Benefits Of Backyard Beekeeping In Naperville

NAPERVILLE, IL — Naperville resident and pastry chef Gena Karpf was perfecting her craft in Australia when she got bitten by a metaphorical bug. Karpf learned about the importance of beekeeping and quickly fell in love with honeybees, setting out to become a beekeeper herself when she got back home to Naperville in 2017.

"[Honeybees are] just endlessly fascinating. They’re a miracle," Karpf told Patch. She added that bees are responsible for pollinating a majority of agricultural crops, saying, “Without honeybees, we don’t eat, it’s really that simple.”

Three years ago, Karpf started studying with a local bee teacher and bought two 3-pound packages of honeybees. Each 3-pound package contains about 9,000 bees, plus a queen bee, Karpf told Patch. She also. Since she began cultivating bees, Karpf's population has grown to about 200,000 bees throughout five backyard hives.

For a new beekeeper, Karpf said beekeeping season starts in April, when the package bees arrive and are used to fill wooden hives. By mid-to late May, plants start to flower and providing nectar, which bees use to fill up their honey frames.

Karpf said bees have three sets of legs and use their back legs or "pollen baskets" to compact pollen, which they carry back to the hive. Bees also carry nectar from plants in what's called their "honey stomach," Karpf told Patch.

The pollen is a bee's protein and the nectar is their carbohydrate source. Once the nectar and pollen are brought back to the hive, the bees combine it to make "bee bread," which is used as a source of food for developing larvae.

Meanwhile, the bees are pollinating local flowers and plants as they collect their supplies.

Queen bees won't lay an egg until bee bread is placed in a brood cell in the lower part of the hive. Once the queen bee lays an egg, a worker bee takes 21 days to gestate in the cell. Once the young bee emerges from the cell, the bees then clean and prep the cell for the next generation of bee babies.

Since bees are biologically programmed to collect nectar and raise young, they bring more nectar and store more honey than they can use. The excess honey is stored in honey supers, which are located higher up in the hive than the brood chambers.

This is how Karpf sources the honey that she sells and uses to craft her delicious confectionery. This year, she harvested 383 pounds of honey, leaving 60 to 80 pounds in each of her five hives for the bees to use throughout the winter.

If you're interested in sourcing local honey, you can contact Karpf at gena@genakarpf.com.