Self-taught beekeeper starts business in Michigan to help local farmers

PORTLAND, Mich. — For many people, beekeeping begins and ends as a hobby.
For Kyle Brown, it was a means of staying afloat through a medical crisis.
Four years ago, the Portland, resident found himself in and out of the hospital with what doctors believed was Crohn's disease. He'd be admitted a week at a time every four to six weeks, destabilizing his income as a manager at a Toys R Us and later as an asbestos abatement supervisor at an environmental cleanup company.
In need of a job where he could make his own hours, Brown turned to beekeeping.
"Three out of the four years that I've been doing beekeeping, it was for medical reasons, because I was sick all the time," Brown said. "This is kind of a reliable source of income."
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Now 28 and on the mend, Brown hasn't been back in the hospital in over a year. He also hasn't been back to a day job.
Brown now works full time as sole proprietor of Brown's Bee Service, removing hives from people's homes and businesses and selling honey and beeswax products at local farmers markets. He's handled bumblebees, carpenter bees, mason bees, honeybees and several species of wasp. He averages 10 wasp removals a week and 10 honeybee removals a year, he said, all fielded through his Facebook page. He also teaches beekeeping classes, networks with other beekeepers and sells hives from his orchards in Sunfield, Sebewa Township and Portland.
"It sounds easy to do it, but it’s very complex," said Anne Labreck, a Charlotte, Michigan, farmer who has bought hives from Brown. "He’s out without a bee veil and is getting stung all over, but is very down to earth and explains things in a way an average person can understand."
Thanks to Brown's hives, Labreck doesn't have to rely on artificial fertilizers to grow fruits and veggies. The bees do the pollination work for her, making for a 100% organic farm.
In urban areas like Lansing, Michigan, beekeeping is a tricky business, requiring a deep understanding of how bees live and work, said Hugh McDiarmid, communications director at the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
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But in Brown's suburban Portland, it's an easy hobby to pick up. After a year learning the ropes, Brown was harvesting honey and re-homing bees from local houses and businesses.
"A lot of honeybees, when they move into a building, they'll go in the wall or somewhere where you can't really see them unless you find the entrance," Brown said.
While a commercial pest control company may kill a hive it's called to exterminate, Brown aims to keep the bees alive and transfer them to a farmer — or better yet, another beekeeper.
Brown, who is transgender, has a vested interest in more and different people joining the beekeeping community. He has a heart tattoo on his upper forearm in pink and light blue, the colors representing transgender pride. But the location was deliberate, he said — easy to conceal with gloves and clothing in a rural community.
Beekeeping is catching on with some in the Hispanic, Black and LGBTQ communities, Brown said. But for the most part, "the beekeepers that I know are older white guys. There are some middle-aged women that I know were starting to get into it — some younger females — but not very many minorities."
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Still, Brown sold around 25 colonies this year, up from just three last year, an indicator to him that more people are picking up beekeeping.
Brown believes increased diversity among beekeepers would lead to different minority groups getting into the hobby, ultimately preserving the life of honeybees.
Labreck, the Charlotte farmer, said Brown's professionalism and knowledge is striking given his age.
"He’s gone out of his way to learn what he can," she said. "He’s open to new ideas and is constantly learning. A lot of stuff he does, his enthusiasm drives it. It’s a passion of his and even for his young age, it’s mutually beneficial."
McDiarmid said he's seen more young people enter the beekeeping field recently. He attributes the uptick in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which left people stuck at home in need of new hobbies.
"It's a good thing that more people are looking into keeping bees and educating themselves about some of the environmental issues that come along with beekeeping that we need to be cognizant of, in terms of relocating a swarm of bees or something like that," he said.
He suggested leaving swarm relocations up to the experts, as it can be dangerous to the unestablished colony.
"There are countless different species of bees and they all are a little bit different," McDiarmid said. "They all have different jobs in the environment. I refer to bees sometimes in the age of COVID as being the original essential workers."
Brown's drive to re-home bees rather than kill them comes from more than an admiration for the species. The disappearance of bees leads to crops and flowers that do not produce as well, he said, pointing to a client who saw an apple tree flourish after Brown introduced a hive to their farm.
McDiarmid has some tips for Michiganders who want to keep their backyard bees healthy and happy.
"Instead of having a purely grass lawn that really is an ecological desert, planting native flowers, milkweeds and letting some clover and even dandelions grow are really important for the health of our bees in suburban areas," he said.
To keep carpenter or mason bees off of decks or porches, Brown suggests an at-home solution: equal parts white vinegar and habanero juice in a spray bottle, plus 1/8 cup of dish soap and 1/8 cup of hot pepper flakes.
Shake it up, let it rest for 12 hours, and "spray the area really good with it," Brown said. "It just makes it the whole area really nasty for the bees and they don't stick around."
With summer in full swing, Brown is setting his sites on a new project: combining the different colonies in his orchard into one hive, for the bees' strength. To do that, he needs more equipment and supplies to drive away bee predators like varroa mites and hive beetles. He's raising money for the business through a GoFundMe, having reached $445 of his $20,000 goal.
"Queens and (beekeeping) boxes have been really hard to come by this year," he said. "So that'll kind of help the ones that I have out in the orchard and build up a little bit more"
Meanwhile, Labreck is already seeing the fruits of her bees' labor. After buying two hives from Brown and planting native flowers for her workers to pollinate, hazelnuts sprouted in her backyard.
"Once the bees get situated, he explained how to feed them if we wish to do so,” she said. “We talked about varroa mites that can decimate hives. You need to winterize hives. I tend to be a DIY-er and took his advice and used it."
Brown's Bee Service isn't yet large enough to support many pollination contracts, which farmers use to rent a hive from a beekeeper. His goal for now is just to help more local farmers like Labreck produce healthier and better crops.
"Really (it's) just to keep the area better — the environmental area — especially in my hometown. Doing pollination from contracts, getting orchards and things to produce better."
Follow Krystal Nurse on Twitter: @KrystalRNurse.