in Santa Barbara and it was fun for him. It was a little diversion from typical business. So I went out with him and we collected swarms and we put bees in beehives and it was a nice little side business. But when my parents had some challenges with that business in Santa Barbara. If anyone remembers there used to be a freeway that went through Santa Barbara that had four stop lights on it. When they went through the process of limiting those stop lights, it affected my parents’ business.
Paul Ward:
Okay.
Larry Pender:
So when my dad was in his early fifties, he actually transitioned from a little part-time beekeeping business. He and his brother bought another commercial beekeeping business out in the Ojai Valley area. So I had worked along with him over the years and different things when I was between positions or something. So in about 2002 my wife and I took a bunch of money outta our savings account and started buying beehive equipment. I did not go into business with my dad. I started a separate business, but we partnered on a lot of projects together at that time. It was an adventure. It was very interesting and it was a good suggestion that my dad made. A mutual friend that we knew had a large beekeeping operation between Minnesota and California at the time and he suggests, “Hey, that friend, Bruce needs some help in the wintertime. Why don’t you go work along with him and make a few dollars too as you’re building your business and get some experience with a large commercial migratory operation.”
Paul Ward:
So you went to Minnesota for a while?
Larry Pender:
Over three summers, I went to Minnesota in the summer. In fact, my daughter was, let’s see, she was born in 2002. So the summer of 2002, when she was about six months old, we drove across the country. We spent a summer in Minnesota so you learn a few things driving out to Northern Minnesota. For anyone that’s ever seen the movie Grumpy Old Men.
Paul Ward:
Yep.
Larry Pender:
You will find out it is a documentary, it is not fiction. It is a different world out there. (laughter)
Paul Ward:
That’s funny.
Larry Pender:
When they say, “Let’s meet out on the Ridge,” you find out that means the road goes about two feet, cuz it is very flat. Northern Minnesota. There are no lakes. There’s one big one, Lake of the Woods up there. But over the three different summers I spent up there between that I took some of my bees up there one year and made some honey with them. When you’re building a business and have no initial cash flow coming in, it was good to work with him part-time to make sure I didn’t starve and got some good guidance.
Paul Ward:
So when you and your wife took out a loan or some money out of your savings, I imagine you bought a few boxes, right? Bee boxes. And we’re sitting here amongst hundreds, if not thousands of boxes right now at the bees flying around. So how did that, how did that progress? I mean, you bought a few and now you’ve got…
Larry Bender:
Well, (when) we started out, I bought 144 beehives from a guy out of the Fresno area. Flies just love me, see, it’s because of the honey I’m sweet ! They’re attracted to me. So I’m gonna have to deal with that. We started out, bought about 144 beehives and then we split them up over next year and added more beehives. Then we found places where we made honey, did a little bit of business, found a place to rent them, to make some money from the almond pollination and made some honey- then expanded a little bit more. Jjust step by step over the years. That’s why for the first couple years I worked along with this gentleman, Bruce, to make sure I paid the bills as we built our numbers up. Now, currently, we have an operation where we run around 6,000 beehives.
Paul Ward:
Wow!
Larry Pender:
We’ve got six full time guys and our business is different than it was originally. Originally I focused very much on the honey production and a little bit on the almond pollination, cuz that’s a good revenue source.
Paul Ward:
So for folks that don’t understand, explain how that works. I mean, you’re making money on honey, right? But you’re also helping local farmers pollinate their orchards. They call you and say, “Hey Larry, I need X number of boxes. I’ve got so many acres,” or do you tell them how many boxes they should use or kind of a combination.
Larry Pender:
Correct. I’ll step back a little bit. One of the things I noticed about 20 years ago, as we were building our B business, the honey production is very cyclical and it’s based on if California gets good rainfall then we get good honey flows. But as everyone is well aware of, California in the last 10 years has been on the dryer side. So it is harder and harder to make consistent honey flows here. What we originally started doing to counteract that; was about 15 years ago we started going to Idaho in the summertime. We take our beehives up there and make some honey in the summer and travel back and forth. What I’ve done here in Ventura county and Santa Barbara county is focus on the crop pollination. The basics of crop pollination is you have flowers, male and female, you need a vector to move the pollen between the two sources and what the bees are really good at are, well, I’ll back up a second…
The honeybee itself is not the best pollinator; Bumble bees. There are some little flies that are really good pollinators, but what the honeybee is, it’s the best pollinator we can control where we put it on a farm. Like down here on the Guadalasca Ranch, they grow a lot of blueberries. Right now they have some, a small bit of their acreage. That’s in bloom with the blueberries. So we put about 80 beehives on those small blocks. Now come October, November, and December the whole orchard, the whole 120 acres or more will go into bloom. So we’ll have 250 beehives out there at that time. They pay us to manage the beehives, to have them on that crop. We do a lot of blackberries, a lot of raspberries and the bees themselves- we don’t guarantee to the farmer that they’re gonna visit their flowers.
Paul Ward:
Sure. There’s no way to force the bee to go where you want.
Larry Bender:
We make the best effort. And then there’s some side benefits of having the bees there. It’s not just the flowers. There’s something about the activity of the bees around the flowers. It goes back to a saying that I’ve always told my kids and they’re probably tired of hearing it, but, “Action creates action.” The action of the bees, the insect going around and through the plants, does something to strengthen the plants. And so what we’ve learned with a lot of pollination is that instead of waiting for the right time, when the flowers start blooming to deliver the bees, we like to deliver three or four weeks before that. They find that their production is a lot better.
Larry Bender:
In addition to that, when you have a berry that has all those little (berries), for all you people out there, you see a strawberry, a raspberry blackberry, there are all those small little areas. That means they need a lot of pollination. But one of the things that also happens with those plants is if there’s too much moisture in the ground, they tend to exude more nectar. And if that nectar sits on the outside of the berry, a mold happens here in our climate because the berries are grown in those hoop houses, right, where they’re typically about 20 degrees warmer than outside temperature and double the humidity. So it turns into a thing called, “City mold,” which they get rejected. Sometimes the farm’s gonna have a 30 or 40% rejection rate with that.
Paul Ward:
Oh really?
Larry Bender:
But by having the bees in there, the bees will actually go up and drink up that syrup and it gives them a better quality crop.
Paul Ward:
That’s different from pollination?
Larry Bender:
That’s different from pollination. In addition to the pollination. So they get a quality fruit. Now what I do know in studies with the blueberries is they find that the more bees visit the flowers, the thicker, the skin and the longer their shelf life is.
You know, Paul, one of the interesting things is when you- not at our overall business, what we do is we look at the beehive itself, it is fascinating how they operate. And two basic things that the bees do is they are a biological unit. There’s a queen bee inside and her job is to lay eggs. She’ll lay about 2000 eggs every day and the population of beehives typically in January will be the lowest. It’ll increase during the summertime and go back down in the fall time. It’s the normal ebbs and flows, but the bees need two main resources to live on. They need a protein source, which is the pollen and they collect it from the flowers. So when they go out and visit these flowers, which we’re called to pollinate, they’re for their own selfish purpose. They want that food. And that protein source is what they feed to their young. Then they also collect the nectar from the flowers, which that’s like for us, our carbohydrate. The extra nectar that they bring in, they process, add some enzymes to it and then dehydrate it to turn it into honey. Cuz once that honey is stored in their hives, it’ll never go bad.
Paul Ward:
Okay.
Larry Bender:
So they do that to have food in the future.
Paul Ward:
Gotcha. Of course. We’re, of course, taking that for our own.
Larry Bender:
Absolutely. Because it’s good! I mean, it is really good stuff! So the operation, we call it, a “Biological Unit.” There’s the queen bee and all the worker bees. They take some from when the queen lays the eggs to when they hatch out is about three weeks for new bees. So there’s always a rotation of bees. And the last thing, if anyone’s ever watched The Bee Movie, it’s not an exact depiction, but I remember the one scene where they’re showing all the jobs that the bees do from crud cleaners to collectors and protectors. Each of the bees goes through their life cycle and does one of those jobs. The last thing in their job cycle is to be a field bee, which they go out of the hive and go collect things.
Paul Ward:
So their job changes over time or they’re born…..?
Larry Bender:
Their job changes over time. And so that’s why being a field bee is the last thing you’ll see. So when you see a beehive and you see the bees flying out, it’s about 5 to 8% of that hive that will be out collecting.
Paul Ward:
Those are the older bees?
Larry Bender:
The older bees. So if you see 2000 of those bees flying inside and out, that means there’s 50 or 60,000 beehives in that nest. So it’s a constant rotation.
Paul Ward:
How long does the bee live?
Larry Bender:
It can be two months. It can be four months.
Paul Ward:
Wow! That’s a short life.
Larry Bender:
Fairly short life. The queen will live for multiple years. It all depends on- for all those farm and insect peoples- it depends on their protein levels and how good of quality; if they have a good diet and good food, they live longer. Poor diet, shorter life.
Paul Ward:
So tell us about honey types.
Larry Bender:
Okay. Each of the flowers in God’s green earth create a different sugar molecule in their nectar, the bees exude that nectar to attract insects, to do their pollination. Everything has a purpose. Each of the flowers, whether it be a raspberry, a sage plant, a toyon plant or an alfalfa plant, they create a different flavor. Honey. In fact, one of the most interesting ones is the avocado trees because it creates a really dark red- t almost takes like molasses. There’s some people that absolutely love it. And there’s people that absolutely don’t love it. Did I say that right? The opposite- don’t love it. But your standard honey, like your sage, has a very mild flavor, very light color. Orange trees, the honey will look similar, but have a very distinct flavor of the orange.
What you’ll find here in California is we get a lot of specialty honeys. I mean, for someone here in Ventura county, if they go out to Bennett Honey Farm in Piru, they have a tasting of the different flavors, right? If you go up into Ventura to the honey store there, same thing, they have all the different flavors. So people can try and find the right one for them. The farmer’s markets. I know our friend, Diane, she sells here at the Camarillo farmer’s markets. She’s typically the wildflower. They always offer samples because even the wildflower or the Sage year to year will taste a little bit different. Depends on how much moisture comes down. Right. How and how the bees put it together. So, right. It’s kind of interesting.
Paul Ward:
How is the industry changing with climate changing and farming changing? What changes do you see? I mean, I’d imagine over 20 years you’ve seen a lot of changes and future changes in store.
Larry Bender:
The whole bee industry over the last 20 years has had some huge changes. And the thing that affected us first was we have an issue with this thing. It’s called a “Varroa Mite.” The bees could handle the varroa mite somewhat, but what happens is when a mite or a parasite bites your skin, it opens up a hole, which then lets in unknown viruses. And so we had a kind of a synergy reaction between that and it took 10-15 years for the industry to figure out ways to manage that. Prior to 30 years ago, you could figure one employee for every thousand beehives. Now we’re at about one employee to every 600 because the workload to manage the mites and manage those work details is basically doubled in that time.
Paul Ward:
Interesting. All related to the mites
Larry Pender:
l related to that mite. A lot of people ask about what’s causing problems? “D, all the above,” is the answer and it’s not any one thing. The bees can handle certain things, just like our bodies. We can handle a certain amount of things around us. When there’s an overload in the area. So if we let the mites get outta control, then it creates problems. They’re always gonna be there. They’re like fleas and mosquitoes. They’re always gonna be there. But we have to manage ’em.
Paul Ward:
Is it easy to become a beekeeper or if somebody wants to be a hobbyist and have a hive in their backyard, is that a thing?
Larry Pender:
Yes, it is. There’s actually a fair amount of people that get 1, 2, 3, or four, beehives and become a backyard beekeeper. It can actually be very enjoyable. I know when I was a kid, we had eight beehives in our backyard. It was cool to go out and watch ’em if there’s the honey flow going and the smell of nectar in the backyard is really cool. For anyone that’s watched like an observation hive of a beehive or an ant farm they’re organized. So people like doing those things. There’s companies, national companies that you can mail or somebody can mail order boxes from someone like friends of mine, Keith and Danny, down at the Valley Hive on Topanga. They actually sell all the parts for people that want to become a backyard beekeeper.
Paul Ward:
And what about the bees themselves? Can you get them shipped to your door? How does that work?
Larry Pender:
Yes, you can. Well, you can get packages of bees, which means about three pounds of bees, a queen bee and things shipped to you. Typically people like to come pick them up. We put together about 40 or 50 of ’em for different people in the springtime. They come by and pick up small little bee hives.
Paul Ward:
Oh, you do?
Larry Pender:
It’s not a focus of mine. I let Danny and Keith handle that down there. They buy a few from us. Another company, Bryan’s Bees out of the Thousand Oaks area, they do specialize in a lot of removals, but he has customers that wanna buy what they call a “Nucleus hive.” So he supplies those for ’em.
Paul Ward:
And those folks have their own honey supply and give it to friends.
Larry Pender:
And sometimes they have a honey supply. That’s one of the things that’s always surprising is that you don’t always make honey with the beehive. It depends on which area you’re in. The people that do work in the neighborhoods, like in your backyard, typically, you will make some honey, which is very nice. Cuz it’s from the local area around where you’re at. Ventura county wants to, and I’ve been to some of the agriculture planning committee meetings. They would like to allow people to do backyard beekeeping. I wish they would just keep it simple and just say, “Follow some rules,” but they want people to register. So I don’t have to agree with what my county is doing, but at least they’re wanting to allow people to go enjoy the hobby of beekeeping, cuz for some people it is a really nice diversion away from busy work life. You go work with one of God’s creatures and it operates differently than us as people. You can also enjoy the fruits of that labor with the honey that comes off from them and learn how to manage them.
Paul Ward:
So where do you see the future of beekeeping? The future of the industry in general?
Larry Pender:
I see a very good future with beekeeping. One of the things to keep in mind, Paul is that the farming industry as a whole is always rotating and moving. As a businessman and beekeeper, I have to keep a pulse on how that’s moving, but let’s start with beekeeping as a whole. People like honey, right? So people are going to pay for that honey, which will entice beekeepers to go out and find a way to make that. I mean, that’s what the industry is generally based on, its honey production. I have friends that have large honey operations between Minnesota and North Dakota, Texas, and California, and they move three or four times a year. They actually have multiple places to operate.
Paul Ward:
So they take their boxes on a truck?
Larry Pender:
They pollinate almond trees in California in February. Then in March and April, they go down to Texas, cuz of the beautiful weather, to take 10,000 hives and turn that into 20,000 beehives using God’s natural duplication process in Queens. Then in June and July, you go to the Midwest where the clover and alfalfa fields are blooming. They move up there and make that. And then they take ’em back down for wintertime and it’s a regular rotation. I mean there’s one of my friends, the Mitchell’s here in Ventura county, they have Blue Ridge Honey. They’ve focused on making honey in Ventura county and they made some good honey this year. Where last year they didn’t make any honey because of the drought. So you have to have your business focused around the lifestyle that you wanna live.
My businesses that I have, have to work around my life. The profit that we make from this business is to support my family and live. If we wanna travel and do things we wanna do. Other beekeepers have the same situation and they have to find the route. When I say, “The route,” it’s how to move around if they’re gonna make honey or do pollination and have it work for them. I know the Mitchell’s have never wanted to travel outta state like I did. We did it because as we grew there wasn’t the room to make the honey here in Ventura county. So we traveled up to Idaho and had a lot of enjoyable- don’t ever go to Bear Lake, Idaho. It’s a very bad place. No, it’s a beautiful lake up there, but the beautiful areas in the summertime- in February it’s below zero. So that’s why we’re back down here. So the future of the industry? The industry will always be there in some format. How is it going to adapt for us? Depends what happens with a lot of the crops here in Ventura county. One of the things I’ve noticed in Ventura county is we are having less raspberry crops grown here because they’re growing more and more down in the Baja.
Paul Ward:
Okay.
Larry Pender:
The acreage of blackberries is going up and that’s what I’ve learned. I like to understand and visit with the farmers that we deal with. So we know why the crops, why the changes, the blackberries don’t handle the truck while driving to market. Like the raspberries, the raspberries can handle the trip from the center of Baja up to California to market. Whereas the blackberries are a little more delicate fruit and they can’t handle the mileage. So they need to be grown closer to market. The blueberries that are grown in this community are grown because we have beautiful weather in the wintertime. We can harvest some blueberries in the middle of December and January, while Michigan is sitting there in a big ice box. So there’s some high dollar crops. And you never know if those are gonna change over time, but I always have to keep my kind of ear to the ground. What’s happening to counteract things like that? Like this year I picked up dealing with a seed company out of the Santa Maria area that grows carrot seeds, celery, seeds, onions, seeds, and broccoli seeds that then they sell to the farmers to grow their crops.
Paul Ward:
So, you know, it’s coming?
Larry Pender:
We hope to stay on top of it, but there’s always gonna be a rotation. So we just have to stay nimble. One thing growing up in the restaurant and in the seafood business. The biggest challenge I saw my parents face is when that freeway construction happened in Santa Barbara county. You cannot pick up a restaurant in two days and move it somewhere else. It’s a very expensive proposition. One of the reasons why I’ve gotten into the beekeeping business is I can pick up and move my business very easily. I mean, this year I got a call that they needed 800 of our beehives out in El Centro to pollinate seed alfalfa. We hire a truck, we load it up, they deliver ’em and it helps everybody out. So the mobility can be very good.
Now for anyone thinking about getting into the beekeeping industry, I would highly encourage you to work along with someone. Same as I’d encourage someone if they wanted to open a restaurant, go work with someone a little bit to find out the realities of what the work is.
Paul Ward:
Sure. Yep. Doesn’t hurt to have experience before you, you know, jump in by yourself.
Larry Pender:
That is correct.
Paul Ward:
For our health conscious listeners and watchers out there, what are the health benefits of honey?
Larry Pender:
The health benefits of honey are very interesting, cuz it is a sugar and everyone’s heard that sugars are bad for you, right? In some way, like if you ingest straight sucrose, which is our table sugar, your blood sugar will spike up. What honey does and the way it’s made between glucose and fructose, it’s a different structure sugar, it keeps a very even leveled blood sugar as it’s absorbed in your system. What also happens with honey, and this is a really cool thing if somebody’s new to moving into an area; what we always recommend is for ’em to get some, a tablespoon of honey a day from somewhere within that region, 75 to a 100 miles of where they’re living at, because what happens is as the bees collect the nectar at the flowers thing to thing, small amounts of that pollen-micro amounts-end up in the honey.
Paul Ward:
So if they have allergies cuz they’re new to the area. Maybe that will act as a natural allergy shot?
Larry Pender:
Like an inoculation. Cuz what happens, Paul, is in the honey, there’s micro amounts of it. So I have other beekeeper friends that will collect the pollen. The pollen that comes from all the flowers is one people would consider it a superfood because it has all the vitamins and all the minerals in that pollen. But if somebody has an allergy and takes a tablespoon of straight pollen, it’s an overload on the system. So what they do is you take just a scoop of the honey. They have small amounts over a period of time, you build up an immunity to that area. So if somebody just moved to Ventura county and they have some small allergies, I would have ’em go to one of the local honey stores or farmers’ markets to get some of the local wildflower honey. Take a teaspoon a day and it will help build those immunities to those areas. If you want a superfood, you collect the bee pollen and it’s a little more expensive, only a few beekeepers collect it. What some people do with the bee pollen is that they actually mix it with honey and let it sit for 14 or 15 days. It becomes what they call, “bee bread.” The nutrients are a little more released out of the pollen in with the honey, breaking it down a little bit.
Paul Ward:
Very cool.
Larry Pender:
So it’s good stuff. I mean, if you ever eat straight pollen, some of the pollen is a little bitter. Some are sweet. It depends on what time of year and what flowers they’re coming in. So, the honey is good. I always put it in our hot tea. I actually put a scoop of honey in my protein shake every morning. That’s why I always tell my wife I’m the sweetest guy she’ll ever meet. Girls still don’t buy that one all the time, but I do get a few chuckles out of it.
Paul Ward:
There ya go. Always good. Well, Larry Pender, thank you so much for being our guest on this edition of Farm Talk. We’ve loved having you and this has been so informative and educational and I’m sure our watchers and listeners are gonna appreciate all that you had to offer.
Larry Pender:
Well, I hope they do Paul. Thank you very much.
Paul Ward:
Absolutely. And of course we want to thank our sponsors, The Escrow Hub and The Money Store and be sure to tune in next time for another edition of Farm Talk.
