A Buzz with Life

Sarah Lefrancois & Christopher Andrew

Connect with Nature Through Beekeeping

Our farm is located on one of the seven hills of Franklin, and although it is no bigger than two acres, it is teeming with more than 250,000 tiny creatures making their home in five pine Langstroth hives.

We began keeping Italian honeybees as a way to pollinate our home garden, but also to enjoy the spoils: honey from the wildflowers around our house. We started our home apiary with two hives, but as is the way with honeybees, we have since expanded to a total of 12 hives that we keep at three locations.

Honeybees were brought to America by the colonists in the early 1600s. A hive of bees will include one queen, whose sole job is to leave the hive once, mate, and spend the rest of her life laying eggs (about 1,500 a day in the height of the summer!) to maintain the hive’s population. The queen is not always easy to spot, but she’ll be larger than the other bees and more golden in color. Most bees in a hive are female, and they have several duties: feeding and caring for the queen, feeding and caring for the larvae, cleaning the dead bees from the hive, maintaining the wax foundation of the frames, guarding the hive, packing pollen, ripening nectar, and, at the end of their lives, foraging for nectar, pollen, and propolis outside of the hive. Drone bees, the only males bees in the hive, have one job - to mate with new, unmated queens from other hives.

In the spring, the honey is a light golden yellow and has grassy, floral notes thanks to the Dutch clover.

Inspecting a beehive is a sensory experience, and I was overwhelmed the first time I looked into a hive. As the beekeeper slides the hive tool under the lid of the hive, you can hear the crack of the piney propolis used by the bees to seal the hive. The low hum of the bees at work fills your ears. There’s the sweet smell of nectar, and the smell of the hay burning in the smoker, used to mask the pheromones with which bees communicate when there is danger nearby. If you can smell something similar to bananas or circus peanuts, watch out: the bees are signaling to each other that they need to attack. The sight of a frame full of bees in a large, moving mass is awesome to witness, and it’s a thrill to feel a weighty frame full of golden honey.

As the beekeeper slides the hive tool under the lid of the hive, you can hear the crack of the piney propolis used by the bees to seal the hive.

Beekeeping is like trying to solve a riddle that changes through the seasons. We inspect each hive every 10-14 days. We look to make sure that we have a queen, and if we don’t see her, we look for all stages of larvae: rice-shaped eggs, C-shaped larvae, and capped brood— larvae sealed behind a thin layer of wax. We make sure there is enough food being stored, that there are no signs of disease, and we decide whether we need to give the bees more space to lay eggs or store honey. Because the honeybees are not native to this continent, we treat them like tiny livestock and support them with whatever they may need, including supplemental sugar syrup feed, since, this far north, there are times during the year when there is no food available. At certain points in the season, we also apply treatments to prevent disease or mite infestations. Our preferred treatments are naturally occurring organic acids that kill mites without harming the bees or leaving chemical residues.

In the fall, the honey is a dark brown or red and has citrusy, herbal notes because of the available goldenrod.

During the spring, we inspect for signs of swarming. When the hive builds up a large population, the queen’s pheromone doesn’t get evenly distributed to all of the worker bees, signaling that a new queen needs to be made. When there are too many queens in one hive, the bees gorge themselves on the honey stores and take off with the old queen. The swarm of bees will fly to a nearby location and send scout bees to look for a new home. Beekeepers can prevent losing a hive by creating a split so that the hive does not get too large. Though swarms are usually not aggressive, if you encounter one, call a local beekeeper. The swarm will likely not survive on its own through the winter, and a beekeeper can recover the swarm if it’s in a safe location and place it in a new hive box.

...dandelions are one of the first pollen sources for foraging honeybees...

While beekeeping is fascinating, the investment of time and money may not be for everyone. If you want to support honeybees, but perhaps don’t have the financial resources (startup kits run about $500) or adequate time, you can open your land to a beekeeper, perhaps working a trade for honey. We keep a few hives on a local farm, where they help native bees pollinate a squash crop. As a result, we have space for a few more hives and get more honey, and the farmer benefits from greater squash yields.

You can also support honeybees by not treating your lawn. Although many consider dandelions and clover unsightly, dandelions are one of the first pollen sources for foraging honeybees and other pollinators. Dutch clover, the white flowers that pop up in grass, are a major nectar source for the bees in the spring. Goldenrod, which grows along the edges of fields, is a huge nectar source in the fall. You can also help the bees by waiting to mow your lawn, allowing the flowers to come up and for the bees to forage for just a little longer.

Beekeeping has given us so much but, best of all, it’s given us a greater sense of awareness of what is happening in the fields around us. We’re aware of the bloom schedule in this region and we look for what food sources the bees are on: skunk cabbage, clover, asters, fruit trees, squashes, knotweed, joe-pye weed, and goldenrod.

We harvest honey in the spring and in the fall, which allows us to yield two different types of honey because of the varying nectar sources. In the spring, the honey is a light golden yellow and has grassy, floral notes thanks to the Dutch clover. In the fall, the honey is a dark brown or red and has citrusy, herbal notes because of the available goldenrod.

There is so much to know about beekeeping, and it can take years to truly understand what you are seeing in the hive. The danger of losing a hive to a varroa mite infestation, starvation, or disease is strong, and we recommend that you take a class with a local beekeeper or association in order to learn as much as you can about what issues you may face while keeping bees. Classes usually run in January or February, and can be found through the Connecticut Beekeepers Association, the Eastern Connecticut Beekeepers Association, the Backyard Beekeepers Association, or through local apiaries: Stonewall Apiary in Sprague, Mike’s Bee Hives in Roxbury, Massaro Farm in Woodbridge, and Jones Apiary in Farmington.

Sarah Lefrancois’ and Christopher Andrew’s Hop-Bee Honey is a small local apiary concentrating on honey bee health and creating quality honey products found in season at Connecticut farm shops and on Etsy.