The Catskill Mountain Beekeepers Club, Promoting Our Precious Pollinators

CATSKILL MOUNTAINS - Sichuan Province, Hanyuan County produces pears, lots of pears. They have a problem, however, they have virtually no bees. The use of pesticides has wiped out the pollinator population of the principal pear producing precincts. Now pollination is carried out by hand, by people. It isn't work you want to pass on to your children. In China, they are addressing the future by encouraging small apiaries. A friend who lived nearby our small apiary told us he "cleared out" a wasp nest with poison. I thought of Sichuan Province.

Genie and I joined the Catskill Mountain Beekeepers Club. We love honey and believe in its health benefits and are worried about the future of food production in the USA. We have been finding that there are a number of reasons folks keep bees in the Catskills, from wishing to keep the pollinator population strong, to helping pay the bills. Believe it or not, your bees also get to know you, and you develop a relationship with them. Last summer, I dropped a frame and the bees flew up from it, checked me out, no head butting, no stings, they just returned to the frame and waited for me to slide it back into the frame.

The local bee club meets in East Durham. It began in 1996.  "I've known bees forever, I was stung by bees, I hated bees, then I lost my honey supplier," Heidi Ruehlmann begins. "They moved away, so I bought the hives from them. You probably hear that from many beekeepers. Once you have bees, you get hooked." The Beekeeper's Club started in her living room. The club was started by Heidi's late husband and Dick Johnson. It now has over 130 members.

Heidi - there at the start of the Club

Among the newest members are Molly and Frank from Palenville. They are interesting members in that they are not in it for the honey. They are breeding bees to increase the community of pollinators keeping our farmlands and forests blooming and growing. They got their bees from Anarchy Apiaries. This supplier specializes in bees who have an inherited behavior of grooming mites from each other. They are interested in increasing the number of honey bees which are resistant to the terrible mites which are growing immune to treatment after treatment. They use topbar hives, which do not have frames, but encourage the bees to grow natural shaped comb inside a long, horizontal box.

Molly and Frank - topbar hive keepers

Jane Treubig "It was something I was interested in, and when I moved upstate, I thought I'd give it a try." I've spoken with Jane before. She organizes the meetings in  East Durham, walking through the crowd calling, "Five minutes to places... One minute, ... Places people." Growing up in theater I recognize a stage manager when I see one, and always answered "Five and thank you... places and thank you." Jane attended the Catskill Mountain Beekeepers Club for two years before "venturing in-" to the world of beekeeping. She bought two "nucs" (the group of bees and a queen) and two hives, "I had them for two years, and then lost them in the winter, and kind of gave up."  A year after moving upstate, Jane's husband passed away, leaving her with a huge building and ten acres. The Catskill Bee Club didn't have a central location. Members had to track down the club's extractor (a centrifugal device for spinning frames of honey to pull the honey out of the frames ) there was a library which a member would bring to each meeting. Now Jane donates the use of the large building on her property to store the club's shared equipment and house the club's library. 

I've dropped in on Mary Ann Welsh and her husband Gary. They live overlooking one of the most beautiful valleys I've ever seen, in a log house built by Gary and Mary Ann. Gary is a retired contractor from Catskill, Leeds. Mary Ann is from the Bronx, New York. They've been keeping bees for sixteen or seventeen years. It was Gary's idea. They had beekeeper friends and Mary Ann was "dead against it because [she] didn't like bugs and" she said, " naw not a good idea." But they started with two hives. For the first four years they kept losing bees, but they kept learning. They joined the Catskill Mountain Beekeepers Club, and learned all the things they needed to know to build a thriving population of pollinators. They now have about seventy five hives in eight apiaries and Mary Ann is the current president of the club. They keep some hives on their own property, and others spread out on other people's properties. Their apiaries are on farmland in Schoharie and Green Counties, where people have fruit trees and good plants for pollen. They pay their apiary's landowners with honey as they tend the hives on their host's property.   

Mary Ann and Gary Welsh's home apiary

The apiary on her own property are bees whose swarms they have caught, or gotten by bee rescues, "cut outs." The new hives can be monitored near the house. They could be diseased or have a heavy mite count. The last thing she wants to do is mix a new hive into a large established apiary. Cutting out a hive isn't an easy job. There is a great deal of set up and equipment to remove a hive. The queen must be found and the bees safely vacuumed up, then the comb completely removed.  I ask her what the hardest bee rescue she and Gary have performed. She tells me a horror story of finding bees in an attic three flights up in the summer. It was over one hundred degrees in a crawl space, and they had to take turns in their bee suits in the terrible heat as they cut away one hundred years of growth of a hive. The old wax was like concrete and it all had to be removed. The job took them all day.

Mary Ann and Gary Welsh with their bees

There is another challenge besides hot attic cut outs. Our Catskill bears love honey as much as we do, as a dessert for a meal of bee larva. Recently Mary Ann and Gary cut out a wonderfully docile hive from a barn. "They were beautiful docile bees," and were planning breeding generations of this wonderful strain of bees. A few nights ago a large bear broke through the electric fence and carried off a hive to have a picnic in the woods. They take the loss stoically, it is simply another aspect of the life of a beekeeper, trying to discourage bears.

They build and adapt a lot of their own beekeeping gear, something for which the combined knowledge of the club is a nursery. Gary is a great asset in this adaptation of equipment, as he is a master of machinery, meticulously maintaining and fixing classic old cars.

Mary Ann and Gary's equipment for extracting honey and uncapping frames of honey

Al Thiem drops by to drop off some equipment owned by the bee club. I know him from the club. He has some eighty hives, a fast growing apiary which started small but has grown as he catches his own swarms and splits his hives. He often gives talks and demonstrations to the members on making their own equipment and other vital tricks of the trade. Mary Ann estimates he built this bee empire in three to five years.

Al and Mary Ann explain modified and invented equipment to the membership

There is a great mix of folks in the club, a diverse mix of religions, politics, national origins, but I have found, and heard others say, there is a friendly and helpful nature among beekeepers. Perhaps it is becoming more conscious of that matrix of nature which binds us together and makes us dependent on the natural world. But, whatever it is, it makes for a great gathering of friends once a month. You can find the Catskill Mountain Beekeeper's Club at this address: https://www.catskillbees.org/.