- Heading into the woods...
- I get stung at least a dozen times a year.
- Sue Dompke and her son are dressed for hazard duty.
- Most people are of the mind that if they get stung,
they're going to die.
We're going to just smoke them a little bit.
- The smoker helps mask the alarm response
and calms the bees.
- I always have one available,
in case I would happen to get swarmed or if I drop a box.
- When you open up a hive, the guard bees will come out first,
and you have to give guard bees space.
[bees buzzing]
As the bees get more agitated
towards the end of an inspection
it might be 'H-m-m-m-m-m.'
Then it goes 'M-m-m-m-m-m.'
The guard bees will come
and they'll just start bouncing off your helmet.
You know it's time to close up.
Let' em alone.
So, as long as I'm calm,
that hive is going to be calm.
- Sue is surrounded by 65 hives
and nearly three million bees.
Even more amazing...
At one time, she was terrified of bugs.
- So much so that it bordered on "entomophobia."
If I saw a fly in the window,
I would be screaming throughout the house.
- As an adult, she still harbored that fear...
- I was 35, and I decided, "Enough is enough."
- But even then, Sue couldn't imagine all of this...
- Last time I opened this up,
the queen was right on the lid.
Oh, there she is.
See how her abdomen is quite a bit longer.
A lot of people wonder
how someone who spent 18 years in the accounting field
could get into bee keeping.
I grew up a city slicker because
my parents were city people
and I married a city slicker who
never wanted to be on the farm.
And just like that... life can change.
My husband died.
And I had two little girls.
And I knew they would soon be teenagers
and I couldn't face raising them in the city.
That year, my niece gave me a bee hive as a Christmas gift
and what was a hobby, I turned into a career.
- Sue says, in crisis she landed here
on Washington Island.
- I had a business plan and I had the buy-in from my girls
that this is a place that they would want to live.
- Sue purchased an 18-acre patch of island paradise...
and turned it into a honey haven.
- She now builds her own bee boxes
and cultivates colonies of Russian honey bees.
- There's a very limited supply in the United States
with only 15 Russian bee breeders.
So that's what makes us unique.
Russian bees are built
to survive harsh winters and island life.
They're perfectly suited for Wisconsin,
especially Washington Island
because we're at the 48th longitudinal parallel,
replicating that indigenous area
from the Primorsky region of Russia.
- Sue hopes the Russian honey bees are the answer
to the collapse of the American honey bee population
decimated by mites.
- Oh, they're mite-resistant.
They're cold-hardy.
They're hygienic
and they effectively manage their resources.
They say Russians swarm more.
I don't believe so.
- Sue now shares her knowledge and experimental techniques
with other bee keepers.
- Usually bee keepers will align
all of the entrances facing south.
And I started to experiment with putting them in a circle,
based on research that was originally done
for space exploration by Russian astronauts.
And it goes into quantum theory.
And the pattern of life is a circle.
So I'm just trying to create that out in my bee yard.
It sounds bizarre, doesn't it? [laughing]
- Besides breeding bees,
it's the honey that drives her business at Sweet Mountain Farm.
Honey has to be capped.
Then, I'll come in with a hot knife
and skim off the top of the wax cappings.
And I'll stick it in my extractor.
And that's all there is to it.
Sweet Mountain Farm is one of only two honey producers
in the state of Wisconsin that have done the due diligence
to prove to the public that our honey is pure.
- Through the years,
Sue has learned to turn "honey" into "money"
and live in a world surrounded by bees.
And it has turned out wonderfully.