The rest of the honey is warmed enough to make it flow, then strained and jarred for sale. For honeycomb pieces that are intact - and, as he describes them, “really pretty” - he cuts them into squares and sells them individually. ![]() Once Booth gets the honeycomb out of the hives and back to the kitchen, he freezes it for two weeks to get rid of any pests. “When they’re pollinating, like from people’s fruit trees and gardens, the honey is darker.” “The lighter the honey, the more mesquite flowers the bees have been messing with,” Booth says. But the bees making the honey aren’t managed, so it’s hard to know exactly which plants they’ve been pollinating. Most of the honey Booth harvests is from mesquite flowers, because mesquite trees are prevalent in the Southwest. “We take it back to my commercial kitchen and make gourmet honey, honey butters and honey mustard.” “In a normal year, we get over 3 tons of honey, on average,” he says. He doesn’t let the “gold” inside go to waste: Booth and his team remove the hives and gather the honeycomb inside to make Killer Bee Honey products. What sets Booth apart from other bee removal companies is what he does after the hive is removed. “We help the Border Patrol, police, fire marshal, Homeland Security, ranchers and apartment complexes.” “We do removal for everyone in Cochise County,” he says. Regardless, an unmanaged beehive must sometimes be removed for safety reasons - and that’s where Booth and his company come in. “They just got so mean, and at that time, I had to stop keeping bees and I segued into doing beehive removal.”Īccording to the Southern Arizona Beekeepers Association, Africanized bees are an invasive hybrid of European and African bees, which makes it hard to determine whether a swarm of bees is European or Africanized. ![]() “I’d get calls from ranchers telling me how bees had been in the tack room for 20 years, but all of a sudden, they were stinging the cows and horses,” he says. At the time, most of the honeybees found in Arizona were the European variety, but within the next decade, Africanized bees, which are more aggressive, began to take over - and Booth decided it was time to change direction. Booth (pictured) started out as a mead maker in the 1980s, and while making the honey wine, he had the idea to keep his own bees, starting with a couple of hives near his home in Bisbee. Reed Booth is best known as the “Killer Bee Guy” - a fitting nickname for a man who’s spent the better part of three decades handling bees and making products with their honey.
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