Yesterday, I went with David and his two employees, Frank and Ron, to document them treating some hives for Varroa mites. The light in the second yard was perfect for the first 10 minutes that we were there. The bees were in a small clearing in the woods along a busy road. The sun for those 10 minutes was perfectly between two groups of trees. The light, filtered through the tree canopy, fell perfectly onto a few of the pallets of hives.

I spent the whole ten minutes chasing the gorgeous light and hoping David would step into the spots of light. For a minute or two, the entire yard was filled with the lingering smoke from their smokers. Normally the smoke blows away a few seconds after the hives are smoked, but the trees blocked the breeze.

Above is Ron, one of the employees, opening a hive. The story is about David, but as I was crouched there, waiting for David to come over and start working with these hives, Ron came over and started doing them.


Florida at 7 p.m. is perfect.

For the past few months, I've been doing a long-term personal project on a beekeeper. I plan to use this blog as an outlet to post these images. I have a more traditional picture story edit on my Web site (ryanpelham.com), but I hope to use this to display the images that don't make my edit. Hopefully I'll be updating this more often than my Web site, and providing a more in-depth look in the life of David Webb.

Webb is a commercial beekeeper with roughly 700 hives of bees. He's working on increasing his hive count to over 1,000. His honey house is located on State Road 520 in Cocoa, just past Bithlo heading east.



This is favorite image from the project thus far. In this image, Dave is taking a sample of bees to test for Varroa mites, one of the many things that are hurting the bee population in the United States.


On June 26, it began storming while I was driving to the honey house. The power tends to go out at the shop when it storms, so I thought I might make some pictures of him walking through the dark with a flashlight. The power didn't go out this day.

While we were standing in the area of the honey house used to fill and store 55-gallon drums of honey, Dave wandered off. About a minute after he left, I went off to find where he had gone. I walked into the garage area where he builds frames. He had gone in there to grab something, but when I went in there, he was paused in front of the screen door staring out at the rain. I raised my camera and made one frame, and then he turned around and walked away. I thought it was a nice moment.


On Wednesday, July 2, I went out to the honey house to see what was happening there. Dave wasn't there, but Frank, who works for him, was there building frames. I hung out with Frank for a bit until Dave returned. He ended up mowing the grass.

I wanted to take pictures of him mowing the grass, because I feel like I should document his entire life. Being a beekeeper isn't just about working with bees. He has to run a business and keep the honey house clean and maintained. Some people may think this image doesn't belong in a story about a beekeeper, but I feel like I need to photograph this aspect of his life.

I wanted to give the mowing pictures a sense of place. I didn't just want a picture of a guy on a mower. I wanted a picture of a guy on a mower at a honey house on the edge of a ranch.

They were also building frames and supers (the boxes that bees make honey in) on Wednesday. The above image is Dave putting pre-cut supers into the shed. There was a nice little shaft of light entering the otherwise dark shed, but unfortunately it never quite lined up on his face the way I wanted it to.