Beekeeping generating a buzz in the Ocean State

There’s a buzz around beekeeping in Rhode Island, with hundreds of people involved and numerous small businesses selling honey and related products like lip balm and beeswax candles.
No designer neckties needed for this job, but it does require a bee suit. It’s not easy money, considering it’s an agriculture job dependent on weather and markets, and it takes a lot of time.
But with this potential business, it seems, you catch more people with honey than you do with money.
The challenges haven’t deterred 125 people now in Bee School at Rhode Island College and another 60 in Bee School at the University of Rhode Island.
There are now about 400 members of the who have, or once had, beehives.
“It probably costs about $500 to $600 to get started with a bee suit, bees, hive tools, bee boxes and frames,” said Ed Lafferty, owner of Fruit Hill Apiaries in North Providence and vice president of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association.
For their business, Lafferty and his wife have two trucks, an extractor for the honey and a small honey house, where they extract the honey. In addition to bottling honey, his wife uses it to make lip balm and hand-lotion products. Lafferty has 800 pounds of sugar on hand to feed the bees.
Then you figure in the winter hours for repair and maintenance, 60 hours a week in warmer weather, time selling at farmer’s markets and marketing to other outlets, and honey going for about $8 a jar, said Lafferty, who has 30 hives across the state.
“Honey is work. If you’re going to make money, you’d have to have 75 to 100 hives,” he said.
The thing that keeps most people in the bee business is simple, Lafferty said: “It’s fascinating.”
One potential development for uses of Rhode Island honey is research being done by one of Lafferty’s customers, Dr. Allen Dennison, a specialist in internal medicine with a practice in Barrington. Dennison is using FDA-approved Medihoney, imported from Derma Sciences in Toronto, Canada, for wound-healing in the hospitals where he admits patients, Rhode Island Hospital and Roger Williams Hospital. While FDA regulations prohibit him from mixing and selling a honey ointment, he recommends that others can make their own mixture using local honey for minor wounds.
“My wife has six hives, three in Rumford and three in Seekonk, and I was taking her honey for medicinal experiments,” said Dennison, whose wife is also a physician. “So now I buy honey from Fruit Hill Apiaries. I bought about 20 pounds in the last year,” he said.
Dennison said he is planning a research project, with funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to see if local honey performs as well as Medihoney, which uses manuka honey from New Zealand.
For a wide variety of reasons, Rhode Islanders’ interest in bees has grown steadily in recent years, said Jeff McGuire, instructor for the Bee School at URI and president of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association.
“We used to meet in someone’s two-car garage and 15 or 20 people would show up,” said McGuire. “Now we have to rent a hall and 100 people will show up on a Sunday afternoon. We’ve maintained a membership of about 400 for about four years now.”
Like many Rhode Island beekeepers, McGuire and his wife took their interest from a hobby to a small business . And like many beekeepers, they both have full-time jobs. He’s a Warwick firefighter and she’s a teacher in South Kingstown. From their basement workshop comes pounds of honey, beeswax-based lip balm and beeswax candles.
“I enjoy it and it makes a little bit of money to put away for my kids’ college fund,” McGuire said. “During the season, in April, May and June, I’ll be coming home from work and putting on a bee suit and working ‘til sunset and then all weekend long.” It is much more than part time for Jeff Mello, owner of Aquidneck Honey. Mello admits it’s a passion. It’s seven days a week with 1,200 hives that he owns located on farms, estates and backyard gardens in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. He donates the pollinating services – an $85 per hive value, he says – making good on the motto that guides him: no bees equals no farms equals no food.
“We don’t transport the hives. The bees live where they are,” Mello said. That cuts down on bee deaths that may come when they are transported around the country for growing seasons of varied crops, he said.
Mello has a waiting list two-pages long for the free pollination. He sells honey now with the larger purpose of funding his freely given pollination.
His mission of promoting sustainability that involves bees, pollination and farming started from experiences gardening with his grandfather, an immigrant from Portugal.
“I would spend weekends and afternoons, first landscaping and then gardening with him,” Mello wrote on his Aquidneck Honey website. “His talent and passion for agriculture amazed me.”
Now Mello is dedicated to keeping nature intact, in his corner of the world, in the sphere in which he works.
“We pride ourselves on being chemical-free. We don’t treat the hive,” said Mello, who was a plumber by trade and has been keeping bees for nearly 20 years, going to his current schedule of beekeeping two years ago.
“There’s a big interest, but I would make sure, with regard to bees or whatever you farm, be diligent, be conscientious,” Mello said.
His concern is that if new beekeepers don’t take their endeavor seriously enough, it can be one small step toward “no bees, no farms, no food.”
Without diligence, said Mello, “you’ll do a disservice to everyone and kill your bees.” •

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