Myakka beekeeper has found ‘gold’ out in those fields

By CARL MARIO NUDI

Brooks Amerson had a sticky situation. A swarm of bees decided to take up residence under the eave of his home in North Manatee County on Ellenton-Gillette Road. So he called Jim Cutway of Myakka’s Gold Apiary to take care of his problem.

Because he knows how important the insect is to the circle of life, Cutway, a Myakka beekeeper, relocates feral colonies of bees instead of exterminating them with insecticide. “When the bees go, we go,” he said, emphasizing that without bees to pollinate plants and crops, there would be less food for humans. “Bees are important because about one-third of our food crop is pollinated by our bees,” Cutway said.

According to the retired firefighter turned beekeeper, Florida agriculture, such as citrus groves, needs bees to pollinate the blossoms, . He said the almond growers in California report they see a 400 percent yield in their crop when they use millions of bees to pollinate. “This puts into perspective what bees do for us,” Cutway said.

When Cutway removes a feral colony, as he did recently from the Amerson residence, he will use one of his wood box hives to relocate the colony to his property on S.R. 64 in Myakka. It will stay there for several weeks until the colony gets reestablished.

During the extraction Cutway makes sure to find the queen, which is fatter and longer than a worker bee, and places her and several of her worker bees in a special tube with small holes. The queen produces a pheromone that attracts many of the other bees to the honeycomb rack in the hive box where Cutway has attached the tube. The majority of the bees stay with the combs they built under the eave, and as Cutway cuts and removes the combs and attaches them to the rack, those bees remain with the comb.

Because the scent of the hive is still present, hundreds of bees will congregate in a mass where the combs have been removed. These bees are “vacuumed” into a box, which will be “married” with the box hive where the queen is located.

Cutway explained that bees swarm because, in most cases, it is the bees’ natural way of reproducing. When a colony outgrows the hive, the bees create a new queen by feeding a heavy dose of royal jelly, an extremely nutrient rich food, to one individual larva. The other larvae are fed bee bread, a mix of honey and pollen that haS been left to ferment for a while. These larvae mature into the pupa stage and form a chrysalis, and after they break out of the chrysalis, they are adult bees.

The feral colony at Amerson’s house was very sedate compared to some that Cutway has relocated. “But I always wear a beekeeper’s suit when I’m working with the hives.” Cutway explained that when bees attack and bite, it corresponds to several factors: either weather; lack of food; irritation, such as mites; or having mammals take their honey, “These will affect their attitude in general,” he said.

Cutway, who works his hives without any help, described four types of beekeepers with niche operations: beekeepers who raise and sell bees, those who raise only queens, those who use their bees to pollinate crops, and those who raise bees solely for the honey. “Not many beekeepers are successful doing more than one,” Cutway added.

He said he does not use his hives to pollinate agricultural crops because the crops are sprayed with insecticides and herbicides, contaminating the honey. “I try to keep my honey as clean as possible and keep the hives away from commercial agricultural crops as much as possible,” Cutway said.

He has about 10 hives at his property and about 150 colonies located throughout Manatee and Sarasota counties. During the year he moves them around, depending on when the plants are flowering in a specific area. Depending on the time of the year and how productive the bees have been, Cutway harvests the honey combs, leaving enough as food for the hive to be sustainable.

For the retired firefighter, working with bees is a challenge. “The nectar flow is about six weeks in an area for each variety of plant,” he said. “When plants are blooming with nectar, it’s what bees use to make honey. The challenge is learning what Mother Nature is telling you and having the bees ready to move in the right place at the right time,” Cutway said.

He moved to Manatee County when he was six with his family from upstate New York. Cutway grew up in West Bradenton but moved to Myakka with his wife Beth 11 years ago because they wanted the peace and quiet of country life.The couple has two grown daughters, Victoria and Andriene.

After high school Cutway was the manager of a dive shop for 12 years. Then he went to firefighters’ school because he thought he needed something with benefits. Cutway was a firefighter for the City of Bradenton Fire Department from 1997 to 2014 and also did metal fabrication in his garage for a long time. “I just liked playing with metal,” Cutway said. “I liked welding stuff. I built two motorcycles.”

The fabrication hobby became a business when a buddy needed a special tool and brought some metal to Cutway with some drawings.

“Two days later I called him up and told him his tools were ready, and he said, ‘Great,’ and that he needed six more,” Cutway explained.

After that project his friend jokingly started calling the garage shop Cutway Custom Creations.

The name stuck, and Cutway started a business.

Cutway got into the beekeeping business when about 10 years ago he and a friend were in his fabrication shop having a few adult beverages. “My buddy, Greg Bogart, used to make beer, which needs mead, and you need honey to make mead, and to have honey, you need bees,” Cutway said. “We’ve been friends for years, and we’d spitball ideas all the time, and this was one of those times. Then he called me up and said ‘There’s a bunch of bee equipment for sale on Craigslist,’ and I said, ‘Hey, let’s go do it.’ So we bought out the beekeeper’s equipment in Fort Myers, then got some bees from a beekeeper in Wauchula,” added Cutway, concluding his story.

Before buying the equipment and the bees, Cutway said he never even thought about bees or beekeeping. “I learned all about beekeeping from the school of hard knocks,” he said. “I’m self-taught with help from some buddy beekeepers.” Cutway has become well-known in the local beekeeping circles and is president of the Suncoast Beekeepers Association.

He processes and jars all of his honey himself. “I run it through an uncapper machine to puncture the wax seals on the comb cells,” Cutway said. Then he takes the combs and stands them on end inside a big centrifuge, which forces the honey out of the cells as it rotates.

The honey drips down to the bottom of the centrifuge vat where he empties the honey into buckets through a gate valve. The honey is then strained through a stainless steel sieve fine enough to get the big pieces of wax out but also allowing some of the pollen to remain in the honey.

So far this year he has jarred 3,000 pounds of honey. He does between 5,000 to 7,000 pounds a year, depending on the conditions. Cutway sells his honey only at farmer’s markets and street fairs from Parrish to Englewood. He will do one-to-three events per weekend. “I pretty much do something with bees seven days a week,” Cutway said.

To find out which market Cutway will be at, check out his website at www.myakkasgold.com or his Facebook page, www.facebook.com/myakkasgoldapiary.apiary

You also can contact Cutway by phone at 941-746-1597 or via email at MyakkasGoldApiary@gmail.com.

The Suncoast Beekeepers Association website is www.suncoastbeekeepers.org, and its Facebook page is www.facebook.com/SuncoastBees.