With honeybees dying off en masse, it’s caring beekeepers like Jen Dunn who may ultimately save them.
I think that’s so sad-bees are starving as babies!” Nurse bees get sick and can’t take care of their brood, so the brood doesn’t have enough food to properly develop. “One of the biggest problems caused by the Varroa is malnutrition. “I just learned this, and it’s why SNACpack really appeals to me,” says Dunn. Dunn pulls up some photos on her computer of her bees, showing the adverse effects of the mites, including a virus that causes deformities in bees’ wings and abdomens. Dunn identifies three main reasons for the decline: monocultures, because they give bees only one foraging source neonicotinoid pesticides, a type of agricultural insecticide that was just banned in Europe and the Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite that attacks honeybees.
Between 19, the number of hives in the US dropped 60 percent, from 6 million to 2.4 million, according to the U.S. The big picture, though, shows honeybee populations suffering. Saratoga County’s actually a great place to keep bees, says Dunn, not only because we have a resource like Betterbee so close by, but also because of the diverse flora in our area, which offers bees a number of sources from which to forage. Peter’s, to cover the cost of production, and donates the rest of the money to SNACpack (Saratoga Nutrition Assistance For Children), an organization that provides food for children in need. Since I started keeping the bees, I felt like the bees were doing most of the work.” For that reason, she keeps 50 percent of her profits from sales to St. “I feel like I should share my honey,” Dunn says. Dunn sells her honey on Facebook, with the help of her two daughters and to St. In her kitchen, we extract honey from two honeycombs using a large, barrel-shaped contraption, and fill two mason jars. (Jen Dunn)įinally, Dunn puts the lid back on the hive’s box, and I can breathe again.
#HONEYCOMB NEAR ME FULL#
I, meanwhile, am focused on making myself invisible.Ī bee colony “bearding,” or clustering outside the hive to keep the honey at the correct temperature, is in full effect. Throughout the process, Dunn chats casually about bee reproductive processes and behavior, all the while fidgeting around in the hive without gloves. Out in the backyard, Dunn walks me through a hive check-in, making sure the queen-marked with a white dot-is where she’s supposed to be and that the bees aren’t forming swarm cells, which indicate that the queen’s going to leave to form a new colony. Now, Dunn keeps 14 bee colonies, each of which can have up to 70,000 bees in it, in three locations: her home in Saratoga Betterbee, one of three major bee supply companies in the country, located in Greenwich and Pitney Meadows Community Farm, where she’s proposing to the farm board a community apiary where people can rent hives for a year and learn beekeeping from her. It wasn’t until three years ago when she moved back to Saratoga from Rwanda-where a swarm of bees had taken up residence in her laundry room, making her what she calls a “bee haver” rather than a keeper-that she decided to get her own hive. When Dunn was living in Germany in high school, her landlords kept bees, and the idea of taking up the hobby stayed in the back of her mind. “In my experience, knowing a beekeeper is often the gateway to becoming one,” Dunn says. I’m following Saratoga Springs-based beekeeper, Jen Dunn, whose indifference toward the thousands of bees swarming around us makes me feel a little braver. Fast forward two decades, past countless bee stings while playing in the yard, camping and hiking, and I find myself in a veil, white coat and honey-coated gloves, willingly walking toward a busy beehive. The details are foggy, but I do remember walking around barefoot on my driveway one minute, then sitting down and crying the next. One of my very first memories is of stepping on a bee.
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