Local man is the bee’s knees

The Mason jar was filling fast as a 7-year-old John Pluta added more bees to it.
The bees swarmed around their new glass dungeon trying to understand their predicament.
Perhaps, trying to understand why a 7-year-old was not afraid of them.
John Pluta was determined to see some honey.
Pluta, now in his 40s, recalls how he knew nothing about bees in his childhood.
"I just couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t make any honey for me," he said.
He has solved his problem.
Now the owner of a roadside bee farm, Pluta makes a living off his bees. In his arms as he makes his way down his front steps is an eight pound box of 116 blocks of bees wax.
"I’m shipping this off to a woman who buys all this to make skin care products. It’s not just honey we have here, it’s the honey and the by products of the hive," he said.
He takes the eight pound box back inside his house. When he returns, he is wearing a straw hat and he is ready to get to work.
He opens the door of one of his many work sheds to a room of giant barrels and buckets of honey. One of the barrels is propped up so that the honey will slide into a bucket on its own.
"I’m just trying to salvage the last little bit of honey, because it’s supposed to be warm tomorrow, the bees will come and the bees will recycle every single last bit I haven’t gotten out of here," Pluta explains.
Carrying the 60 pound bucket of honey, Pluta travels down into his basement where the honey is processed. The sticky floor grabs the sole of his boots with every step.
"Whenever you’re dealing with honey, everything is sticky," Pluta says.
This sticky business of his is not something Pluta planned on.
He stumbled into the career of beekeeping. Pluta was a berry farmer and was experiencing a lack of bees pollinating his crop. After unsuccessfully looking for a beekeeper to solve his problem, he decided he would buy some bee hives.
"It was a cold winter, so, I ran down to the local library and bought a few books on beekeeping and I thought, ‘I could do this,’" he recalls.
It has been farmer’s hours ever since for this king bee. Pluta is up every morning at sunrise and works until sunset. Having bees in ten different counties can keep a man busy.
"By having them in different places, that’s how I get so many different kinds of honey," Pluta says.
Storing the honey can dirty up quite a sink.
"The only part of beekeeping I don’t like is being a dishwasher," Pluta says. "That and getting stung."
Yes, even professional beekeepers get the occasional sting.
If 20 stings a day is occasional.
"A good day is always less than twenty times, a bad day is more than twenty," he says. "When you’re out there working with the bees, some days are worse than others."
Pluta recalls one bad day over all the others.
 "I backed into about four hives one time and knocked them over and by the time I got them stacked back up that was about two hundreds stings," he said. "Each sting still hurts. After a certain amount you start going into shock a little bit. You know, when you get stung that many times. Most beekeepers are actually immune to the venom to a certain extent. 20 to 50 stings are no problem, but once you start going over 100, that’s going to affect anyone."
Pluta says there is no trick to avoiding being stung.
"Protective covering makes it harder to work. In the summertime it’s hot, you start sweating, and bees don’t like sweat," he says. "When you’re all hot and sweaty and they’re around you, they just get annoyed sometimes."
A true lady’s man at heart, Pluta is constantly surrounded by women.
Not just the two women he lives with or the other two women he "just dances with" at Cowboy Bill’s on the weekends where he is an occasional DJ. Most of his women come in swarms.
"A bee hive is 99 percent female. Walking through the yard, if you walk in front of a bee, that’s when they get you. And so, we never know what the darn women are going to be doing," he says.
When not fending off the dreaded queen bee, Pluta says business is good.
A typical springtime workday for Pluta is 16 to 18 hours, but customers tend to show up at all hours.
 "A lot of times, once you think the day is over, people will come after dark and start honking their horns," he says. "You get phone calls late at night and early in the morning. People always calling me up. One thing we always get called for is people saying, ‘We’ve got bees in our house!’. People expect me to come out and take care of their bee problem."
After saving neighbors from bees and supplying customers with their honey, Pluta will go to sleep when he feels his day has been a productive success.
If he wakes up at around 1 or 2 am, he may just drive to Gainesville, FL, to be there when the supply house opens. That way, he can make it back to Milledgeville in time to open up shop and hopefully start a new day.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Mar 16 2007. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry