When Ian Fraser was laid off from his high-tech fibre optics job more than a decade ago, he had six months on employment insurance to figure out what the was going to do with the rest of his life.
Fraser had taken up Buddhism and liked to meditate on beeswax candles, but without a job, he could no longer afford them. So he started making his own in his home kitchen in a rather modest shack in Ontario.
"Within three years, I was selling 50,000 candles a year," he says, with a shy smile, wearing a long, denim smock in his Burnaby warehouse. "The next thing I knew, I was the fifth largest beeswax candle maker in the country."
Fraser's candle-making led to cleaning and selling massive amounts of wax. He began providing supplies to other candle makers, and in 2010, he got his first hive, moving ever closer to his real passion: the honeybee. For Fraser, bees are central to our survival, since they are responsible for pollinating crops.
"Some people look at the bees as the canary in the coal mine," says the 55-year-old Port Coquitlam resident.
For years, colonies across North American and Europe have been dying off or disappearing. The causes range from mites, pesticides and habitat loss, but the latest smoking gun is neonicotinoid - a type of insecticide that acts as a neurotoxin for bees. Some beekeepers and the Wilderness Committee are calling on the provincial government to ban neonicotinoids, something the European Union has already done.
"The bees are going to be dying if we don't smarten up. We're all going to be dead. We're just the tip of the iceberg. Two-thirds of our food is pollinated by honey bees. Without the honey bees, without the pollination, our food supply is at risk."
This March, Fraser opened Burnaby's first beekeeping supply shop, a small warehouse on Winston Street, close to Burnaby Lake. The shop sells starter kits for beginners, protective clothing, bee boxes, nucleus hives and queens. He also sells honey, bees, candles and pollen - nature's multivitamin, he says.
"We pretty well sell everything there is that the hive offers us," Fraser says.
According to Fraser, the buzz around the beekeeping business is huge.
"The growth rate is incredible right now. There's a lot of media attention on the demise of the bee, ... and because of that, people are wanting to get involved," he said.
Fraser himself has 23 hives near a blueberry field in Pitt Meadows, and in optimum conditions, he gets 50 pounds of honey in a week, while slower periods may require a month to generate that kind of volume.
"It depends on the condition and what's available to them," he says. "They are very weather dependent and crop dependent."
Besides the copious amounts of honey, backyard beekeeping is beneficial for the ecosystem, according to Melinda Yong, an environmental technician with the City of Burnaby.
"While the homeowners are collecting honey, the bees are pollinating fruits for us. That's part of it - the pollination services the bees provide for everyone," she says.
Meanwhile, Fraser is happy he's found his passion and turned it into a business.
"Now I wake up early like a kid at Christmas," he says. "It's been the best 13 years of my life. It's just an incredible experience. To do something that's so related to the environment, that's so natural, that's so grounded, that's so beneficial to everyone, it's just that warm fuzzy feel-good feeling. You know you are doing something worthwhile."
For more on Fraser's shop, go to www.bcbeekeepingsupplies.ca.
