John Gibeau has discovered that crime fighting and beekeeping have a lot in common.
The Royal City resident founded the Honeybee Centre in Surrey, a move that came after a 16-year career in policing. Gibeau left the New Westminster Police Service in 1996.
"I was an RCMP officer in Burnaby for four years, then 12 years in New Westminster," he said. "I got my MBA (master of business administration) as a policeman."
During his time with the New Westminster Police Service, Gibeau helped form the Domestic Violence Response Team and investigated a number of high-profile, gang-related murders. When Gibeau left the police service, he worked as a general manager of a photocopying company for three years.
"It was the first true private sector immersion I had," he said. "It was an awakening. I learned about business, how hard it was to make money."
While he enjoyed the photocopying business, Gibeau began thinking about applying that same service model to beekeeping. He sold his shares in the company and opened the Honeybee Centre, after learning there was a lot of interest in beekeeping.
The Honeybee Centre's original concept was to be a tourist attraction and to service beekeepers with the supplies they needed.
"I opened at the same time that blueberry pollination become in great demand," he said. "The model segued into a (crop) pollination business."
Gibeau said there are common elements to all three of his career choices, including focusing on communication between coworkers and providing goals and rewards for everyone.
As the president of the Honeybee Centre, he applies something that he learned from policing and the photocopying business on a daily basis.
"I miss working homicide, that's it," he said about policing. "It was rewarding; I had some good cases."
The high point of Gibeau's policing career was being one of the lead investigators on murder cases involving gang members, including Bindy Johal and Ron and Jimmy Dosanjh. More than 100 officers from five jurisdictions were involved in the investigations.
Ironically, Gibeau has met up with some of the relatives of the people he once investigated, as some of those families own blueberry fields.
"My business is pollinating blueberry fields," he said. "I know the names, I know the families. I never expected that. It came full circle."
By founding the Honeybee Centre, Gibeau went back to his roots - beekeeping.
"I had always had bees. My dad was a beekeeper and a farmer," he said of his father who was a dairy farmer, grain farmer and beekeeper. "He was the 11th generation of farmer in Canada. I'm the 12th generation of farmer. The romance of farming was there."
While attending RCMP training in Regina, Gibeau and another officer in training had discussed the idea of starting a dairy farm. As a police officer, he had kept bees and sold honey to coworkers at the local police station.
"I grew up around it," said Gibeau, who was raised in Alberta. "My Grade 4 school project was honeybees."
This season, the Honeybee Centre will provide 4,440 colonies in blueberry fields. Thirteen semi-trailer loads of bees will be used to pollinate blueberry crops worth millions of dollars.
"It was being in the right place at the right time," he said of his foray into farming.
According to Gibeau, bees can increase the farmers' yield of blueberries by 50 per cent. In addition to blueberries, the Honeybee Centre supplies bees that pollinate apples, currents, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, kiwi, pumpkin, zucchini and squash crops.
"In winter, our bees go into a semi-state of hibernation," he said. "We put them in people's yards. We have 45 homes in Surrey and Langley."
The Honeybee Centre has 1,400 of its own colonies and rents an additional 3,000 from Alberta from October to June. In June, they're shipped back to Alberta for canola pollination and clover honey production.
The Honeybee Centre's main thrust is around the pollination of local crops in the Fraser Valley, but it also operates a country store that sells honey and natural honeybee products and offers a visitor and learning centre that educates the public about the world of honeybees.
The centre holds an annual Honeybee Festival, with this year's event taking place on July 23 and 24 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 7480 176th St. The event includes children's activities (crafts, face painting, bouncy castle), musical entertainment, more than 20 vendors, bee keeping demonstrations throughout the day, two bee beards daily, honeybee extraction demonstrations and a presentation by Cinemazoo.
"We get about 4,000 people a day," Gibeau said. "It's great."
The Honeybee Centre has four revenue streams: pollination services; sales at its retail store; wholesale sales; and film industry services.
"We have done roughly 35 productions," Gibeau said. "We put honeybees on Nicholas Cage in The Wicker Man, we put bald-faced hornets on Bradley Cooper."
In the past decade, Gibeau has applied about 400 to 500 bee beards.
"People are apprehensive," he said about having a swarm of bees placed on their face or body. "When the bees are on, then they relax. It is grounding. It is a little prickly sensation. They think, this isn't bad at all."
The Honeybee Centre also supplies honeybees and harvests honey at the Fairmont Airport Hotel, Fairmont Waterfront Hotel and Fairmont Empress.
"At the Fairmont Waterfront, they are within 10 metres of the swimming pool," Gibeau said. "At the Empress, they are on the front lawn. I have 600,000 bees there."
In addition to being a food source, Gibeau said honey is like a medicine cabinet unto itself. He noted that, when applied to a cuts, honey kills bacteria and helps with healing.
"If I have a scrape or a cut, honey goes on it," he said. "I haven't used Polysporin in 15 to 20 years."
Gibeau has the Health Canada licence to sell honey to hospitals as a wound dressing, and he adds there are some medical benefits associated with bee stings as well.
He said bee venom can be used to treat more than 40 medical conditions, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and depression.
"You basically sting people. We teach it - they go and sting themselves," he said. "It kickstarts their body to heal themselves. It is actually an anti-inflammatory."
For more information about the Honeybee Festival, visit www.honey beecentre.com.
