Photos by Justin Cook | The Roanoke Times

Beekeeper Jerry Borger prepares to extract thousands of bees from the wall of an old Floyd County farmhouse. Dottie Kirkland and Karl Backlund bought the farmhouse from Arthur Stapel, 86, who hadn't gone upstairs in years and had no idea the bedroom wall was filled with bees, Kirkland says.

Jerry Borger works with his bee hive at his home in Montgomery County. He keeps three full hives, a nucleus or half-sized hive he uses for "spare parts," and a queen castle so he will have extra queens — who are essential to the success of each hive — handy in case one of the others leaves a hive or is killed, all surrounded by a bear-deterring electric fence.

Bees circle a bare lightbulb in the old farmhouse in Floyd County where Jerry Borger was tasked with their removal.

Jerry Borger gets dressed in his bee suit before removing thousands of bees from a farmhouse in Floyd County. Behind him, homeowner Karl Backlund gets ready to help as Dottie Kirkland, co-owner of the farmhouse, looks on.

CHRISTIANSBURG -- After Jerry Borger planted a couple of dozen apple, peach, plum, nectarine and cherry trees on the land around his home off North Fork Road, he thought it might be a good idea to have some bees around to pollinate them.

He took a one-day class on beekeeping and bought two 3-pound packages of honeybees from a Georgia supplier.

Borger would learn that the bees didn't want much to do with his apple trees. But after he'd had them around for a year, it didn't matter.

"I got hooked on the honeybees," Borger said.

He didn't know much about beekeeping, Borger said, but he enjoyed caring for the bees and learning how to figure out how to help them make more honey.

"The first year," he said, "you get your arms around it and hold on because there's a lot of learning."

And a lot of honey for him and his wife, Terry, both tea-drinkers. Borger collected about 200 pounds of honey from the two hives that first year.

Borger is now in his third year of beekeeping. He keeps three full hives, a nucleus or half-sized hive he uses for "spare parts," and a queen castle so he will have extra queens -- who are essential to the success of each hive -- handy in case one of the others leaves a hive or is killed, all surrounded by a bear-deterring electric fence.

A retired Air Force meteorologist, Borger is also the president of the New River Valley Beekeepers Association, a group of about 140 beekeepers mostly from Montgomery and Floyd counties.

The number of New River Valley beekeepers is growing, even as experts say the number of honeybees continues to decline.

Scientists have estimated that the domesticated honeybee population has dropped by half in the past 50 years.

"When I was a child, you couldn't walk across your front lawn in bare feet without worrying about stepping on a bee," Pulaski beekeeper Karl Hunter said. But now, he said, people rarely see honeybees.

According to experts, one-third of our food supply is pollinated by honeybees. In some areas, farmers have reported that their crops have suffered because of a lack of those bees.

"The honeybee is really one of those keystone species that, if something happens to it, it affects the entire ecosystem," Hunter said. It's not just the human food supply that is affected, but the food supply for wildlife as well.

Part of the problem is two types of destructive mites that were introduced to the United States in the 1980s. For commercial beekeepers, colony collapse disorder is often to blame.

Hunter, a pastor who has 50 hives as part of Hunter Apiaries, sells honey, breeds and sells queens, and sells nucleus hives to new beekeepers.

"Demand is really high right now," he said, "because so many people are getting into it."

Bees can be ordered from businesses in warmer states, but there's no guarantee those bees can survive sometimes-harsh Virginia winters. Local bees are more likely to be successful, beekeepers said.

Partly for that reason, beekeepers do all they can to save hives of bees that have swarmed and are looking for a home or hives that have taken up residence indoors.

"It's a great way to get bees," Shawsville beekeeper and physical therapist Marie Goodwin said. "It's a way to get bees from Virginia."

Goodwin got her newest hive from the walls of an old Floyd County farmhouse.

The morning of June 5, Goodwin and Borger packed up much of their bee gear and trekked to a rural section of the county to save a large hive from a second-floor bedroom in a home that was about to be remodeled.

"No one's been up here in five years," Dottie Kirkland said, surveying a pile of dead honeybees several inches deep in front of a window.

Kirkland and Karl Backlund had closed on the 1920-built home just the day before. They bought it from Arthur Stapel after he moved to Charlotte, N.C., from the home he had lived in for decades. Stapel, 86, hadn't gone upstairs in years and had no idea the bedroom wall was filled with bees, Kirkland said.

When Kirkland noticed the steady stream of bees making their way in and out of a small opening in the exterior wall, she called the entomology department at Virginia Tech. She was referred to the beekeepers association.

"We didn't want to destroy them," she said. "But there's no way you can renovate with a wall full of bees."

As Backlund -- dressed like Borger and Goodwin in a protective bee suit and with his head covered in a hat and veil -- began removing wall boards, Borger and Goodwin knew they'd hit a jackpot.

Many thousands of bees were clustered together on nearly a dozen slabs of comb, some dripping with honey.

But it wasn't the sweet, amber-colored honey Goodwin and Borger were trying to save. It was the sections of comb where the cells were slightly larger and filled with a darker material. In these, the hive's queen had laid her eggs in brood cells.

Borger pried the comb off the back of each board and handed it to Goodwin, who gently brushed the bees off into a prepared hive box, their new home.

With a drywall knife, Goodwin carefully trimmed sections of comb to fit the frames inside her hive before securing them with rubber bands.

In August or September, Goodwin will extract the honey from these and her other hives. Her extra honey will be sold at the Shawsville Farmers Market.

"It's an expensive hobby," Hunter said, and one in which beekeepers are often stung. "It's one of those things where the bees have to pay their way."

Buying local honey is a way to ensure that honeybees will remain locally, he said.

Also, he said, "if you know the beekeeper, you know the honey is pure."

It's entirely up to each beekeeper how involved he or she becomes with the hobby, beekeepers said.

"There are different levels," Borger said. Some beekeepers want one hive, some want 100. Some want to check on their hives only a couple of times each season, he said. Others -- like him -- check on them almost daily.

"It's not like having pets. They don't recognize your voice and come out to say hi," Borger said. "But you can know next to nothing and have bees and get honey.

"In ways it can be humbling. "But there are so many exhilarating parts as well."