Honey ministry lends ‘sweet’ note to abbey life

Story and photos by Beth Donze, Clarion Herald

To view video, click here 

Bees have captured Jeff Horchoff’s imagination for more than 40 years – from the time a friend asked him to help move a colony of bees that had taken up residence in an abandoned house.

After taking off the building’s siding, Horchoff was able to view the renegade hive in all its pulsating glory: Thousands of female worker bees were seen toiling in miraculous harmony to build a nest for their egg-laying queen and transforming nectar from neighboring vegetation into the food known as “liquid gold.”

Horchoff was smitten.

“I saw the hand of God,” recalls Horchoff of the experience, which took place in 1977. “It was just so beautiful – the shape of the comb, the whiteness of it. I was struck! I said, ‘I’ve got to do this! This is me!’

“When I pull open a hive of bees and see all the bees in it and the way they’re working, I lose myself in the wonder of that,” he said. “There’s no way you can deny God in that moment!”

So, when the monks of St. Joseph Abbey approached Horchoff 10 years ago to assist in their cottage industry centered on honey production, he was all in.

Horchoff and three other volunteer bee enthusiasts currently maintain more than 100 hives spread across the abbey’s 1,200 acres and an additional 100-plus hives at seven other locations in St. Tammany Parish. Last year, the operation produced 350 gallons of raw, amber-colored honey, all sold by the pound in the monks’ gift shop under the brand name “Saint Joseph Abbee Raw Honey.”

“We have 520 gallons (harvested) right now, and we’re still not done. This year we had a very, very good honey flow,” said Horchoff, speaking June 19 after a long and sweaty week of transporting honey-laden boxes, weighing between 70 to 100 pounds each, for processing and packaging in the abbey’s St. Ambrose Honey House (known to volunteers as the “honey hut”).

Honey takes its sweet time

“It’s a six-month process to build up to the honey (harvest),” Horchoff explained. In December, rectangular frames mimicking a flattened honeycomb are dipped in wax melted down from the previous year’s harvest and are stacked in “file-folder” fashion inside hundreds of wooden boxes. Each box holds 10 frames, and three boxes stacked together form a single hive. Each hive ultimately hosts up to 40,000 bees, only one of which is the queen.

Horchoff and his crew of apiarists inspect the hives over the ensuing months to make sure the queen bee in each has ample space to lay her eggs and that the bee colony has not swarmed to another location. This maintenance work includes rotating boxes between hives and splitting up or adding boxes when a given hive becomes overcrowded.

“I usually go in with guns a-blazing. They don’t mess around and neither do I. They want to sting you!” said Horchoff, who suits up in protective beekeeping gear and lights pine straw in a hand-held device called a smoker. A few puffs of smoke settle down the bees, allowing Horchoff and his beekeeping mates to safely approach them.

“They actually think there’s a fire – they think they’ve got to leave the hive – but really, these bees will not sting you unless you press on them,” Horchoff said.

Every honey harvest has its own its own taste profile based on the blend of nectars the bees draw from their surroundings. At the abbey, the main honey harvest in June relies mostly on nectar gathered from flowering trees such as Chinese tallow and privet (the shrub also known as ligustrum). Over the shorter autumn season, the abbey’s bees primarily feast on goldenrod. 

Not a drop wasted

The June harvest of boxes bursting with honey is just one phase of the beekeepers’ work. Inside the processing hut, each honey-laden frame is fed through a machine called an “uncapper” to have its wax coatings scraped off. Once the wax is removed, the frames are filed into a large centrifuge called an extractor, which spins out the honey and pushes it into a 55-gallon drum. Honey still clinging to the disengaged wax coverings is salvaged in yet another centrifuge, and the wax set aside for use in candles and lotions sold at the abbey’s gift shop, and for the coating of frames used in the coming honey season.

“Our honey is 100% treatment free,” Horchoff said. “Not only are we treatment free, but when we process our wax, we don’t put any heat to it. Our honey is all naturally filtered, so whatever the bees put into that honey, (those components are still) active and alive in it. It’s ‘raw.’”

Honey bees love Louisiana

New Orleans-born Horchoff, 63, attended Our Lady of the Rosary Elementary, St. John Vianney Prep and LSU before moving to the northshore in 1978 to become a woodworker. Horchoff, who also spent 27 years as a postal worker in Mandeville, was drafted into the abbey’s volunteer ranks 11 years ago by Deacon Mark Coudrain. Deacon Coudrain admired the woodwork Horchoff had executed in their home church of St. Jane de Chantal in Abita Springs and asked him to assist in Saint Joseph Woodworks, the abbey’s casket-making ministry.

A year or so later, one of the monks asked Horchoff if he would be interested in keeping bees.

“(That monk) left, but I had already started with the bees – so I just sort of kept it up,” said Horchoff, whose YouTube channel, “Jeff Horchoff Bees,” boasts 95,300 subscribers and more than 27 million hits. He also is part of the 100-member River Region Bee Club, which brings together men and women who have a passion for bees and wish to educate the public on their importance.

Not having “the cold to contend with” is just one reason our region makes an excellent home for bees, Horchoff said.

“We are truly blessed with the habitat that we have in Southeast Louisiana because we have all this marshland; we have so much forest area; and we don’t have a mono-agriculture, like all soybeans, so we don’t have the pesticides,” he said.

Both bees, monks work together
for common good

Horchoff uses the abbey’s “holy honey” to sweeten everything from spaghetti sauce to tuna fish. He noted that beekeeping has been part of monastic life for 1,500 years and that bee hives offer a perfect metaphor for monastic life.

“Bees live in community for the betterment of the community, and they live selflessly in the community. They give a total commitment to the preservation of the hive (as monks do at a monastery),” Horchoff said.

“In my opinion, there’s no way somebody can be a beekeeper without seeing the connection between God’s hand in it,” he added. “That’s what sustains me, because you’ll burn out in two years – from disappointment, from being stung – if there’s not some higher connection to it.”

Proceeds from honey sales, as well as funds generated from Horchoff’s YouTube channel, benefit the bee program. Curbside pickup for the honey is available now at https://stjosephabbeygiftshop.ecwid.com/ or by calling the gift shop at (985) 867-2227. The gift shop will physically reopen July 7. The new hours are Monday-Saturday, 9-11 a.m.; and noon-3 p.m. Visit www.saintjosephabbey.com/gift-shop for more information on shopping guidelines. With the exception of the gift shop and cemetery, the abbey campus, located at 75376 River Road in St. Benedict, Louisiana, remains closed. There are no public Masses at this time.

Beth Donze can be reached at bdonze@clarionherald.org.