Beekeeper takes natural approach

Thirteen cotton-clad bee aficionados, ages 22 to 63, squeezed into Jacqueline Freeman’s little country kitchen.

Freeman hoisted a yellow jar of butter-thick honey and explained how things are done at big bee farms. “They take their honey, and they feed them – guess what?” Freeman said.

“Sugar water?” one woman wondered.

“High-fructose corn syrup?” asked another student.

Freeman nodded. “It used to be they fed them sugar,” she said. “Now it’s cheaper to feed them high-fructose corn syrup.”

Welcome to Clark County’s backwoods boot camp for natural honey production. From the Venersborg, Wash., teaching farm she runs with her husband, Joseph, Freeman has taught her method of beekeeping to hundreds of people who travel from as far as Bellingham and Ashland, Ore.

Participants pay $50 for the daylong introduction to bee-raising, including a detailed slide show, hands-on time with three different wooden beehive models and, occasionally, Freeman’s vocal impersonations of different bee sounds.

Freeman has been leading the sessions every month for three years, one of 20 different classes on natural and organic farming she and her husband offer on their 10 acres east of Battle Ground.

Freeman said bees have a special place in her heart. They have a special place in her house, too: She estimates that 50,000 of them have been living in their north-facing wall for at least eight years.

That hive was one reason Freeman wanted to buy the place.

“I definitely want to live in a house that bees live in,” she said Saturday. “I put my ear up against the wall, and I can hear them in there. All winter long. There’s something comforting about that.”

Some would find a nest so close disturbing, she knows – just as they’d find bees disturbing in general. But people often have the wrong idea about bees, she said.

“Bees are hygienic,” Freeman told her class. “They don’t put up with any mess in the house. … As long as we don’t take them out, we don’t have a problem.”

Nancy Roberts, of La Center, Wash., said she’d wanted to raise bees “for years and years” but had only taken it up recently.

After losing her bees two years in a row, she said, she tracked down Freeman to learn more about hives that let bees build their combs in natural patterns rather than following human-designed wood frames.

“That makes more sense to me,” Roberts said. “Let the bees do it their way.”