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KAYSVILLE — Kimball Clark knows his bees. That’s why Clark calls himself a “bee nerd.” It’s marketing, but it’s true.
“Bees are the other woman,” Clark said, laughing.
His love affair with bees began when his son Thomas, then 3 years old, watched a YouTube confrontation between honeybees and a Japanese hornet — the bees actually cook the hornet — and developed a fondness for the insects.
Clark wanted to get his son some bees and remembered reading about a stingless, or nearly stingless bee.
So he drilled a hole— 5/16 of an inch in diameter — in a log in his backyard, and a bee made that hole her home. It was not a honeybee, but a Blue Orchard bee— a solitary bee that lives in a hole, not a hive.
Young Thomas forgot the bees and moved onto chickens, but Clark turned the bees into a passion and a business.
Solitary bees
Scientists and farmers have been trying to use solitary bees as alternative pollinators to help out the beleaguered honeybees.
“We've only been using one species primarily for pollination efforts for eons, and we need to diversify our species,” Clark said.
"In recent years, the blue orchard bee (BOB) has become established as an alternative orchard pollinator in North America. With a strong preference for fruit trees, BOBs are highly efficient pollinators; in fact, just 250-300 females will pollinate an entire acre of apples or cherries."
-Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture
Blue Orchard bees and other solitary bees are very efficient pollinators, but compared to honeybees, they’re very particular about what they pollinate. They also don’t live in hives that can be trucked from farm to farm.
Clark has received grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Utah Science Technology and Research Agency to develop what he calls “bee condos” that would make it easier to sort and transport the bees.
Clark’s friend, Kris Ricks, is a fur and bee trapper. In the spring in the mountains of Northern Utah, he hangs bundles of cut phragmites reeds. The bees nest in the reeds, and then Ricks collects the eggs. He splits open the reeds and sorts the thousands of bee cocoons.
The condos
Kimball’s condos are easily disassembled to access the nests.
“So I'm trying to build bee condos that he can use up in the mountains and cull these hundreds and thousands and millions, literally, of bees that he's gathering — make it easier for him,” Clark said.
Right now Clark’s researching a green bee: Osmia Ribifloris. He has a bee condo set up in his neighbor Vaughn Nielsen’s backyard, who said his fruit trees have been more productive.
“I know we have bees next door, we have honeybees next door,” Nielsen said, pointing to a white box of bees in his neighbor’s yard. “But they don't go as fast as these guys.”
Nielsen has a variety of fruit trees — apple, Asian pear, apricot, plum, peach — and Clark is trying to figure out which the bees like to visit.
“This becomes more valuable once it becomes more manageable, and so that's what I'm trying to do,” Clark said. “I'm trying to learn how to manage this and many other things and many other species.”
Clark is a businessman, a researcher and a bee nerd, but there is one thing he is not: a scientist. He’s not an entomologist. He’s a graphic designer — an artist who happens to know a lot about solitary bees.
“I've learned a little bit little bit about innovation and how innovation changes people's lives,” he said. “You get in the car and you drive to work and how marvelous that really is. The same can happen with just about anything, and maybe if we keep doing that for decades, we'll come up with really great ideas.”
“It's a lot better than watching TV,” Clark added.
