BY GLEN MASON
VIRGINIA BEACH — Beekeeper Don Norrell had to see to his two queens. In his world, the queen rules. Norrell helps build their castles, an apiary in the domain of hives. Like the bees who serve her, he is a kind of worker bee in the queen bees’ world, making honey for us and her industrious offspring.
If he was a superhero, Norrell’s identity would be The Apiary Man. He’s developed a passion for bees and honey.
It makes you wonder where we would be without bees and honey. And it begs the question: when did Norrell fall in love with his first queen bee and start making beehives for honey?
“I started Rocky Top Apiary after attending a local beekeeping school by Beekeepers Guild of Southeast Virginia,” Norrell told me recently.
He said he needed a break after 26 years as a Norfolk homicide detective and another 16 as an investigator in the medical examiner’s office.
“My grandfather had been a beekeeper,” Norrell said. “He was a farmer. He showed me how farmers use bees to pollinate their crops. My dad, Stanley, was still alive back then. We went to beekeeping school at the Southeastern Virginia beekeepers guild. Then we joined the Chesapeake beekeeping club. I started with two hives on my 10-acre place in Currituck County, N.C.”
Now he builds apiaries in Virginia Beach, and they generate about 7,000 pounds of honey a year.
“Beekeeping was a very relaxing and calming outlet from the violence I had to deal with at work,” he said. “It was very therapeutic. Bees are amazing insects and have a perfect social community where everyone has a job and works to their death. My wife, Teresa, was a little nervous about the bees when I started because she is allergic to their stings.”
Ironically, it was Teresa Norrell who told her husband he needed to do something he’d be passionate about.
An apiary is a place where beehives are kept in abundance. They are a far cry from the oval beehives of the cartoons of our youth. Now they protect the queen bee and make honey to feed her and her offspring. Little do they know we reap the benefits of their collective efforts. You could say our lives depend on them. They pollinate many of our foods.
Norrell said he enjoys the helpfulness and fellowship of the region’s beekeepers. Research and knowledge are shared eagerly. On his Rocky Top Apiary social media page, Norrell shares his experience, educational information and interesting facts about honeybees and local honey in Currituck, Chesapeake, and Virginia Beach.
“I use Langstroth beehives,” Norrell said. “The boxes hold frames. Makes it easy to harvest honey. My hives average 50 to 100 pounds of honey a year. There are a lot of people who want local honey for allergies. Honey has a lot of medical benefits.”
Honey is known and, in some cultures, revered for its longevity. Further, its preserving elements have health benefits. Which raises the query: what exactly makes honey such an exceptional food?
In a Smithsonian Magazine article about Amina Harris, executive director of the Honey and Pollination Center at the Robert Mondavi Institute at the University of California, Harris explained, “Honey in its natural form is meager moisture. Very few bacteria or microorganisms can survive in an environment like that. They die. They’re smothered by it, essentially.”
From an epicurean perspective, the food is life, and for ages, it has sustained life. It is a food of plenty. However, honey has more to its symbiotic relationship with the kindest insect to man.
A visit to the Honey Festival at the Virginia Beach Farmers Market this past month led this intrepid epicurean to seek out Virginia Beach honey – and find Norrell and his work with bees, which helps us all.
“A third of our foods have to be pollinated,” Norrell told me. “Bees definitely help.”
The author is a writer and documentary filmmaker who grew up in Norfolk and lived in Virginia Beach for much of his life. He ran a production company, worked in college athletics and was curator at an art gallery in Virginia Beach for years.
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