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COVER STORIES: BACK TO THE LAND...STILL
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| Photo
by Dennis Wolverton |
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Kenny Williams, A71
Beekeeping brings untold benefits
to agriculture as it contributes to “Earth’s natural
bounty"
Back to Back
to the Land...Still
When Kenny Williams, A71, went to Oregon’s Reed College for a master’s
degree in education, he never thought much about honeybees. But one day, a former
student dropped by and mentioned he had seen some beehives. “And he said
he thought of me,” recalls Williams. “For some reason, what he said
struck a chord.” His curiosity piqued, Williams checked out books on the
subject from the library, which led to an apprenticeship. Within a few years
he was loading his own hives onto a 1955 Studebaker truck to pollinate farmers’ local
crops.
Williams’s gamble on beekeeping paid off. Today he operates his own 600-hive
enterprise, Wild Harvest Honey, out of Blodgett, Oregon. Each summer, he trucks
his hives throughout the Willamette Valley to help farmers to pollinate their
crops, and, every February, to northern California to pollinate some of the 450,000
acres of almond orchards there. He also distributes hives in numerous locations
in the Coast Range west of the Willamette Valley, where his bees can produce
up to 20 tons of golden blackberry blossom honey annually. Williams sells to
natural food co-ops, restaurants, and a brewery; he ships the rest to a Midwest
packer.
As president of the Oregon State Beekeepers Association, and with more than two
decades of beekeeping experience under his belt, Williams is ready with talking
points about the benefits of honeybees. Billions of dollars’ worth of food
require honeybee pollination, he notes; few people realize, for instance, that
each year some 400,000 hives come into California from out of state, including
40,000 from Oregon, to assist in the pollination of 450,000 acres of almond orchards.
Without this industry, quality would be lower and yields of a variety of crops
would drop by 20 to 50 percent, he says. “I believe it was Albert Einstein
who said that, essentially, human life would be eliminated within five years
if honeybees disappeared. The natural increase in plant life provided by the
systematic pollination of honeybees is enormous.”
And from that perspective, Williams says he enjoys earning a living while doing
something essential, simple, and good. “It’s what Thoreau called
honest labor,” he says, “while contributing to Earth’s natural
bounty.”
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