About Robert

Robert got his interested in bees and beekeeping from a 6th grade field trip to a local museum. He kept bees through his junior high school, high school, and college years. He graduated from the University of Kansas with a Liberal Arts degree and major in a foreign language-German. He found out during his last semester of college that he was only 3 credits away from earning a minor in Biology after having taken such courses as Zoology, Botany, Human Anatomy & Physiology, and even Plant Geography besides the requisites. In 2003 and 2004, as well as 2005, he attended the Dr. Marion Ellis’s Midwest Master Beekeeping courses. He took the queen-rearing course taught by Dr. Marla Spivak and Gary Reuter while in Lincoln, NE in 2005. He has been rearing queens by grafting larvae from his own stock ever since. The American Beekeeping Federation held their national meeting in Kansas City in January 2003 where Robert attended his first national conference and became a member of the ABF. He attended several other ABF meetings and has been at national speaker, giving presentations at Louisville, KY, Sacramento, CA, Reno, NV, and Galveston, TX. His topics included beeswax soap-making and queen rearing and also mead-making. He has been rearing his own queens for the last 11 years. “Attending the national meetings puts things in a bigger world perspective. I come away with better ideas. I also love running into the authors of all those great articles in both Bee Culture and The American Bee Journal.” Since 2005, after an invitation from Katherine Kelly Robert has become involved with the urban agricultural farm movement in Kansas City, taking care of the hives as a volunteer at a local nonprofit organization, dedicated to community gardening, and teaching people about growing food in the city. This involvement has given him contacts and ways to expand the locations of several of his bee yards in suburban and urban settings. Robert has been providing financial leadership, serving as Treasurer for the Northeastern Kansas Beekeepers' as well as the Kansas Honey Producers' Associations for over 10 years.

Soap Making

Making Soap with Beeswax

There are basically 4 processes to making soap:

  1. Cold-Process (traditional saponification involving a chemical reaction between an acid (fats) and a base
  2. Hand-milling (grated cold-process)
  3. Melt & Pour (melted glycerin)
  4. The ‘cooking’ method. Becky Tipton, my mentor, has been working on a Hot-Process soap production. I’ll have more on that process at a later date.

The process I use in my out-line below is the traditional cold-process method.

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Honey bees teach young people to be patient, gentle, and good stewards of the natural world.

Quote

Honey bees are superb teachers when trying to instill an environmental awareness and conservation ethic in young people. In learning about the importance of honey bee pollination, they realize how living things depend on other living things and that, while a few insects are pests, many are essential to our survival. Honey bees teach young people to be patient and gentle. Hastiness and carelessness have painful consequences, a lesson honey bees can teach you at a young age if you keep them. Honey bees are superb teachers.

Dr. Marion Ellis