Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Here's Hawai'i | June 2000

Here's Hawai'i

Spreading Honey

Beekeeper Michael Kliks, who has nine apiaries on O'ahu, maintains that Hawai'i honey contains a lot of aloha

If you think we're lucky to live in Hawai'i, think about honeybees. Here the ocean protects them from creepy things that are infecting Mainland colonies, such as the varroa mite and Africanized bee strains, and the flowers and climate are the best in the world. For these and other reasons, including the fact that beekeepers are a passionate lot, Hawai'i may be the most sensible place for apiculture, the Gold Coast of the bee world.

I looked up Michael Kliks, who has a doctorate in entomology and parasitology, because his signature was on the label of a bottle of Manoa Honey Co. "Beekeeper's Reserve" that I found at my favorite health food store. The honey was dark, supremely flavorful, solid enough to be spreadable and superior to any honey I've had before. The personally signed (not printed to look signed) label and the fact that the honey was aged in the hive five years piqued my interest. It turns out that Kliks, president of the Hawai'i Beekeepers' Association, is making not only superb honey, but queen bees as well, and had much to say about the importance of pollination services to diversified agriculture in Hawai'i.

"We need a reliable system of pollination for these valuable crops here," he said passionately before we suited up to visit the hives at his home. "Without that, you can forget diversified agriculture. We know from research how many hives are necessary to pollinate a given area of a crop." This managed pollination service has shown good results in increasing yield and quality of produce.

His nine apiaries on O'ahu-from Diamond Head to Waiahole-Waikane and Kahuku-produce honeys of various types and grades, including "Crater Kiawe," "Waikane Golden" and "Beekeeper's Reserve," the one that bowled me over. This year, Kliks is aiming to double the 5,000 bottles he distributed last year, a goal that will no doubt keep him as busy as a you-know-what. "This is a handmade product with a lot of aloha in it," he continued. "We're not just mass-producing this stuff with no concern for who's eating it. It's our family to your family."

He then introduced me to the world of buzzing, busy, honey-producing, mating, reproducing, pollen-gathering, goal-oriented honeybees. The queens moved more commandingly and were discernibly larger. Kliks hopes to produce queens for export to the Mainland, where contaminated strains and the migration of Africanized honeybees (called "killer bees" in the media, a moniker that annoys beekeepers) are major threats to apiculture.

"There's a fear of bringing in infected queens," he explained. "Canada is restricting U.S. queen imports, and it's already illegal to import any bees into the United States. It's been illegal for 30 years to bring bees into Hawai'i." Because New Zealand is certified to be free of varroa mites, it's a prime source of bees for the United States, Canada and Asia.

Hawai'i, protected by thousands of miles of ocean, is ideal as a source of queen bees. By next January, Kliks said, he hopes to have a thousand queens a month, "just for starters."

Besides tending his hives, gathering and bottling the honey, making 500 beeswax candles a year and raising queens, Kliks also makes meads-25 different kinds, for home use. A mead is a beverage made by fermenting honey, water and yeast, and one mead I tasted was made of honey that had been in the hives for about 10 years and in the cask for another 15. It was as smooth and flavorful as a fine port."Bees are all about order," Kliks said. "Everything is orderly, staged, regulated, anticipated, predictable. They're such nice creatures to have. I may not have dogs and chickens, cows and pigs, but I can have 600,000 bees."

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