Local Beekeeper Tends to His Passion at Home

Jay Parsons is a Norcross resident and certified Master Beekeeper who understands the importance of maintaining bees. He began his chemical-free apiary six years ago. He now has 13 hives in his backyard and has established nine others in Gwinnett and Habersham counties.

With the threat of bees becoming extinct through pesticides and other environmental perils, Jay, like more and more people, became aware of how important maintaining bees are to the survival of agriculture. 

“We simply can’t do without bees,” says Jay, “And with the current environmental threats, you can’t just start a hive and let them go, they now require protection.”

Dances with Bees is the company Jay and his wife Patti began to share their beekeeping passion. Jay gathers the honey and Patti creates candles and chemical-free skin care products.  They average around 400 pounds per five hives and their honey comes from a variety of sources including wildflowers, Poplar trees, blackberries and kudzu.  

Living outside of the City of Norcross protected Parsons from the city restrictions of an older ordinance that classified beekeeping as keeping livestock. His neighborhood was recently annexed into the City of Norcross, but he will still be able to keep bees. 

Thanks to Sustainable Norcross Chair Connie Weathers with the support of Mayor Pro-Tem Ross Kaul, a new ordinance was passed that allows “a one family residence to keep honey bees for personal pleasure or utility,” as long as their lot is 10,000 square feet or larger and the hives are more than five feet from the property line. 

“Bees fly in a three-mile area freely providing surrounding gardeners the necessary pollination for their fruits and vegetables, so it is an advantage to the community,” says Parsons. 

There are a great many misunderstandings and fallacies about beekeeping.  People often confuse honeybees with Yellow Jackets, which are yellow and black, meat eating ground wasps that build gray paper nests and can sting many times.  They are the ones that hang around garbage cans and other waste facilities. Honeybees are brown and black and live in wax nests or domesticated hives. They are much less aggressive and can only sting once and then they die. 

“Stings are more likely to occur during spring swarming season when the bees have outgrown their hive and have prepared a young new Queen to establish a new home,” says Parsons, “the bees are simply performing their job of protecting the new Queen.”

In addition to the job of providing necessary pollination, it’s known that early settlers used honey for its healing and anti-bacterial qualities. Some people say honey is a remarkable tool for rapidly healing wounds, discouraging allergies and, when eaten daily with cinnamon, diminishing the pain and swelling of arthritis.