A hive of activity

Chris Klepps stands in a grove of shiny green noni trees, bright sunlight triggering sweat as he uses a hand-held smoker to puff calm upon the beehive in front of him.

The third-generation beekeeper pops the lid with a sticky cracking sound. The bees buzz louder, but most continue their diligent work of honey and hive production unabated as Klepps finds the hive’s queen, who is bigger and darker in color, plucks her out between index finger and thumb, and then puts her abdomen between his pursed lips to free his hands so he can put the hive’s wooden slats, full of wax and dripping honey, back in place.

He then moves the queen from his mouth into a special vial his spouse and business partner, Wendy, hands him. It will be used to ship the queen to the mainland via UPS.

The couple’s company — Department of Agriculture-inspected Ono Queens (http://onoqueens.buzz) — raises queen bees near Pahoa for sale to honey producers on the mainland. It’s sort of a separate entity from their honey production, even though the queen hives also make honey.

A windfall they received this month will hasten the next step to expand their operation to a total of 1,500 hives, including those that produce honey and those used to produce queens.

They received a $25,000 award this month from the Hawaii Island Business Plan Competition, or HIplan, hosted by the University of Hawaii at Hilo and sponsored by the Hawaii Island Chamber of Commerce.

That kind of money, to small business owners, is “going to have a huge impact on them,” said Jim Wyban, co-chair of HIplan.

The organization’s goal is to stimulate an ecosystem of entrepreneurship on the island. Wyban calls the entrepreneurship community on the island an “untapped resource” and says he loved the ecstatic reaction the Klepps showed when they realized they had won the award. The couple plans to double production, shipping 300 queens a week. As they buy materials to make more hives, their queen production will continue to increase through next spring.

Demand is so high that Ono Queens has a waiting list.

“We now have over 5,000 queens on order through January, and we’re kind of looking at each other going, ‘How are we going to do this?’” Wendy Klepps said.

Their customers come from states all over the country, including California, New Jersey and the Carolinas, and internationally from as far away as Guam and the Philippines.

Colonies of bees in nature have a single queen. When a queen dies or comes up missing from a domesticated hive (such as when a beekeeper plucks her away), the colony is triggered to make more queens by feeding royal jelly to a few larvae.

In an apiary like the one owned by Ono Queens, the beekeeper places capsules with larvae of just the right age into the hive. Timing is everything in such scenarios, because if an individual larva is too young or too old, even by just a couple of hours, it won’t be catered to. Only the beekeeper’s perfectly-aged larvae will get the kind of attention necessary to produce a queen.

The price of a queen bee can range from $20 to $250 from various companies online, depending on the queen’s characteristics.

Chris and Wendy Klepps offer queens that have been checked to ensure they lay a lot of eggs. If a queen doesn’t lay many eggs, it does not get shipped at all.

“We had one queen that had solid brood from one end to the other. It was solid, up and down, of all eggs,” Wendy Klepps said.

Honey producers sometimes experience a queen that produces a “shotgun brood,” with eggs filling spots on a hive slot the way holes spread across Swiss cheese. That’s not good, and that queen won’t get shipped. Ono Queens might go through 100 queens but only ship 60 because they skip all the ones with bad characteristics.

Ono Queens does sometimes sell queens to honey producers in Hawaii County. But the vast majority of its demand comes from the mainland. One long-time customer from Texas experienced devastation due to flooding, and Ono Bees sent queens to help him rebuild his business. He appreciated the gesture so much that he has become a major customer as his own business flourishes again.

Raising queen bees means that the beekeeper must open hives often. And, yes, Chris Klepps gets stung from time to time.

But, says the Navy and Army veteran, “I’m a beekeeper. What are you going to expect? You’re a beekeeper, you get stung. You’re in Iraq, you get shot at.”

Competition for the HIplan award included applicants such as Aloha Nut Families Practice, Big Island Wasabi (third place), Hawaii Family Practice (second place), Dam Fine Farms, Easybotics, Hawaii Ulu Producers Coop and The Spoon Shop.

Email Jeff Hansel at jhansel@hawaiitribuneherald.com