By Moses Leos III

Kyle resident, business owner and apiarist Gordon Wybo takes pride in educating people on the benefits of honeybees.  

Dismissing the “Hollywood” image of angry, swarming bees bent on hurting people is one of his goals. 

“We’re trying to bring awareness to the fact that we need the honeybees,” Wybo said. Education was the primary reason why Wybo invited Hays County citizens to celebrate National Honeybee Day Saturday with the inaugural Kyle Honeybee Festival at his business, Sustainacycle. 

Wybo said it is important to save the bees as “1 out of every 3 bites of food come directly because of bees, while the remaining two bites come indirectly because of bees.”

People need honeybees for more than just food sources, however. 

Honeybees give off a frequency with their wings that regulates the temperature within their hive, which affects the alpha waves in the human brain, Wybo said. The resulting frequency creates a calming, meditative state.

Start of a beehive enterprise 

In 2013, Wybo and his wife Janet started their first beehive, which ultimately led to his creation of a new hive design, which features an upside-down triangle shape with removable, short wooden slats. Bees would construct their combs within the slats, making it easier for Wybo to collect honey.

Traditional box-style bee hives can collect so much honey that when the square panels are removed, they can weigh up to 150lbs, Wybo said. 

While the new hive design yields about 80 percent of the volume that a traditional square hive can produce, Wybo said the beekeeper will do about 50 percent of the work with the new hive. 

“It’s a little less honey and a lot less work,” Wybo said. 

Wybo said both the new and traditional hives can both house around 60,000 bees, with each only serving one queen. 

But Wybo’s beehive collection isn’t limited to the common European honeybee. 

He sometimes runs into less common breeds, such as a nest of Mexican honey wasps he was recruited to rescue from a tree at the San Marcos Premium Outlets.

Wybo said the honey wasps look more like a carpenter ant, rather than a traditional honeybee. While he said they are docile insects, honey wasps can pack a sting like a red wasp. 

The Mexican honey wasps build a hive out of paper around the branch of a tree that resembles a papier-mâché ball. The hive contains honey, but only to store as a winter food source.

Saving hives and lives 

But modern population growth, along with the prevalent use of pesticides, has threatened the honeybee population, which in turn threatens human food sources.

“We’re losing honeybees through pesticides and habitat encroachment and a thousand different reasons,” Wybo said.  

Wybo, who has his own beehives, began to mitigate the issue by working with local animal control, fire and police departments to safely collect and relocate bees from populated areas, where they could pose a threat to people.

Wybo asks residents with a honeybee infestation to send him pictures of the hive from a safe distance, so he can formulate a plan to safely deconstruct it. 

Wybo said he uses a special special vacuum to suck up the bees, including the queen, who’s the size of a nickel, and deposit them directly into a specially designed “bee condo.” 

From there, Wybo transfers the bees to his garden, where he will reconstruct their hive.

“If someone has a question or has been injured by bees in an area, I will come out to collect them and worry about the bill later,” Wybo said. “I want to get them (bees) out of there without any injury or stress to the people living there.”