Way to Bee – in challenging times
You could call Claire Desilets the queen of beekeepers on the Cape (if you want to embarrass her)
“Looks like a honey of a day,” joked Claire Desilets; sun out, temperatures sneaking into the 60s so bees were active – until as happens so often around here around now, fog slipped in and made the late afternoon chilly. The bees retreated to their boxes to “cuddle,” as Claire put it.
She will not entirely agree or disagree that she has an addiction to beekeeping:
“It’s more of a passion,” she says, which grew out of a childhood around 4-H Clubs in the 1950s in East Sandwich, plenty of chickens, pigs, and ducks, and evolved as her family farmed cranberry bogs and took on 50 hives around Crow Farm.
She joined the Barnstable County Beekeeping Organization in the 1980s, and now she’s running it. There were 420 members last year but like hives, there’s attrition so the total is around 340 now.
Her focus is on bee numbers more than people numbers, overseeing multiple hives in her yard in Sandwich, another 10 or so in a far corner of the county farm along Route 6A in Barnstable. Using boxes at the county “we go one step beyond what club members are doing at home,” she says, not research really but advanced effort like making queens; she creates “queen cups” that hold larvae with the magic sauce “royal jelly” spooned in, “and voila! If all goes well, you’ve got a queen.”
She still imports queens but prefers breeding from the hardiest local stock. “We call them Cape Cod mutts,” she laughs.
The specter that hovers over all Cape Cod beekeeping – beekeeping across the continent – is “Varroa Destructor,” which sounds like a comic book villain and acts like one too. Varroa is a parasitic mite about the size of a period, reddish brown, eight legs, no eyes, that feeds off pupa. Aptly named, it destroys hives. It first arrived in this country around 1987 and to this day wreaks havoc:
“We can lose 40, 50 percent of our hives on the Cape,” says Claire, a lethality matched across the country that leads to great discouragement among beekeepers and great concern among anyone interested in a healthy ecosystem.
How to fight Destructor? Desilets believes that galling as it is, hives must be treated – though not with synthetic pesticides. Her weapons include formic acid (as found in ants), Hop Guard which is extracted from hops (as found in beer), and a menthol product called Apiguard, a thymol gel (as found in thyme).
“The best one is oxalic acid, found in many plants,” she says. “If you use it at the right temperature, and the right time, it can be very effective. But for example if you use formic acid when the temperature gets up toward 95 degrees during the summer, you’ll kill the queen.”
Desilets will sacrifice half a cup of bees, 300, drowning them in an alcohol solution, swishing them around, pouring it out, and counting the dead Varroa among dead bees. That way she can tell whether she needs to treat.
“Some beekeepers can’t bear to kill 300,” she adds, “but my response is it’s 300 or maybe the whole hive.”
Widespread use of synthetic chemical pesticides led to the next disaster; mites developed resistance. Natural miticides, bio-alternatives, seem to work and Desilets has come to the conclusion that there is no option; ecologists say an overwhelming percentage of wild hives in North America have been killed by Varroa.
But let’s be (bee) real: Wholesale spraying, pesticide applications, and mowing down wild flowers have played a huge destructive role.
A Cape beekeeper who keeps a hive alive can average 50 pounds of honey a season, says Claire, assuming it’s sunny and warm. One key is the weather when plentiful black locust trees bloom later in the spring; if those white flowers stay aloft, not blown away or rained down, that’s fine as kind. Linden trees make a lovely blossom too, and in the fall golden rod is a favorite (though there’s not much of it on the Outer Cape).
For years Claire offered an annual start-up course, beekeeping 101, five or six weeks in the winter to the first 40 sign-ups, popular until COVID; she hopes to regroup next winter. Meanwhile she’s “at BJs buying sugar constantly to get them through the spring,” and offering support to backyard beekeepers who become discouraged given high mortality.
But people keep coming, keep trying, fighting mites and odds. That must be because beekeeping is meditative, repetitive, noble in intent, life affirming, ancient, respecting natural connectedness.
Henry Thoreau had a way a putting things I appreciate, ponder, then come to dispatch. Here’s one: “The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”
“I’m often asked if there’s help beekeepers need,” says Desilets. “What I say is there is only one thing we really need: More blooms. More blossoms. More pollinating plants. People just need to plant more, and let more grow.”
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