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Hood Brook Apiary – From the beginning

Hood Brook Apiary – From the beginning

ABOUT HOOD BROOK APIARY
From the Beginning…

Although owner/operator Bob Donovan has been a “hobby beekeeper” since 1986 in 3 New England States, his interest in bees goes back much further. However, Hood Brook Apiary is relatively new. After relocating to central Maine on 30 acres of heavily wooded bog land in January 2021, he founded Hood Brook Apiary in Pittsfield, ME. The name comes from the brook that starts from springs around our land. The brook is called, you guessed it, “Hood Brook.”

Coming up with me from Massachusetts were the 3 hives I kept where I lived in Lynn. In addition, I purchased 7 new hives from Pierco Beekeeping Equipment. They were delivered to my new home and Apiary here in Pittsfield. I purchased 10 packages of bees from “Spicer Bees” in Whitefield, ME. The bees arrived in mid-April and were installed in the hives on the same day. We were now officially known as “Hood Brook Apiary!” I had brought my 20-frame extractor and bottling tank up from Massachusetts on the move and built my hive stands here. We were off to a very good start.

I was happy to see that the fall of 2021 was going well, and that my bees were strong and being fed. Little did I know the disaster my first Maine winter would become. By the end of December, I had lost one hive that hadn’t built up enough. I had nine remaining. They all looked good! But at the end of February, a very unusual weather pattern moved through a couple of times creating horrific losses for Maine Beekeepers. The days warmed up to about 70 degrees, but by mid-afternoon, the temp would swiftly drop into the teens. This happened several times over the next 2 to 3 weeks!

What made it so bad was that the bees survived much of the winter cooped up inside their hives; the warm weather allowed the bees to do house cleaning.  Generally when the weather warms up, even for a day, the bees like to do housecleaning making it wasier to move around and have less debris within the hive.

They would clean up any debris, including dead bees, and carry them out of the hive. They would do short flights to carry the debris away from the hive. On a normal late winter day when the temps warm up, they would gradually go lower starting late in the afternoon and not getting super cold until the evening. This would allow plenty of time for the bees to return to the hive, gather together, and form a big cluster that generates heat to keep the hive warm enough to survive the cold.

Sadly, the swift early afternoon drastic temperature drops caught the bees off guard, not allowing them enough time to get back into the hive, organize, form the cluster, and maintain heat in the hive. Instead, some never made it back, and others got together with any returning bees closest to them and formed several smaller clusters that were spread apart. This does not generate enough overall heat in the hive for the extremely low temperatures outside. The bees froze to death. I lost 4 hives with the first major temperature fluctuation, and 4 days later I lost 2 more. The following week the same temperature fluctuations passed through one last time, killing 2 of the 3 remaining hives and severely weakening the remaining hive. I figured I was finished as this was a huge investment. An investment I counted on making back in the 2nd year from honey sales that never materialized because of the losses. The State of Maine’s Bee Inspector and State Apiarist with the Department of Agriculture came here and inspected my losses. She said I did nothing wrong, and there were a lot of losses throughout parts of Maine in the last weeks of February and early March.

Any existing apiary that had been in operation for 2 or more years would have had enough honey stores to sell honey through the following summer and help cover their losses. Without having that because I was in the apiary’s first year, it was disastrous financially, forcing me to sell off most of my dead hives along with my extractors, uncapping equipment, and bottling tank to try to raise enough money to start over with maybe 2 hives rather than 10. It went from a business back to a hobby-sized beekeeping situation.