The Montana Buzz is Getting Louder

Lonnie Larson gently sprayed smoke from a small metal can across a half-dozen rectangular wooden frames in a white wooden box, each frame crawling with hundreds of bees.

“C’mon, girls,” he said, sending out another puff from the smoker. “Go away.”

Larson, a Huntley resident and president of the Yellowstone Valley Beekeepers Association, was looking for the queen of one of the six hives he owns and maintains on a friend’s property in the Arrow Creek area east of Billings.

The goal was to find the queen and move her to a new set of boxes in order to create a new hive, splitting it before the bees’ population grows to the point where it swarms and splits on its own. The smoke calms down the rest of the colony’s 40,000 bees and masks pheromones that signal them to attack.

For many beekeepers in Montana, splitting hives is practically an annual rite of spring, signaling the start of the local beekeeping and the honey-producing season, which runs through the summer and ends with the collection of honey.

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