Megan Piper Mahoney put horse manure and some newspaper in a can and lit it on fire.
It's the beekeeper's first step before going into the hives.
"It doesn't hurt the bees at all," she said. "The smoke kind of makes it so they don't fly out at you. Bees communicate with pheromones. If a bee stings you, she sends off an alarm pheromone so it tells all the other bees that there's an intruder. You're more than likely to get stung after you've already been stung once. The smoke kind of confuses those pheromones a little bit."
Mahoney said that if honeybees die off, humans are expected to last for four years thereafter. Half the honeybee population is thought to have already died off possibly due to a mixture of mites and people ruining the environment.
"They pollinate over 80 percent of our food sources," she said. "They're a huge bioindicator. We'd have some staple crops like wheat, corn, rice and oats, but there probably wouldn't be enough of it to sustain us humans."
She was introduced to the idea of beekeeping about six years ago while taking an introductory entomology class at the University of Minnesota. She chose beekeeping for a class project.
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"I started reading about it and started realizing it's, like, this huge thing," Mahoney said. "Tons of people involved. There's bee journals. Bee magazines. Just endless amounts of information about beekeeping. It's been around for a long, long time. I've had bees everywhere I've gone since then."
She said she gets packages of bees from companies. A one-pound package holds between 5,000 and 7,000 bees. She has also gotten them from people who call for help when confronted with a big, noisy swarm of them in their yard. She said bees are most docile when they're swarming, looking for a new hive.
"You can just basically shake them into a box and take them home," she said. "But you have to make sure you get the queen."
All worker bees are female, and the male bees are called drones. Their only purpose is to reproduce with the queen.
"Drones are actually unfertilized eggs," Mahoney said. "They're really not very smart. They're, like, half of a genetic code. They're born with higher birth defects."
Queen bees are fed only royal jelly, which is thought to extend people's lifespans, she said. The white jelly is excreted from a gland near the bees' mouths.
"The queen lives a lot longer than the workers," she said. "The workers in the summer live about six weeks. I think the oldest queen on record is 11 years old. I used to work with this Yemeni beekeeper. And we'd go out, and if we found any queen cells, he would take the whole cell and just eat it - the larva and all the royal jelly. He was like, 'It gets me high.' It's a huge dose of energy."
Mahoney built her five hives from scratch, and her only protection is a veil when collecting the honey. She has about 250,000 bees.
"It's a very worthwhile thing to be doing," she said. "It helps the world, and it's just such an organic experience. And almost all the products from the beehive are usable, like beeswax, propolis, pollen, honey. They're one of the only insects that make food for humans."
And honey never goes bad, though it may crystallize, which is just a more stable form of it, she said. Honey made from bees kept by the Egyptians is still good today.
"It's like a natural preservative," she said. "It is really good for you. They can't reproduce honey in the lab. There are all kinds of enzymes that nobody knows what they do. It has all sorts of antibacterial and healing properties."
She said having honeybees fosters an awareness for the cycle of life.
"It's a dying trade," she said. "You guys should all get bees."
