Industrial Arts...

Fri, 06/23/2017 - 8:15am

Eva Murray

Laura Livingston’s beehive under the horse chestnut tree on Matinicus Island.

Laura Livingston says good morning to one of her cows on Matinicus Island.

Matinicus Island beekeepers Joe and Diana Bray.

Joe Bray checks in with his bees.

Busy bees!

Joe Bray doesn’t always suit up, but he decided he should for his photo in the news.

Laura Livingston’s beehive under the horse chestnut tree on Matinicus Island.

Laura Livingston says good morning to one of her cows on Matinicus Island.

Matinicus Island beekeepers Joe and Diana Bray.

Joe Bray checks in with his bees.

Busy bees!

Joe Bray doesn’t always suit up, but he decided he should for his photo in the news.

Despite quite a few dim, foggy days and the lingering chilly nights (interspersed with a few oddly hot mornings), the official start of summer was this week. Here on Matinicus Island, the first day of summer — and most of spring — can be more of an abstraction than a real-world experience. But, even when offshore temperatures require we keep our sweatshirts on, the flowers do come out. This year, the show has been especially gorgeous, with flowering trees abundant and wildflowers all over the island. The apple blossoms have come and gone – I must say, rather gloriously this year – and now the lupines are beginning to turn the fields and roadsides purple. Daisies line the airstrip and the blackberry blossoms are huge.

The bees are going to work.

The beekeepers have been at work for a while now. This past week, Diana and Joe Bray added a third hive to their 10-year-old honeybee operation. Joe, who is a lobster fisherman for a living, sounds like a committed environmentalist, even though that expression sometimes makes a commercial fisherman wince. I'd best not call him – or any fisherman – that name in the news, but you can tell from talking with Joe that he cares deeply about the natural world and the wider ecosystem. Beekeeping fits in well with a desire to make things better.

Lobsterman John Melquist had honeybees for seven years on Matinicus. He doesn't have any bees on the island this year, but says he may bring some out again next spring from South Thomaston, where he also maintains beehives. Like many island fishermen these days, John has two houses, as his wife – a nurse – is employed on the mainland.

Laura Livingston is relatively new to Matinicus. A couple of years ago, she brought out the first cows we've seen here in roughly 60 years, and is expanding her small farmstead. Bees are a logical addition. Nestled under a spreading horse chestnut tree, now in flower, Laura's single hive is busy with activity as the bees explore their new home.

Nobody here is in the honey business, and none of the island's beekeepers imported bees to pollinate commercial crops. All have fallen in love with the hobby for reasons beyond something sweet on the morning toast. To be sure, high-quality, local honey from your own bees is not a bad payback, but part of the satisfaction comes from more than an edible harvest. Keeping bees seems to make people happy. Everybody I spoke with told me that beekeeping was an interesting, enjoyable activity, and that it is gratifying to feel like you're helping with something important. Joe insists, "It's actually relaxing to watch them."

He adds, "It's a good feeling to be part of saving the bees. I love honey of course, but I don't eat honey every day, it's not about the honey. It's just a good feeling. It's really is worth it, for so many different reasons."

Laura said: "I could suck down a lot of honey! I'm so into local food, I don't like buying something that came from somewhere else if I don't have to. I've always wanted bees, and finally I don't have a landlord who says, 'No.' I couldn't do it until I had a home here."

Diana has met a lot of other local beekeepers through area organizations and classes. "I went to bee class at Extension, joined the Knox Lincoln County Beekeepers, met my new friends the 'bee nerds.' There are a huge number of people in this area keeping bees now," she said.

Diana told me, "I always suit up," but Joe said, "A lot of times, I don't. But you learn some lessons – like don't wear a fleece when you're around the bees. That's like Velcro for their little legs, and they get stuck on you. That does not make them happy."

Our offshore location makes shipping and logistics a challenge when it comes to honeybees, as it is with ice cream, engine parts, medications,and just about everything else. Joe and Diana explained how, "For this third hive, we got a 'nuc' (nucleus) order of bees from Bangor, and had scheduled a flight with Penobscot Island Air but the fog came in. We got a ride from (a neighboring lobsterman). It was a nasty, awful day, and they didn't dig the ride. You certainly have to plan; you can't just hop in the car and go get what you need on short notice."

Laura ran into the same complexities starting out. "When my bees arrived, the queen was dead, so I had to order another queen." Evidently the package had endured some rough handling in the freight process. "I got the first bunch from a company that didn't have wonderful customer service, so I won't be using them again. Live and learn."

Robin, our island postmaster, tells about the air service pilot carrying the little box off the mail plane when Laura's new queen arrived. He grandly announced, "The Queen is here!" Those pilots fly absolutely everything.

"I didn't have a bee suit yet either," Laura said. "Because the one I'd ordered hadn't come in time, but I haven't been stung. The first hive I ordered also wasn't going to get here in time for the bees, so I had to order another one from somewhere else. So now I have two."

I wondered what got each of my beekeeping neighbors started. Joe described how, "Back when I was fishing off Criehaven years ago, I could look across to Matinicus and see Charlie Pratt's beehives, so I knew there used to be somebody keeping bees out here. We'd heard about the issues with bees, Africanizing, the colony collapse, not enough bees for various reasons. I thought, why not try again?"

John told me, "My granddaughters got me started. When they were little, they asked me 'Where does honey come from?' They had an interest and I took the beekeeping course."

Laura shared how she'd wanted bees for years, but until recently hadn't had a place for them. "I took the beekeeping course years ago and had read a lot, but until now there was always somebody who objected. Now, I own the property, there's plenty of room, nobody has to worry that there's a beehive right outside the bedroom window. I can finally have bees!"

Physical space without homes too close is only one of the many advantages of Matinicus Island for beekeeping. Diana said, "There are no big farms, and we're fairly isolated, so it's pretty nearly organic." John echoed that when he said, "There is no big monoculture with a lot of pesticides," and Laura said, "No GMO corn or crops with strange things going on."

The island is mostly spruce woods, with apple trees, berries, and flowering bushes in every field and open space. Undeveloped beach areas are full of beach peas, and home gardeners here tend to go light on the chemicals.

"Bees love the rugosa roses, the blackberries, wild strawberries, cranberries. One year we got some honey with a distinctive color, you can do a color match test, we found out it was from roses and cranberry. Late in the year we have jewelweed, both colors. In the spring, they love dandelions, they go for crocuses, and the spruce pollen, and rhododendrons. This is a great place for bees."

John added, "One of the biggest things is the climate. Out here, we don't get our first hard frost until into November, and they can get nectar and pollen all summer and into the fall. It's a long season, a very good environment as far as supplies, food for them. They like those asters that grow along the roads in October."

Beekeeping does take some work, just the same. "Parasites are a constant issue," John said. "Mites {varroa destructor} are getting immune to some treatments, just like with people do with antibiotics. You've got to treat the bees for mites. Formic acid and oxalic acid help, and they're allowable by organic standards."

"We do have a long, cold spring, though, weeks when it's not really spring yet. You have to feed the bees. I'd fly out to the island from South Thomaston in March to feed the bees, give them sugar and pollen substitute, just to get them through until the flowers came out. Things bloom later here," he said.

Laura said: "I've watched a ton of YouTube. I also read the book by the guy who designed the style of hives we all use, Langstroth, back in the 1850s. There is a lot of good advice in that old book (L.L. Langstroth On the Hive and The Honeybee; The Classic Beekeepers Manual). When I ordered the bees, they did ask if I wanted the queen marked or clipped, and being a beginner I said, 'Both.' Clipped means that the queen won't leave. I don't need her to start a swarm and end up moving into some neighbor's attic."

Laura also had to supplement to get the bees started. "I made them some apple syrup instead of just plain sugar syrup, because I had this homemade cider that was too sour, so I boiled it down and added a lot of sugar. They liked that," she said.

Overwintering bees requires leaving them plenty to eat. The beekeepers told me that summer worker bees (the females) have a six-week lifespan, but winter bees can live six months around here.

Diana said she's been taught that the recommendation is to leave about 75 pounds of honey for the bees to overwinter. "In the bee class, they say you won't harvest any honey the first year, but our first year we had a bumper crop. I was psyched that we got any at all that first year. There was so much, I couldn't lift it."

The Brays harvested no honey last fall, because the drought last summer resulted in a decreased supply. The bees survived the winter, though, and they come first.

A few facts: a single bee makes a couple of spoonfuls of honey in its life. They'll fly two or three miles in search of nectar and pollen, but no way can they fly all the way to the mainland (Matinicus is roughly two miles, end to end). During the peak of the season, there might be 60- to 80,000 bees, or more, in a hive, with a single queen. Diana added a piece of interesting trivia she'd heard in bee class: "They hum at Middle C."

Joe Bray summed up what all of these island beekeepers said one way or another: honeybees are good neighbors. "If anybody in your neighborhood has bees, it's always a positive thing, never a negative thing. People shouldn't get freaked out. People don't understand how much honeybees do for us."

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