COMMUNITY
that they have,” Liza said. “It’s beyond human comprehension sometimes.” During the brutal summer, when there is nothing blooming for the bees, the Williamses put some “bee bread” inside the hive — a mix of pollen, honey and nectar — to get the bees by until temperatures drop and their lavender farms are in bloom. Sometimes, when Liza and Will maintain the hive, they wear suits; other times, they don’t. During an interview for this story, the bees were extremely passive and didn’t mind when their frames were pulled out for inspection. “They’re doing what their God-given task is to do, and that’s all that’s on their agenda: go out, pollinate, bring whatever the queen needs, and they do that for 40 days,” Liza Williams said. “It’s also kind of sad because they still, in their mind, need to help the queen and the colony. So, in the last days of their life, they’ll drink a lot of water, fan the front, and then they’ll die.” They’re doing what their God- given task is to do, and that’s all that’s on their agenda: go out, pollinate, bring whatever the queen needs, and they do that for 40 days.” LIZA WILLIAMS, BEEKEEPER What’s the buzz about? Thunderbird Farms residents Bill “The Bee Guy” and Monica Johnson keep millions of the little buggers in over 80 different hives at their home, across the Valley and on properties surrounding the popular sunflower fields along Ralston Road. Liza Williams met the couple on Facebook when she was first learning the hobby and says Bill Johnson took her “under his wing” as a mentor. He was easy to find because of his online moniker, BilltheBeeGuy. “He’s basically my living beekeeping bible,” Liza Williams said. “The way he beekeeps may not be the way that I beekeep, but in a sense he teaches me how to handle the problems when they arise.” The Johnson couple first became interested in bees about five years ago, when they found a hive in their chicken feed. “We opened up the 55-gallon drums of feed, and it’s full of bees,” Bill Johnson said. “They weren’t aggressive, which made us very curious about it too.” The couple did some research on beekeeping and found it was best to get not one hive, but
Thunderbird Farms residents Liza and Will Williams inspect a hive at their home farm July 28.
A GAME OF THRONES
hive into several different colonies and then giving each its queen tends to work better for him. “That’s responsible beekeeping, that’s how it’s supposed to be done.” Once the new queen is accepted and starts laying eggs, the mean bees will eventually live out their life cycle and be replaced by nicer and gentler bees that match the queen. “In the space of three or four months, you’ve gone from a mean hive to a very gentle hive,” Bill Johnson said. “That’s how it’s done in the removal business, that’s how we save the bees in my mind, rather than exterminate them.” If hives are placed too close to each other, they can get aggressive toward one another, with the larger ones attacking the smaller ones: “It’s a game of thrones thing, survival of the fittest.”
Honeybees function as a caste system with a queen, worker bees and drones. If the queen is mean, so are the bees. If the queen isn’t up to standards, they’ll kill her and replace her. “If you’ve got a mean queen, then you need to go in and remove her, depending on how mean the hive is,” Thunderbird Farms beekeeper Bill “The Bee Guy” Johnson said. “They want a queen, they want to continue to procreate, so you wait three days and bring in a new queen in her cage, leave her on top of the frames so that they can acquaint themselves and get to know her.” Sometimes that simply doesn’t work because the bees may reject her pheromones. The larger the hive is, the harder it is to match a queen. “You come back the
RESTORE YOUR HOME TO PERFECTION
FUN FACT According to city code 18.80.030, buildings or hives for apiaries may not be closer than 75 feet to any neighboring residence.
next morning, and they’ve killed her. Bees are a lot like street gangs: The larger the group is, the more hostile they are to other outside sources,” Bill Johnson said. One common question he fields in the beekeeping community is: Do you just let those hostile ones die off? He doesn’t, citing he believes that goes against his “save the bees” message. “Why don’t you just divide them and requeen them?” he asked, rhetorically. Splitting the
Other local beekeepers who more recently joined the community said their fear of bees dissolved once they learned more about the insects. “You want to get away from it until you find out what they do and why they do it,” Thunderbird Farms resident Liza Williams said. “Then you change your entire perspective: Don’t kill that thing — that’s going to pollinate something to feed the human race.” Liza and her husband, Will Williams, are the owners of Teva Farms and are relatively new to beekeeping. They first put their two Flow Hives outside in March and have loved every second of it. “It’s fascinating to sit and watch bees, to learn about them and to continue to be part of their world and help steward them because they do their own thing in this form of intelligence
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InMaricopa.com | September 2025
September 2025 | InMaricopa.com
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