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HONEY

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Beekeeping came with the settlers to Bingham County, the skill already ingrained in the community enough for the Insane Asylum to harvest 2500 pounds from its own hives in 1904.The winner of the best honey at the Blackfoot Fair was O.F. Smith, a grower of cherries, quince, German prunes, pears (Bartlett and Kiefer) and apples (Ben Davis, Rome Beauty, Duchess, Gano, Good Peasant, Genneton, Fall Orange, Jonathan, Grime's Golden, and Red Astrachan) who kept bees for pollination. Smith's place, a nursery sporting 2300 trees, was near the present-day Groveland-Highway 26 intersection. He'd come from Nebraska in 1888, having been in the nursery business there for some years, and was instrumental in putting the "grove" in Groveland at the town's formation.


In 1911, J.E. Miller and 25 others incorporated the Idaho Honey Producers, 2000 shares available at $5 a share. Miller, after stopping at Logan and Providence in Utah some years earlier for his beekeeping enterprise, would increase his holdings in Bingham County for many years, his company's product becoming omnipresent for a hundred years.


J.H. Stoneman, another producer, was packaging his own honey at the time in a "sealfast" glass jar that opened with a spring.


Stoneman ran "Cozy Nook Apiaries", close enough to town that tourists from the Yellowstone Highway could stop and buy his product. He sold extractors, queen bees and bee equipment to other apiarists, who together sold two carloads of honey to Chicago in early November of 1912, with a total of thirty expected to be shipped out from eastern Idaho. It was his turn to win "best honey" at the fair in 1913.


Stoneman was the bee inspector for the area, overseeing 200 Idaho Honey Producers members who shipped out two carloads to Kansas City in October 1914 with another two heading to Minnesota. The Weber Brothers, who raised bees south of Ferry Butte, shipped out two carloads a month later and a third at the end of December. Stoneman experimented with "flavored" honey by buying product from A.J. Snyder, who raised alfalfa seed with the aid of honeybees in Springfield. Stoneman sent a jar of the honey to the honey producers association in Sagehurst of the British Isles.


As inspector, Stoneman was responsible for checking apiarists' colonies. Both American and European foulbrood, devastating bacterial infections, had appeared in Eastern Idaho hives. Local apiarists were told to transfer all bees from immovable combs to movable ones so the inspector could detect the bacteria and respond accordingly by destroying infected hives.


European foulbrood was easier to deal with than its counterpart. The inspector killed the queen of an infected colony, replaced her in seven or eight days, a process which alleviated the disease. American foulbrood required burning the hive and its contents, though the bees themselves could be kept (this may no longer be true). The spores of the bacteria can last forty years, making its appearance a permanent problem.


The Honey Producers, in 1915, stipulated that beekeepers put their colonies no closer than two miles to other producers' hives, in part to prevent cross-infection of foulbrood.


Stoneman, who had 400 hives, became vice-president of the national beekeepers' association and shipped honey to South Dakota, Illinois, Missouri, and Washington. His warehouse, in the Kennedy Addition of Blackfoot, became a source of disconcern for citizens, thirty of whom petitioned to have it moved from the city.


He shipped five carloads from Blackfoot in 1916, and in 1921 expected to have 40,000 pounds of honey for sale, the year being excessively good with each hive producing a hundred pounds--thirty pounds was a more normal figure. That year saw the expansion of the Miller-Nelson honey warehouse near Anderson Lumber on the Mackay Branch railroad spur. The building would be 35' X 60' with a full basement. A million pounds of honey was shipped from Southeast Idaho in 1924.


There were a 100 members of the Idaho Honey Producers in 1927, with 57,000 colonies and a yield of 5 million pounds of honey. They shipped fifteen carloads of product to Germany, England, Austria, Holland and France and were looking for a market in China. Idaho's apiarists sold $350,000 in honey in 1929, a poor year when only 125 carloads were shipped--the prior year yielded 200 cars.


By 1935, colony numbers reached 90,000, a thousand beekeepers managing them--several with over 3000 hives. Thirteen years later, that number reached 712,000 colonies, and by 1963 Idaho was producing fifteen million pounds of honey. Apiarists expressed concern over the recent explosion of insecticide use, particularly aerial spraying, noting that the new chemicals didn't distinguish between "bad" insects that damaged crops and "good" ones like honeybees that were required to pollinate them.


Today, Idaho produces 3.3 million pounds of honey a year with about one hundred apiarists (not including small hobbyists) operating 143,000 colonies.


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