To bee or not to bee Why you want honeybees in your yard
L
ike many backyard beekeepers, Catherine Dempsey got the bug from another honey farmer. She was running a series of heritage shops in Newfoundland and Labrador and started selling honey, lip balms, beeswax candles and other honeybee by-products from a family-run bee business on the island’s East Coast. “When I retired from fulltime work, I thought, ‘I’d like to try it,’” recalls Dempsey.
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SUMMER 2022
BY JANET WHITMAN
“I’d always really liked bees and I have a big garden and a lot of fruit trees. I thought maybe some beehives wouldn’t be a bad thing.” That was June 2011. Dempsey soon learned it was too late to get everything ready to start that year but ended up glad for the delay. “Everybody thinks this is going to be just as easy as putting a birdfeeder in the backyard,” she says. “I realized it was a lot more work than that, but also a lot more rewarding.”
