Hays is a true bee ambassador who, after 17 years as president of the New Mexico Beekeepers Association, dedicates his time to educating the community about honeybees and the therapeutic properties of their various products. An evening at Shed roots every guest in his native soil. Read more: Chef Johnny Ortiz gathers and raises the ingredients for his 12-person, reservation-only meals, served on dishes he also makes by hand. Beekeepers north of it must have a minimum of 15 hives those south need at least 25. According to Tiffany Johnson, an entomologist for the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, qualifying for a state license depends on the number of hives one has and where they are located in relation to I-40. They work together as one unit so much better than people,” says Hays, a self-proclaimed “old drone.” A commercial beekeeper who has been at the task since 1970, Hays has one of only seven licensed apiaries in the state, though he estimates there are at least 1,000 people statewide who keep bees as a hobby. Each one is born with a job it instinctively knows how to do. Wings that give life to the hive as its members collectively rear their young, remove their dead, disinfect and clean their home, make their honey, forage for pollen and nectar, tend to their queen, guard their home, and construct the immaculate hexagonal waxen chambers of their comb. Wings of newborn worker bees whose first job is to selflessly flap and flutter to keep the new generation of larvae at a steady 95 degrees. Wings that come into the world downy with branched hairs designed to collect the protein-rich pollen that sustains them-and their planet-only for the bees to fall still a few weeks later, slick and hairless from a short lifetime of altruistic deeds. Inside the 150 hives that Hays cares for, hundreds of thousands of wings beat in unison, 230 times per second.
Read more: A Bosque Farms dairy delivers milk the natural way. It is the music to which a company of sunlight, bees, and smoke realize their ballet.
It is how I imagine the inside of a body might sound, if I could hear the movement of cells, the invisible currents that give us life.
The atmosphere pulses with a primal, life-affirming sound-a continual, energetic buzz atop a steady, rhythmic pulse. The colony retreats, sedated, into the lower levels of the hive, except for a handful of daring girls who begin their airborne routines. From a metal vessel, smoke performs its own seductive pirouette, penetrating the air with the peculiar scent of burning horse manure. It dances across Hays’s bleached overalls and bounces playfully against several white hive boxes, each one home to as many as 100,000 busy little honeybees. The play between sun and shadow creates what the Japanese call komorebi. AFTERNOON SUNSHINE FILTERS through the leaves of commercial beekeeper Ken Hays’s bucolic apple orchard in Bosque Farms, 18 miles south of Albuquerque.
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