ZOOCULTURE: Beekeeping Is Buzz Worthy

The kitchen of Rose Viggiano’s farmhouse in East Chatham, New York, bustles with mid-October activity. Against a backdrop of hanging baskets and the soft glow of an antique-style hurricane lamp, nine people scurry about the room. Everyone shares a sense of purpose for today’s gathering: to harvest honey from the two beehives Viggiano keeps in her backyard. A brand-new extractor—a tall, round, gleaming metal machine—stands in the center of the kitchen like a masterpiece awaiting its grand unveiling. In the adjacent dining room, one hundred and twenty glass jars are arranged in neat rows on the table.

It’s the first time Viggiano, an artist who lives in New York City, has transformed her summer home into a honey harvesting site. Walter Bauer, an expert beekeeper, leads the show, aided by his wife, Nonie; son Walter Jr.; and daughter, Sheri Mayorga. Viggiano, along with her brother, Frank Viggiano, and friends Joy Nagy and Benigna Chilla, watches attentively while Walter inspects a heavy comb-covered frame. A few stray bees drift around the kitchen, but no one seems to mind. In the background, Henry Whiteman, an amateur beekeeper from Canaan, New York, inspects the extractor.

“The honey is not warm enough,” Walter says, shaking his head. “Rose, you’re not going to be able to extract that today.”

But Viggiano is determined to bottle honey this afternoon. She ducks into the living room and reappears a moment later carrying a space heater. “I’ve got high, medium, and low,” she says with a smile.

Fifteen minutes later, Walter holds the frame in one hand over a deep silver bucket; his other hand grasps a heated electric knife. He makes an upward slice through the combs. “You just take the cappings off,” he explains. “You don’t have to take off the other wax.”

For the next few hours, despite a few mishaps—the smoke alarm blares, and sticky honey is tracked on shoe soles all over the wood floor—the team works diligently and patiently to coax forty-seven pounds of honey from combs to extractor to bottles. “This is like a comedy of errors,” Viggiano says with a laugh, straining the extracted honey into bottles through a sieve. She tosses in a piece of comb and holds the jar up to admire its hard-won, golden contents. “What do you think?” she asks proudly. “Not bad for a hobbyist!”

Viggiano became a beekeeper three years ago. She decided to cultivate backyard beehives after learning about the agricultural threats posed by Colony Collapse Disorder, a syndrome in which worker bees mysteriously disappear from hives. She wanted to help. “At first, it was just a concern and fascination with bees,” Viggiano explains. It was only after her first season of beekeeping that she fully appreciated the edible advantages of her new hobby. “Pulling out the honey was like gold,” she says.

The first year, her bees produced seventy-nine pounds of honey. Although she didn’t harvest the honey herself—outsourcing that job for the first year instead—she was awestruck by the final product. “It was hard to hold back the tears, it was so beautiful,” she says. “I couldn’t believe those little creatures had produced so much honey.”

Viggiano is among a growing number of Berkshire residents who have ventured into beekeeping, many of whom seem motivated by the same environmental concerns. “Colony Collapse Disorder is an interesting and scary thing,” says Basil Michaels, a plastic surgeon who, with his wife, Jenny, set up hives in their Richmond, Massachusetts, backyard three years ago. “I wanted to learn more about it and maybe do my own small part to help with biodiversity.”

As testament to the rising popularity of backyard beekeeping, membership in the Northern Berkshire Beekeepers Association (NBBA) has soared in the past few years. About thirty people attend the monthly meetings now, as opposed to the handful that attended five years ago. Anthony Pisano, a beekeeper from North Adams, Massachusetts, who serves as club secretary, says members come from Vermont, New York, and southern Berkshire County as well as from northern Berkshire County, where the group was born.

In fact, interest in the craft has blossomed across the country. Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine and author of The Backyard Beekeeper: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden, says it’s difficult to estimate just how many people maintain hives, but there’s been an upward trend in the last three to four years. “No one keeps a record,” he says, but general calculations count 95,000 to 100,000 backyard beekeepers in the United States. “The numbers have gone up, but not as much as we’d like,” he adds.

“Keeping bees is something that anyone can do, anywhere,” Pisano says. And despite the occasional sting, “It’s really pretty relaxing. It almost puts you in another world.”

In the five years since he started keeping hives in his yard, Pisano has drifted into commercial territory. (“If I’m going to do it as a hobby, I’d like to make a little money to at least pay for the equipment,” he notes.) Through Berkshire Farms Apiary, a business he owns with his son, Josh, Anthony Pisano sells honey harvested from the hives he tends on his property, as well as from those he maintains at a few local farms. In 2008, Pisano harvested four hundred pounds of honey from five hives. But he doesn’t sell all of it; his family keeps about a hundred and fifty pounds each year for use in tea and cooking—in a good year, that still leaves a lot to sell. Still, honey production varies from year to year. Heavy rain hindered the 2009 season; in most of the Northeast, production was down about thirty percent from 2008. “It was a very wet summer, not good for honeybees,” Viggiano explains.

Tom Stefanik, an Adams, Massachusetts, resident and president of the Northern Berkshire Beekeepers Association, has been a self-described “bee farmer” for seven years. He lectures frequently about apiculture, but even though he’s highly knowledgeable, he still marvels at what bees accomplish intuitively. “The queen lays a thousand eggs a day in the peak of summertime,” he says. “She’s the one we need to keep alive at all costs.”

And, he continues, “Bees are very hygienic, very clean insects. It’s all for the good of the colony. Very socialistic, when you think about it.”

As hobbies go, backyard beekeeping requires relatively little in terms of money and time, especially if you compare it to, say, motorcycle touring or scuba diving. Beekeeping basics—wooden beehive boxes and frames, bees, and equipment like veils, gloves, and smokers—cost a few hundred dollars.

But in our region, one significant additional expense is essential: an electric fence around the hives to fend off black bears. (The stereotype is true: bears do love honey.) Viggiano put up a solar-powered fence that cost a thousand dollars. “I have a very elaborate fence,” she admits. “Because there’s no way I am going to shoot a bear!” She also spent about eight hundred dollars on a state-of-the-art extractor.

“My biggest expense was the electric fence,” Michaels says. He laughs good-naturedly as he details his fence travails: after installing a thousand-dollar, five-thousand-volt, solar-powered fence, he realized there wasn’t enough sun exposure around his hives to provide the necessary power. He had to run electricity from his house, about a hundred-and-fifty yards away. “I know it’s ridiculous,” he says. “I put up a three thousand dollar fence!”

Then there’s David Graves, a Becket, Massachusetts-based beekeeper who hit upon a bear-deterring solution that has won him international attention. After a bear demolished his hives in the mid-1980s, Graves—who with his wife, Mary, sells jams, jellies, maple syrup, and honey through their homegrown company, Berkshire Berries—stood in the yard and gazed thoughtfully at the top of his garage. “Geez, if I put them on the rooftops …” he remembers thinking.

So he moved his beehive to the rooftop. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” Graves says. Not for long, though. At their new altitude, the bees in that one hive produced more than one hundred pounds of honey, far more than Graves had ever expected. “They made so much honey it drowned some of the bees,” he says.

The experiment was so successful that Graves tried it on rooftops in New York City. It worked beautifully, despite the fact that until earlier this year beekeeping in New York City was illegal. “I’ve never been cited,” Graves asserts proudly, as he works closely with building owners and occupants to maintain as many as twelve rooftop hives in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Three days a week, he sells Berkshire Berries products, including rooftop honey, at the Union Square Greenmarket. “Most people like the concept of utilizing rooftops for bees,” he adds.

In a 2007 New Yorker piece, Adam Gopnik called Graves “the originator … of the rooftop beehives of New York City.” Today, rooftop hives—and articles featuring Graves—are found in cities around the world. “People will say, ‘I’ve seen you on TV in Italy,’” Graves admits with a modest smile.

Once hives are established, bees require little maintenance. “It’s a very limited time commitment,” Michaels says. “I go to my bees, at most, every two weeks. The actual harvesting of the honey takes a few hours.”

Other backyard apiarists opt to spend more time with their bees. During the peak season, Stefanik might spend twenty to thirty hours each week tending to his hives. “I’m not just into honey production,” he explains. “I’m into multiplying my bees.”

There are occasional challenges, of course, besides bears (and skunks). The bees can swarm. They can fall victim to disease. The queen can die. And the hive can become infested with mites. Beekeepers learn to take these hurdles—and the occasional stings—in stride.

In general, hobbyist beekeepers in the Berkshires have not attributed any hive difficulties they’ve faced to Colony Collapse Disorder. “I haven’t heard of anyone in this area that’s been affected by it,” says Pisano. But David Graves insists it has been a major factor in recent years, crippling hives in New York City and dramatically reducing honey production throughout the world. For the last six years, he says, he’s lost sixty percent of his bees each year. “Beekeepers in Sweden, Australia, France, [they] all say the same thing,” he adds, “that there is a decline in honeybees.”

Graves is convinced the problem is caused by the electromagnetic signals from cellphone towers. He believes these signals interfere with the bees’ ability to navigate between pollen sources and the hive. “They tend to get lost,” he says. (Scientists, however, don’t necessarily agree; a small study in India found a correlation, though its scale and methodology have been questioned.)

What Berkshire beekeepers—like beekeepers everywhere—do have to contend with regularly are stings. To avoid them, many beekeepers wear light-colored gloves and veils and use smokers to confuse the bees. “The bees think the hive is on fire and gorge on the honey, so they don’t bother you,” explains Michaels, who has only been stung once or twice.

Interestingly, ardent beekeepers don’t seem to mind the occasional sting as much as one might expect. Some, like Pisano, even forego the protective gloves. In fact, he doesn’t recall the number of times he’s been jabbed. “You really don’t think about it too much,” he says. “The weather has a lot to do with it, and how you move. You want to stay calm and relaxed.”

During his first year of beekeeping, Stefanik was not stung once. “I was very, very careful,” he says, “then I got a little risky.” He typically wears a veil instead of a full suit, except when harvesting.

Now, he gets stung about a dozen times a year. “I don’t want to hurt my bees, but you do pinch them, taking out the honey,” he says. “They’re not very docile at that point.”

Viggiano, on the other hand, has been stung only once—but, in her view, that’s hardly enough. “I’m so disappointed,” she says earnestly. “I was hoping to get stung more because it’s good for arthritis.”

“My aunt ran off with a beekeeper,” she adds, “and he had the best skin you could imagine.”
Viggiano is convinced that her relationship with her bees will be long-term. “They become like your babies,” she says. “You get really attached.”  [AUGUST 2010]

Christine Hensel Triantos is a freelance writer who lives in Richmond, Mass. She was not stung once while researching this story.

THE GOODS

Northern Berkshire Beekeepers Association
Meets last Tuesday of each month
Price Chopper
245 State Rd./Route 2
North Adams, Mass.
Tony Pisano: 413.663.9288

Berkshire Berries
Route 20
Becket, Mass.
800.523.7797