Bees buzzing in the backyard

Lake Street has a few more residents than you might expect from a casual glance — thousands of them, in fact. 

All of these tiny, tallow-and-black neighbors make their homes in the backyards of siblings Scott and Marianne Ross.

Marianne Ross, an intensive care nurse, has lived in Trussville for about 10 years, while Scott Ross, who works in construction, just moved into a house down the street about a year ago. They got into beekeeping about five years ago, with the help of their mother, retired biology teacher Linda Ross, and golden retrievers Honey and Maggie. There are now about 20 beehives between their backyards, with thousands of tiny honeybees searching for pollen and nectar as far as three to five miles away.

Lake Street is an ideal setting for a beehive, with the berry bushes and fruit trees in Marianne Ross’s yard and plenty of flowers and trees planted by the neighbors. The Rosses said they try to make sure the bees are good neighbors by giving free honey, catching swarms and preventing the bees from becoming more aggressive. Most of them, Scott Ross said, are comparatively tame.

“There’s probably 2 million bees sitting right over here, and you’re not being attacked by bees,” Scott Ross said.

“[Neighbors] are just amazed that we have the bees right here,” Marianne Ross said.

Last summer, the Rosses’ beehives grew from a personal hobby into a small business. Through good weather, good bees or good management, the honey just kept flowing in 2015.

“Whether it was a particularly good year or we did everything right or some combination thereof, we ended up with a thousand pounds of honey,” Marianne Ross said.

They created Grasshopper Cottage to sell honey and beeswax products through Facebook, markets and Marianne Ross’s front yard. At the time, none of the Rosses realized how popular locally produced honey was.

“End of June [2015], I was like, ‘Man, what are we going to do with all this stuff?’ I was worried we were going to be stuck with it, [or] we were going to be eating it by the spoonful all winter long. And then we ended up selling out,” Scott Ross said.

While they sold honey at farmers markets around Birmingham and to friends and co-workers, Marianne Ross said they did the most business through word of mouth and setting up a table in front of her house.

“We would even have the police stop in [their] cruisers,” Marianne Ross said.

And when the honey ran out in October, the calls didn’t stop coming.

“Several times a week people would be calling, saying ‘I really want to buy some honey. Do you have honey?’ And we didn’t realize the demand for raw, local honey, and it was just phenomenal,” Linda Ross said.

Since January, Marianne Ross said she has received regular calls asking when they would begin collecting honey again. The Rosses were planning their first summer harvest for the end of June, with a second and possibly third one later in the summer.

Since they don’t use chemical pesticides on the plants in their own yards or the hives themselves, Marianne Ross said their honey is popular. They like to educate the public as they sell, too, by bringing an observation hive and samples of honeycombed beeswax for both children and adults to learn. Marianne Ross said keeping bees has made her more aware of the environment, from the impact of pesticides to different seasonal plants bloom. She said when she wants to share that knowledge with others.

Keeping bees is always a learning process, Scott Ross said. Even after five years, there’s still something new or unexpected when they look inside their hives. 

“We’re still scratching our heads at times,” he said.

The Rosses have done a lot of research, but so much of the hobby can only be learned once you’ve put on the suit and tried it out.

“Beekeeping is very local. Whatever I tell anybody here will not apply to someone in Montgomery or Tennessee or Montana, because it all depends on our local environment,” Marianne Ross said. “It takes several years to realize just how local it is. You can do what they tell you in the books, but until you fine-tune it for your area, you really won’t see what you were planning on seeing.”

Scott Ross, who will readily walk up to the hive without a suit and pick up a frame covered in bees, said beekeeping is by necessity a calming hobby. To avoid being stung, he always has to be calm and careful when he’s around the hives.

Right now, Scott Ross said they have “maxed out” the number of bees their neighborhood can sustain. He’s interested in finding more land where they can continue to increase their honeybee population.

“We limit because of neighbors,” Marianne Ross said. “We’d have a hundred hives if we could.”

Find out more about Grasshopper Cottage and where they’ll be selling this summer by finding them on Facebook.