I am in a grove of American olive trees at the edge of Shortt’s Farm on Riverside Road in Sandy Hook, backing up oh-so-slowly and trying desperately to heed beekeeper Tony Planakis’s advice to not wave my hands or run as a honey bee pauses from its incessant humming about my head to investigate my hair. “He’s just on a curiosity flight,” Mr Planakis assures me as I creep further and further away from the hives and the beekeeper I have come to interview. It’s not hot, but I am sweating.

All I can think about is the line from the 1996 movie, Jerry McGuire, when McGuire’s girlfriend’s precocious little boy gravely asks McGuire, “D'you know that bees and dogs can smell fear?”

His curiosity evidently satisfied, and my fear evidently not fragrant enough to get a rise out of this particular bee, the bee returns in a meandering path to the two hives Mr Planakis is adjusting to make room for a new, third hive on the Shortt property where he keeps his bees.

Later, Mr Planakis explains to me that honey bees are actually reluctant to sting. “They know they will die. One sting and its over for honey bees, not like wasps or hornets that can sting again and again and again.”

It is one of the many tidbits of information Mr Planakis, a New York electrician who has summered in Sandy Hook since 1970, shares with me about beekeeping.

He does not always suit up in the protective gear he had donned this sunny June morning to work with his bees. The night before he had removed an unwanted hive from a New York City location and was relocating them to a new hive next to the two he keeps on the Shortt’s Farm. “I don’t know how aggressive these bees are,” he later explained. “I know my bees are gentle, but these bees have been upset and I won’t be able to tell for a few days what kind they are, and they aren’t used to me.”

He is used to the occasional sting, although the Carniolan bees he raises are among the most gentle of honey bees. With bees of unknown temperament and his bees feeling threatened, though, he felt it prudent to use the protective gear as he introduced the box of captured bees to their new home. Having watched the torrent of bees swirl about from a now safely removed distance, I would agree that that had been a wise move.

The process had taken a little longer than he had anticipated, as he ended up needing to switch out frames from the two standing hives to create the new hive until he has time to build more frames.

A frame is made up of a wooden top bar and two end bars into which a beekeeper inserts a wax sheet imprinted with combs. This is where the bees will build their combs to hold the honey.

The frames, from six to ten usually, are hung in a box, and several boxes making up the body of the hive are stacked on top of each other to create the living space for the bees. Boxes which provide space for the bees to store surplus honey, which is what the beekeeper takes, are called supers.

The summer solstice and the month of June might signal the start of honey harvesting to some beekeepers, but Mr Planakis, who has been keeping bees for more than 20 years, said that more than a date on the calendar comes into play when collecting honey from hives.

Environment, weather and location of the hives also figure largely as to when a beekeeper can harvest honey. “The harvest could be anytime from late spring to fall,” he said, noting that the many rainy spring days followed by sunny days has made 2006 an ideal spring for honey bees.

Each hive can produce 20 to 30 pounds of honey per super in a good year, said Mr Planakis, but that is not what draws him to beekeeping. “Bees are a fascinating society. They are extremely organized and cooperative. When you’ve handled them long enough, I know it sounds a little odd, but you almost develop a bond with them. Beekeeping brings me outdoors, too,” he explained. In order to maintain the health of his hives, he visits them one to two times a week during the peak season. Even in colder months, the dormant bees rely on him to supply them with feed, a sugar water mixture, to help them through in particularly extreme weather situations.

The two — now three — hives that Mr Planakis cares for on the Shortt’s property allow him a peaceful place to spend quiet time with his hobby, and also are beneficial to the Shortt’s farm, where the bees diligently join bumblebees and butterflies in pollinating the flowers and crops.

Part of the enjoyment of having hives is determining where the hives will be located on property. He had bees for many years at his Sandy Hook residence, but when the ant problem there became too problematic three years ago, Jim Shortt offered to let Mr Planakis set up hives on the farm.

“I had to spend a lot of time watching where the sun came up, where it went down, how much sun and shade they would get, how that changed over the weeks, what kind of plants were blooming and when; all kinds of things go into where a hive will be. If I notice the bees flying off at an angle, I might decide to adjust how the hives are situated.”

The first location on the Shortt farm turned out not to be the best for the bees, so under the cover of darkness, when the bees are all in their hive and quiet, Mr Planakis shifted the hives to the olive grove. A better location means better honey production and a healthier hive, he said.

Raising bee is not without its moments, said Mr Planakis, although the majority of the time it is not because of the bees. Three summers ago, he encountered a situation that left him happy he had paid attention to his intuition.

“I decided to suit up when I visited the hives,” he recalled. “I had the smoker going, too, which I don’t like to use to quiet the bees, but I just thought I needed it that day. As I approached the hive, it felt like someone was throwing rocks at me. I thought maybe Jim [Shortt] was just being funny and tossing pebbles at me. I kept going and it started up again — ping, ping — like little rocks hitting me and I couldn’t figure what was going on.”

What was going on became clear as he closed in on his hives: bald faced hornets had built a nest on top of one of the hives and were angrily attacking him. Carnivores, the hornets had also made short work of the bees. “They had taken about 30 percent of the bees in just the three weeks since I had last visited,” he said.

Being on an organic farm made the situation a little trickier to deal with, as pesticides could not be applied to eliminate the hornets. Safe application of a pesticide without doing harm to the bees is always an issue, too, said Mr Planakis. “What Jim and I ended up doing was encapsulating the nest in a fiberglass bag, removing it from the property and destroying it.”