Hood Brook – The Beginning
Hood Brook Apiary
The Beginning
Starting as a child Bob Donovan was always fascinated by nature and honeybees. He knew nothing about beekeeping but decided to capture some bees and put them in a box. He figured they would make honey for him. To his surprise, rather than honey, they made a box of dead bees!
Fast forward 4 or 5 years. Bob was accepted to attend Essex Agricultural High School in Danvers, Massachusetts. This was a 162-acre working farm and school where Bob took Animal Science as a major. While attending school there, on the farm side of the school near the chicken coops and small animal care center, one of the workers at the school, Billie Linderman, was raising a couple of hives of bees. Bob was fascinated! Many a day he’d sit by the hives at lunch or breaks just watching the bees. He had never seen a real honeybee hive before. He spent a lot of time speaking with Mr. Linderman about the bees as well. Bob was convinced that SOMEDAY, he’d have his very own honeybees!
Fast forward 32 years and it finally happened. A long time in the waiting, but Bob got his first hive while staying with his brother in New Hampshire. Four years later he relocated to western, New Hampshire and got another hive so he now had two. They went well but he made his mistakes and lost his bees a couple of times, but it was a great learning experience. 5 years later he got 3 hives when he lived on 11 acres on a hillside in Jay, Maine. At this location, Bob caught his first swarm and hived them which brought him up to 4 hives.
Sadly, 2 years later Bob’s elderly mother fell ill, and Bob took his bees back to Massachusetts to the home he grew up in and became the caregiver for his mom and what became 5 hives in her backyard. Luckily, the home his parents owned, and he grew up in was surrounded by woods and a big lake, so even though in a big city, the bees were just fine and so were the neighbors (I gave each of them a pound of honey each year!).
In early 2020 Bob’s Mother passed, and it was time to get back to nature for bob and his bees. At this point, he decided to start an apiary (a bee farm) so he moved to Maine, and with every penny he had, he purchased 29.1 acres of heavily wooded conservation land where a spring-fed brook originated. It was Hood Brook. He decided since Hood Brook started on his property and this new apiary was a new start in his life, he would name it after the Brook, hence the name Hood Brook Apiary
In his first season, he purchased all the necessary equipment to have 10 hives for a starter and t
he ability to extract and bottle all his honey to market. He wanted to educate people, especially students, about the importance of honeybees and all pollinators, especially in a rural community in central Maine such as the one he now lived in.
That is how Hood Brook Apiary and Learning Center began!
