Beekeeping Family Stirring Up a Hornet’s Nest

Earlier this month, Bernadette de Barajas, a deputy district attorney, fretted about the elderly beekeeper she was prosecuting.

Being the Christmas season, she wondered if the Newhall jury would balk at convicting the Santa Claus look-alike, with his long, snowy beard.

“He looks like an elderly gentleman who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but after I looked at his file I was astounded to say the least,” Barajas said.

Fellow beekeepers, though, were not surprised. After Albert Knoefler, 69, was convicted of illegally placing more than 700 beehives near the Pyramid Lake recreation area, Barajas received congratulatory calls and offers of free honey from Knoefler’s grateful colleagues.

“It’s a real hurrah for the beekeeping industry,” said Michael C. Pearson, Los Angeles County’s bee inspector.

Knoefler belongs to a huge family of beekeepers that long ago gained a reputation for battling with competitors and authorities.

Testing Limits

Some bee inspectors claim that a few family members often stretch or break bee regulations or test the laws’ limits, especially those requiring them to obtain permission before placing hives on private property. They also apparently chafe at bee etiquette, which dictates that a beekeeper should not place his hives too close to a rival’s colonies.

“They feel those laws infringe on their sovereign rights,” said Judy Carlson, a North Dakota official who has fought members of the beekeeping family in court 15 times in the past 12 years. “They just don’t feel these laws apply to them.”

Four generations of Knoeflers have been raising bees since George Knoefler, the clan’s patriarch, started a honey farm in Riverside County in 1930. Seven of George Knoefler’s sons became beekeepers, and many of their sons and grandsons embraced this way of life. Most of the Knoeflers work in father-and-son teams with nine of the boys remaining in Riverside. Just how successful any of the Knoeflers are remains a secret.

North Dakota Problems

Tales of the family’s exploits are recited as far as North Dakota, where Ray Knoefler and his son, Harold, unsuccessfully have made repeated challenges in the state Supreme Court to a law that prohibits beekeepers from placing colonies within 2 miles of existing hives.

The Knoeflers have gotten stung a lot, records show.

During an African bee scare in California 3 years ago, some of the ferocious bees were discovered in Knoefler honeycombs. A Knoefler was fined for sneaking his hives out of a quarantine area near Bakersfield. A family employee was shot and wounded a couple of years ago by a rival beekeeper, who claimed he was stealing bees. In the mid-1970s, an angry beekeeper in Ventura County poisoned 15 million Knoefler bees after his wife left him for one of the Knoeflers.

Albert Knoefler became legendary in bee circles almost a decade ago when he held police officers at bay for hours in the Mojave Desert. The incident began when Knoefler drove a truck loaded with beehives through the state’s agricultural inspection station without stopping. The California Highway Patrol escorted the truck back to the station, while the FBI and local authorities were called to investigate what the CHP thought could be bee rustling.

The truck was swarming with angry bees. No one dared approach.

When Dixon Hunter, San Bernardino County’s bee inspector arrived, he quickly ruled out bee theft when he spotted Knoefler.

“I knew him real well. I said, ‘Albert what’s going on?’ He had this little sheepish grin and laughed to himself and he said, ‘Nothing,’ ” Hunter recalled.

Albert Knoefler was free to go if he produced a certificate required to bring bees into the state. Hours went by. When he had not produced the document by midnight, authorities tired of the stalemate.

“We got him all ready to usher him out of the state, and he took the certificate out of his pocket,” Hunter said. “I think it was his way of having some fun.”

Albert Knoefler was hazy on details of the day in the desert. He remembered dumping some bees on a road in Utah during an accident earlier in the day. As he headed for California he had a truck of riled bees and no net to keep them on the truck.

“We didn’t want to stop by the scales and have the bees come out and sting people,” Knoefler said.

Admitted Violation

In his latest scrap, Albert Knoefler acknowledged in court that he placed his hives near a public camping area without permission. But he said he was desperate when his bees became sick after an orange orchard where they were placed was sprayed with insecticide.

The Knoeflers bristled at the suggestion that they are viewed as outlaw beekeepers.

“If we push the law to the limit all these years, we wouldn’t be in business all these years,” said David Knoefler, whose first childhood Christmas present from his father, Milton, was a small smoker used to force bees into their hives.

“We’re being blamed if there is anything going wrong in the state of California,” complained Iva Nette Knoefler, Albert’s wife.

But some beekeepers say the Knoeflers deserve all the flak they get.

“These guys are just notorious,” said one beekeeper from Los Angeles County who asked to remain anonymous. “They are renegades.”

Fight for Space

The Knoeflers, however, said all beekeepers squat on farmland. But whenever possible, they maintain, they seek permission.

Like other California beekeepers, the Knoeflers compete for a dwindling amount of space for their bees as suburban sprawl advances. When George Knoefler established the family’s first honey farm in Riverside County, he could see only two other houses in the distance. Today the family homestead and farm, still on Knoefler Drive, is pinched in by tract homes, an apartment complex and a college. And the city folks do not like bees.

The farm, where Albert lives, has seen better days. The Knoeflers have not finished cleaning up after a 1982 fire that destroyed part of their honey warehouse. The dark, cool building is stacked with thousands of white, wooden boxes used to build hives. Frames of dried honeycomb and 5-gallon honey barrels litter the property. The grounds resemble a graveyard for old trucks and spare parts. Some bees hover about, as do drifters whom the Knoeflers often feed and clothe.

Keep Moving

Like a lot of migratory beekeepers, the Knoeflers stay on the move during much of the year looking for choice spots for their bees to pollinate and suck nectar. Their search may take them from the California almond fields, where they are paid to pollinate the nut crop, to the orange groves and cucumber fields and eventually to clover pastures in Nebraska or expanses of sage in Southern California where they usually must pay farmers rent while their bees make honey.

The Knoeflers--most of whom are vegetarians--are passionate about their vocation and say they could not imagine doing anything else.

Presentations on Bees

Diane Knoefler, who married into the family, said she stopped dreaming of becoming a psychologist when she visited her future husband’s honey farm. She has become a bee emissary, bringing a see-through hive to local classrooms and extolling the virtues of pollen and “royal jelly,” the queen bee’s food, which is secreted from the heads of her bee servants.

The Knoeflers like to boast that Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to climb Mt. Everest, was a beekeeper.

Diane Knoefler’s father-in-law, Milton Knoefler, who has been spreading bee pollen on his bread for 20 years, swears “it takes the sludge out of capillaries.”

The Knoeflers’ legal troubles did not end with Albert Knoefler’s trespassing conviction.

Officials in North Dakota recently obtained a $28,000 judgment for a violation of the 2-mile limit against the Knoefler Honey Farms, which produced 12 millions pounds of honey last year. But officials were told that it is now owned by a trust in the British West Indies.

While the state sifted through the legal documents, it attempted to destroy some of the Knoeflers’ bees. But the Knoeflers shipped the bees to California this fall, where it was discovered that they were diseased. It was the first time that bees carrying the parasitic barroa mite had appeared in California.

“It is a serious threat to the honey bee industry,” said Martina Quidgeon, a state agriculture official who supervises some of the agriculture border stations.

The mite, which is the size of a pencil tip, has spread to 14 other locations in California. The state has quarantined Knoeflers’ bees and is charging to treat them, but the mite has never been eradicated in any state.

Harold Knoefler, who runs the honey farm operation in North Dakota, said he did not know the bees were infected.

“This will be a thing of the past,” he said of the infestation concern in California. “It will be just one of the things you have to treat for.”