Teaneck — Sometimes envelopes marked “bees” pass through the post office. They contain harmonica-sized boxes with some candy, drones and a Queen Bee. Rabbi Daniel Senter, selling honey at the Teaneck Farmer’s Market for the first time this year, received the bees in the mail recently.

Senter is a jack-of-all trades who does “too many things.” In addition to being the Rabbinic Administrator at the Kof-K, a certification organization started by his father in the 1960s, Senter, as his three business cards list, is a carded ASA umpire, certified shochet, EMT, classic auto restorer, master beer brewer, fishing guide, story teller, clock maker, magician, balloonist, bar mitzvah instructor, swim instructor, outdoorsman, forager, traiberer, mohel, CPR instructor, reptile handler, baseball coach, and, as of four years ago, bee keeper and rescuer. He also lectures about wild life, chickens and turkeys.

“Most of my interests are not career interests,” Senter said. “A lot of these things,  if I had to do them every day, they’d get monotonous.

Senter’s day job involves working with companies like Streit’s Matzoh, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and Fairway supermarkets—going through ingredients, kashering machines and planning plant visits. He, along with his father, mother, brother, sister and 100 other employees, work on the certification process for a large number of food manufacturers.

One of the many jobs Senter has is working as a shochet. When he was in Israel for a year, he decided he was either going to become a vegetarian, or become comfortable with how shechitah works. Senter chose the latter and, as a result, he discovered beekeeping three years ago when he traveled to upstate New York to shecht some chickens on a friend’s farm.

“I’m thinking: Bears? Bees? This is so cool, I’ve got to look into it,” Senter said.

Now, after making sure each of his hives has enough honey so that the bees can eat their fill—80 pounds—Senter filters and bottles both honey and creamed honey, a smoother honey made with pulverized honey crystals. He also makes candles from the wax the bees use to cap the honeycombs. (Senter used wax from a hive destroyed by Hurricane Sandy to make yahrtzeit candles recently.)

Wax isn’t the main product produced by bees though, honey is. The creamed honey Senter makes comes in vanilla, cocoa and coffee. Senter is experimenting with cinnamon and ginger flavored ones as well.

“It’s like a fine wine; it has to age well,” Senter said.

This is the first year Senter’s hives have produced enough honey for him to sell. Prior to this past Rosh Hashannah, he gave it all away. He bought two hives to start with and now has hives in Teaneck along with hives in Woodridge and Eldridge, New York.

The bees in most of the hives are feral, not cultivated because, according to Senter, local bees have proved they can survive on their own. Most of his bees come from local hive extractions after people call him in: it is illegal to exterminate honey bees. Spring and summer bees live up to six weeks and fall and winter bees live for six months, so these extracted bees don’t last long. The queen bee, however, can live for six years, and will lay 1,000 eggs a day.

Senter knows his bees. When a customer called to tell him that a pillar in front of her home was coated in bees, he knew they were there and not in the hive because the hive needed some breathing space to stay at 90 degrees. Another bee tactic for keeping their home at the right temperature is to perch outside the hive and use their wings to fan the inside. The column yielded 30,000 bees, which is actually small for a hive. (Senter recently lost close to a million bees along with a few hundred pounds of honey when a bear managed to get at and destroy his Woodridge stock.)

Honey isn’t the only food Senter makes. Each year, around Purim, he produces his own beer and also sources and processes his own meat rather than buying it year-round. “This way I can ensure the quality and also the humane treatment,” Senter said.

Between his fishing, foraging (he recently collected elderflowers for a friend) and beekeeping, Senter spends a lot of time outside.

“To me, a bee swarm is the most amazing sight in nature—literally, the sky is filled with bees, and then they’re gone,” Senter said

By Aliza Chasan