By Lauren Carter

The queen pipes.
From deep within the hive, her vibrato voice emerges, trumpeting into Allan Sinton's living room through a small speaker on an old-fashioned tape recorder.
Sitting with the recorder in his lap, Sinton grins above his white beard as the sound of a tiny horn lifts above the buzzing of the bees.
Observed and recorded last August, the piping queen is the latest in his decade-long unravelling of the secrets the bees keep. After hearing an old-time beekeeper briefly mention that the queen bee pipes, Sinton searched for answers from other beekeepers. When he didn't find any, he decided to try to observe the phenomenon himself.
A scientist by nature and past profession, he dropped a microphone into a three-tiered cross-sectioned hive that he built for his own observation purposes and watched the drama of the piping queen unfold while simultaneously capturing her voice on tape.
“When she piped, she raised or arched her abdomen and her wings would quiver,” he explained in an article that he wrote about the event. Through observation and further research, Sinton theorized that the queen was piping to instruct unborn queens to stay in their cells until she and her worker bees had time to leave the crowded hive, an event known as swarming.
While Sinton's dozen hives bring in an average of 405 kilograms of honey per year, it was actually the precise and fascinating activity of the species, rather than the honey, that attracted Sinton to the task of beekeeping in the first place.
“I was more interested in what the bees do,” explains Sinton, whose honey has since won several awards, including trophies at the Royal Winter Fair and several blue ribbons at the Orillia Fair and the annual Ontario Beekeepers' Convention.
His success with honey production may be as surprising to him as some of the things the bees get up to.
“[I enjoy] studying what they do, watching them,” says Sinton. “When I first got the bees, I thought, boy, I hadn't counted on all the honey, but it's nice to have.”
Honey is what most of us think of when we think of keeping bees. The story, however, is not as simple nor as sweet as that. Honey production, an activity that attracts 118 registered beekeepers in Simcoe County, is both a captivating hobby and a big business.
Within the busy world of the more than 2,000 hives across Ontario, bees spend their short lives creating a product that's attracted human beings for thousands of years while pollinating crops in the process.
They are more important than many of us realize.
These fuzzy little creatures are actually responsible for 30 per cent of everything we eat, explains Sinton in his dining room, a nearby window overlooking the hills outside of Barrie.
“That's every third spoonful you eat for supper,” says the former metallurgical technician for Falconbridge Nickel Mines in Toronto.
That's power.
And in this day and age of factory farms, environmental dilemmas and international trade issues, how can the story of honey not be a dramatic tale? From the buzzing centre of a worker-driven society that will oust their queen if she's not producing enough eggs to the market price of a jar of honey, this is a story of stings and sweet lessons.

At Tannenhof Farms, beekeeper Adi Stoer is well aware of the vital role bees play.
“If we didn't have honey bees, your apples would cost ten times more,” he says. “Farmers increase their crops by 10 times if they have bees around.”
Surrounded by farmers’ fields, Stoer and his wife, Martha, live amidst spring, summer and autumn spreads of sweet clover, mountain mint and anis hyssop. The nectar from these flowers feeds the bees from over 200 hives, ultimately ending up as the 6750-4500 kilograms of honey that the couple produces per year.
Overseeing the process has plugged Stoer into the cycles of the natural world.
“When you're a beekeeper, you're so much more in touch with nature and the seasons,” he says.
From spring, when the bees are busy raising their brood, to late summer when the honey harvest is on, the cycle of life revolves regularly within the six-and-a-half metres of hives at the crossroads of Line Six and the 15/16 Side Road in Oro Station.
At Tannenhof Farms, the rise and fall of mini-queendoms is happening all the time.
“The queen runs the hive. She thinks,” Stoer explains. “It's really the workers who decide what's going to happen. If she's a poor layer [of eggs], they replace her.”
The busy worker bees, sterile females who oversee all of the tasks in the hive, will supply new larvae with royal jelly and lengthen the cell, thereby creating a brand new queen. Simply said, after the new queen returns, impregnated from her maiden flight, the queens fight to the death, with the stronger emerging as the hive's new queen.
After 18 years in the business, Stoer has learned a lot about the life cycle and society of bees. At a table overlooking the couple's back forty and the nearest clutch of hives, Stoer rhymes off several facts about the fascinating creatures.
Bees live to be only 35 to 40 days at most, he says.
In that short lifetime, worker bees will move from one role to the next until they die. At the beginning, they are house bees who care for the young and clean the hive. From there they move from wax spinners to guard bees to undertaker bees who throw the dead bodies out of the hive. The final stage they enter, Stoer explains, is when they become fielder bees, the ones who fly out of the hive to collect nectar and pollen and bring it home to give to the house bees.
In the early days of his beekeeping hobby, Stoer observed all this first-hand. Recognizing his interest in the activity, his family gave him a single beehive as a gift. On his days off from the Black Forest House, a restaurant he and his wife operated for 13 years in Barrie, he would sit by the hive, watching the bees working. He also joined the Huronia Beekeepers’ Association, an active organization which has grown to over 50 members since it started in 1991.
“It started as one hive as a hobby,” says his wife. “Now it's a business.”
These days, Stoer is president of the Huronia Beekeepers’ Association and sells equipment to up-and-coming apiarists.
Stoer has learned a lot in the transition.
“I was learning then and I'm learning now,” he says. “At that time, I knew nothing. I couldn't tell the difference between the queen and the drones. You have to be able to recognize the queen. You have to know how the hive operates to be a successful beekeeper.”
But success is a tricky word for farmers in this day and age.
“Beekeeping is just another form of farming,” says Stoer. “And farming is an economy that seems to always be in trouble.”
These days beekeepers have to deal with several dangerous ailments. In 1987, the border with the U.S. closed to imports of bees after varroa mites dealt a devastating blow to wild honey bee colonies. The mites have since spread into Canada and now the threat of aggressive Africanized honey bees poses an issue. Beekeepers also contend with bears raiding their hives and competition with countries that dump cheap honey on the Canadian market.
“Our break-even price [for selling honey] is $1.00 per pound,” says Stoer. “If we don't get this, we go broke.”
The sad fact is that the average consumer will often buy the cheapest honey on the shelf, thinking that when it says Canada #1 on the container, that's what it is. Unfortunately, says Stoer, shoppers need to read the small print.
“It can be named Canada #1 honey even if it's only packed here.”
Imported from China and Argentina, honey is packed in Canada and sold for .33 to .38 cents a kilo, Stoer says. For him and other Ontario beekeepers, the cheaper prices pose a big problem.
“[The honey] is coming in at such low prices that Canadian beekeepers can't make as much money.”
These practices ensure that large corporations are making a large profit at the expense of the small farmer, says an angered Stoer.
“They're trampling on the backs of the farmers, of the beekeepers.”
Imported honey can also present other problems for the consumer. In 2004, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency recalled several brands of honey, including the popular brand Billy Bee. The imported honey contained the antimicrobial drug nitro furan, which is banned in Canada.
Stoer's advice? Shop locally. In Canada, beekeepers are subject to strict regulations regarding medicines and pesticides.
“We do not put medication in the hive when the bees are making honey,” says Stoer, adding that this fact is without negotiation.
If the beekeeper lapses, regular inspections of honey will catch them out. All of this is good news for the consumer.
“When [people] buy from their next door beekeeper, they know they have a good product [and] that it's not contaminated.”
In his honey house, Stoer pulls a stainless steel handle and releases an even flow of golden honey harvested last year. Created from pollen and nectar drawn from dandelions, purple loosestrife, goldenrod and countless other wildflowers, this honey will eventually end up on toast or in tea, as honey like it has for hundreds of years. While today's beekeepers negotiate both the sweet and sour aspects of their industry, the bees simply do what they've always done: work.
“A little bee is born and within 15 minutes she's working,” says Sinton.
Without the instinct-driven toil of this clever and complex species, we would lose not only honey, but whole harvests. No one understands that better than the beekeepers, who regularly take some stings for the team.