KNOX — On Sunday afternoon, Tim Norray settled on a stool on the edge of a flower-filled field along Pleasant Valley Road. In front of him was a wooden box he had built that buzzed with the activity of bees.

It was one of a row of boxes — each home to a hive, ruled by a queen — that stretched in front of him and behind him, with another row beside him. Slowly and methodically, Norray lifted a tray from the hive.

A visitor, sheathed in a white coat with a netted hat and face cover attached, watched in amazement as the bees buzzed about Norray but did not bother him. “I haven’t been stung today,” he said with a grin. He was wearing just shorts, a bee-emblazoned T-shirt, and a ballcap. A can that would produce smoke to keep the bees at bay sat next to him, unused.

“Bees and dogs can tell if you’re afraid,” he said calmly.

Norray, who is 54, has tended bees since he was a boy. Across Pleasant Valley Road from his hives is his parents’ house. His father, Jack, taught him how to be a beekeeper.

His children, in their twenties, Maclin and Kristen, are carrying on the family tradition.

Tim Norray will have a display, “The World of Honeybees,” at the Altamont Fair’s Agriculture and Science Building. He will show off his hives from inside a screened area so that visitors can see and hear without fear of being stung. He will emphasize the new technology he is using to make beekeeping more efficient.

Norray’s bees are bred to be calm. He has chosen queens with that DNA, he said. He concedes, though, there is one box with “cranky bees.” He calls that one “Amy.”

This spring the Norrays have 500 hives.

He splits hives after the winter. “If you don’t, they’ll swarm,” he said, meaning a colony made up of a queen and several hundred workers will leave to strike out on their own.

“We introduce a new queen with genetics we like,” said Norray. “In New York, we need to make sure they’ll overwinter. Their temperment is the big thing,” he said when considering a queen’s DNA.

Each hive has one queen, Norray explained. “She’s one-and-a-half times the size of the others,” he said. “If something happened to that queen, the worker bees can make an egg a queen.”

All of the workers are females. “They bring back the nectar from the flowers to make honey,” said Norray.

The males are drones. “Their only job is to mate with the queen,” he said. “The queen lays a couple thousand eggs a day as long as pollen comes in from the field.”

When Norray harvests honey, he leaves enough in the hive for the bees to survive the winter. If he takes a queen from a hive, the other bees will follow.

He makes the boxes himself, each with 10 frames. “The bees fill it with beeswax, honeycomb, and eggs,” he said. He builds a second story on a box when the hive needs more room.

The same hive will create different flavors and colors of honey based on the time of year, Norray said. In the spring, the honey made from dandelions and apple blossoms is lighter and sweeter than in the fall when the nectar comes from goldenrod, which produces darker honey with a stronger flavor, Norray said.

Norray sells his honey under the Black Sheep brand. Some of it is “barrel-aged,” he said explaining it is put in recently-emptied bourbon barrels to give the honey a smoky flavor. “We sell that all over the country,” he said. In the winter, he brings some hives to North Carolina, which he describes as a “bee-friendly state.”

The science of apiculture

Norray is excited about the new technology that is being added to the science of apiculture, practiced for millennia, as far back as the ancient Greek and Egyptian civilizations.

Lots of beekeepers, he said, use the same methods as 50 or 60 years ago. The new technology, Norray said, allows a beekeepers to monitor the weight of a hive, its moisture level, and even measure the sound made by a brood of bees. Also, cameras can be installed to keep track of activity outside of a hive.

All of this, he said, means fewer disturbances for the hive, and more efficient production of honey. “With monitoring,” Norray said, “you don’t need to be in there every day. Being in the box a lot isn’t beneficial. We can check remotely.”

Norray is adding a teaching component to his work, spanning a spectrum from the youngest learners to college-level learners. Elementary students at Berne-Knox-Westerlo, near where Norray lives and raises his bees, will be able, from monitors in their classroom to see the bees at work. They will also take field trips to the hives.

Siena College students, in Loudonville, will be linked to the Hilltown hives, too. Norray works at Siena as the college’s assistant director of safety, and said the faculty is excited about the new project.

“Siena will get real-time, real accurate data for pollen sources,” he said.

Norray said of the instruction he’ll provide at the Altamont Fair, “It’s bringing science technology into the bee yard.”

From the inside of a screened gazebo, Norray said, “I’ll pull out a frame and talk about what goes on inside.”

He hopes to interest more people in beekeeping since, he said, that the average age of beekeepers is creeping up.

He also hopes that fair-goers will learn to avoid using pesticides. The colony collapse disorder that struck a decade ago has never been fully explained.

“Forty percent of all bees in the country were lost,” said Norray. “A lot of research is being done, and there are a lot of theories. Among the considered causes are a virus, fungus, mites, pesticides, and global warming.

“A magic well”

The single person who taught modern western civilization the most about bees was Karl von Frisch.

“The bees life is like a magic well: The more you draw from it, the more it fills with water,” wrote Frisch, an Austrian scientist who spent a large part of his life studying bees and shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his work. He showed how bees, an intelligent species, have perfected methods to work together in order to survive.

Frisch showed that bees can see colors and discovered that bees orient themselves — by the sun, by the polarization pattern of a blue sky, and by the Earth’s magnetic field. He also discovered that bees can keep time: Knowing the direction of pollen-filled flowers she has visited, a worker bee can find that same flower again, based on the position of the sun.

When a swarm is constructing a new honeycomb, the alignment of the plane of that honeycomb will be the same as the swarm’s home hive, Frisch found.

Most remarkable, Frisch discovered that, when bees find nectar in a flower, they do a sort of dance that shows other bees where to find the nectar. There are two forms of this communication dance: the round dance, for telling of nearby nectar, and the waggle dance about far-off food sources.

The foraging bee, wrote Frisch, starts whirling around on the comb, dancing clockwise and then counter-clockwise in quick succession in the thickest bustle of the hive.

“What makes it so particularly striking and attractive,” wrote Frisch, “is the way it infects the surrounding bees; those sitting next to the dancer start tripping after her, always trying to keep their outstretched feelers on close contact with the tip of her abdomen ... They take part in each of her maneuverings so that the dancer herself, in her mad wheeling movements, appears to carry behind her a perpetual comet’s tail of bees.”

In the waggle dance, the bee moves forward, waggling her posterior, on the hive’s vertically hanging honeycomb, then she makes a semi circle to return where she started, and begins the dance again. The direction of the food source is revealed to the other bees by the direction of the straight stretch since the angle between the straight stretch and the vertical is the angle that the direction of flight has to the position of the sun. She tells the distance to the food by the time she takes to walk the straight stretch.

“I’m blessed to have beekeeping in my family,” said Tim Norray on Sunday after he finished showing his hives. “You learn and you grow as time changes.”