I started my apiary with a few Langstroth hives, the typical hive of boxes piled vertically on top of each other. As my interest in bees grew, so did my desire for more hives. Influenced by a friend to try raising bees as done in Slovenia, I was encouraged to convert my large chicken coop into a Slovenian beehouse. It made perfect sense as my interest in bees was surpassing my interest in chickens, and the cost of building a completely new building was prohibitive. I still keep chickens, but only eight, rather than the over fifty I had developed that produced olive, khaki, green, and blue eggs. An apiary tour to Slovenia in 2016 reinforced my decision. I visited countless apiaries (and some wineries), met many beekeepers, talked beekeeping for hours on end, and learned the systems for working a fixed, horizontally arranged bee family.

Beekeeping is my third career. After maintaining a textile weaving and design company that wove fancy woolens for the fashion trade (Aurora Designs) for twenty years, and teaching elementary school in Brattleboro, Vermont for twenty years, I began keeping bees in 2011 for my next twenty-year career. 

I am not the first to fall in love with a bug. The longer I keep bees, the more fascinating they become and the more I want to learn about them. I am fortunate that there are several active beekeeping associations in New England, which bring in highly qualified speakers and teachers from around the country to educate us beeks. I attend as many events as I can to add to my ever increasing knowledge of honey bee husbandry.

Since 1973, when I moved to Harrisville, New Hampshire, I have cultivated a substantial vegetable and flower garden. A fascination with gardens and growing things runs in my family - my Grandpa Abbott tinkered with cross pollinating beans and produced a hybrid called the Connecticut Wonder Bean. He warned me many times not to plant more than one variety if I wanted to keep the seeds, because "bees don't respect garden bed boundaries."

As my apiary has grown, so has my garden - lately with fewer vegetables (there is only so much butternut squash one person can consume) and more flowers coveted by pollinators, honey bees and native pollinators alike. Where corn stalks used to wave in the wind, there is now a bee-loving arbor of hardy kiwi (see picture). I have thinned the many daylilies to the edge of the woods and replaced them with a potpourri of nectar producing blooms (see picture).

On warm spring and summer evenings, I walk through the garden to spy new blooms, and zealous workers still out collecting pollen or nectar (the bumblebees are always working late). I settle on the bee house deck or in a lawn chair in the Langstroth apiary, a glass of wine in hand, and observe the foragers returning from their daily labors, heavy with pollen, and smile at the nectar bearers who crash onto the landing board as though slightly inebriated, welcomed by the guard bees who let them in to unload. This humble and meditative surveillance rejuvenates and restores, as well as alerts me to anything that is amiss.

Bees are beautiful.