Dennis Arp’s Mountain Top Honey
The Sweet Life
Mountainaire, Arizona · By Peter Friederici
When he was a teenager growing up on an Iowa farm, Dennis Arp once went squirrelhunting
with friends and came across some beehives. The boys decided they’d try
to extract the honey. Dennis borrowed a veil from his dad, who’d kept
bees in the past. Lacking experience, the youths didn’t quite master
the technique of taking honey from the hives of bees that didn’t want
to give it up. “Pretty soon there were bees inside the veil,” Dennis
says, “and we decided it wasn’t worth it.”
Dennis has had a bit more practice by now. He started keeping bees as a
hobby at the suggestion of a couple of coworkers about twenty-five
years ago, and now, from his home in Mountainaire, just south of
Flagstaff, Dennis manages an enterprise of 1,200 beehives that on
average produce 100,000 pounds of honey a year. As proprietor of
Mountain Top Honey, he’s a successful entrepreneur whose work is firmly
centered on the Colorado Plateau, even as he sometimes sells his
products in places as far-flung as Taiwan.
Managing bees is an exercise in timing and motion, especially for someone who livesat
7,000 feet where nothing is in bloom for at least six months of the
year. As a result, Dennis and his part-time assistant, Tom Hedwall, are
on the road a great deal. At the beginning of February they travel to
California to place beehives in the almond groves. Almond nectar
doesn’t make good honey, but almond trees must be pollinated by bees,
and the growers pay well for that service. By mid-March it’s time to
move the bees back to Arizona and the dwindling orange groves of the
greater Phoenix area. The orange blossom honey the bees produce there
is light and tangy and popular with visitors and residents alike.
In May and early June, Dennis and Tom move the hives to the desert
outskirts surrounding Phoenix, where the bees forage on catclaw,
mesquite, and paloverde flowers. Sometimes the two men have help from
Dennis’s son, who is in college. Always they work long hours. The
beehives are moved only at night, when the bees are resting. In the
desert it’s hot even at midnight. “We spend a whole lot of time in the
middle of the night moving bees, then working all the rest of the day
too,” Dennis says. They drive a flatbed truck. The wooden hives are
stacked on pallets and moved with a forklift. In one night they can
move 120 hives – a tenth of his total.
By early summer the bees are moved to the Little Colorado River valley
near Winslow and Holbrook, where the honey comes from camelthorn. This
is a thorny and noxious weed, but it produces fine honey. When the
summer rains start in July, it’s time to move the hives close to home,
to the grasslands and ponderosa forests around Flagstaff. Where
specifically to move them is a roll of the dice. The monsoon rains are
irregular. “Sometimes,” Dennis says, “there might be flowers everywhere
in one place, and you could go a mile one way or the other and not see
any flowers. It can be kind of hit or miss.” By the time a good bloom
happens, it can be too late to move many hives there. Like a wise
investor, he finds it prudent to split up his hives in various
locations.
This summer the bees out by A-1 Mountain produced little honey, while
those thirty miles to the southeast on Anderson Mesa made a bumper crop
– a hundred poundsper
hive. In November, after the bloom, Dennis and Tom extract the honey
from the hives. They work in the “honey house” – a building the size of
a two-car garage next to Dennis’s house. The yard is full of
fifty-five-gallon drums and five-gallon buckets, mounds of yellow wax,
and machinery of indeterminate purpose.
The honey house is crammed with hives and with the machinery needed to
extract and process the honey. “All this stuff makes my electric meter
spin pretty good,” acknowledges Dennis. Each hive consists of stacked
white wooden boxes, each of which is lined with an array of rectangular
wooden frames in which the bees build their combs and make their honey.
To extract the honey, Tom places the frames on a pair of moving chains
that carries them past a vibrating knife, which cuts the wax caps off
the combs. Wax and honey slide gloppily down into a vat. A sweet,
earthy smell fills the room. The frames continue moving on the chains
into the “extractor,” a large stainless steel vat in which they’re spun
at high speed. The centrifugal force presses out the honey. It and the
leavings from the uncapper end up in a sump tank built into the floor,
from which the honey is pumped into two holding tanks that each can
accommodate almost two tons of honey. The leavings go into a small,
square machine in which a heater separates the remnant honey from the
wax.
It’s a process that looks messy, but in fact little is wasted. Dennis
sells the beeswax to candle and salve makers, the pollen at health food
stores, and the resin-like propolis, which the bees use to make repairs
and which has antibacterial qualities, to makers of herbal medical
products. He sells much of the honey directly to customers at a variety
of stores and farm stands in northern and central Arizona; some goes to
local restaurants; some is sold to a bakery in the Phoenix area; and
then there is the occasional inquiry from Taiwan or elsewhere.
After helping Tom with the extraction process, Dennis sits by a row of
five heated tanks at one end of the room. It’s here that the honey ends
up, in its diverse flavors and colors – orange blossom, desert
wildflower, mesquite, camelthorn, Flagstaff wildflower – each heated to
130 degrees so that it can flow smoothly into glass jars. At one point
he samples a bit of the honey that came from the ponderosa forest near
Flagstaff this summer. It’s tangy, almost a bit acidic, and very
different from mesquite honey (dark, almost like molasses) and
camelthorn (very light).
“It has a really nice, fresh flavor, doesn’t it?” he says. “At an
industrial scale you really lose that individual flavor and character.
Most supermarket honey is mixed from honey from all over – Argentina,
China, Mexico. You don’t know where it’s from.”
That’s far from the case with Mountain Top Honey. Dennis fills jar
after jar from the barrels, labels them to indicate precisely what’s
inside, and places them in boxes that he’ll drive himself to a local
store. It is hard, grinding work to get the honey to this point, but as
the accumulated sunshine of spring and summer, of goldeneye and
rabbitbrush and buckwheat and fleabane, flows into the clear jars and
glows golden under the fluorescent lights, it is also easy to be sure
that it is sweetly, deliciously worthwhile.
___________________
This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.
Dennis Arp
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