From just two production hives, this summer's harvest at the apiary in the dene came to 27 gallons of honey. That is about 324 pounds. Consider what it took to make it.
Honey bees make roughly 2 million visits to flowers to produce a single pound of honey, and a worker bee produces only about 1/12 of a teaspoon in her entire lifetime. Every jar on the shelf represents an almost unimaginable amount of work by a very large number of very small creatures.
Now, as the apiary is prepared for winter, it's the right moment to look back at what the bees have given us this year, and at the many hands that helped bring it in.
Harvest is about community
Harvesting that much honey takes more than bees. During the week of July 20, Burr and Burton Academy students, both past and present, joined Hildene interns, volunteers, and staff at the greenhouse at Hildene Farm in the dene. From there, the crew suited up, walked to the apiary, and pulled the honey supers, the boxes where the bees store their surplus honey. The next morning, everyone was back at the greenhouse to uncap the comb and extract it.
“The students never hesitated even a moment when I asked if they would like to suit up, open the hives, and collect the boxes filled with honey... and bees,” says Lisa Maggio, Hildene's Youth Education Director, who leads the apiary. “They were just as willing to grab a mop when the work got messy.”
This year's crew went above and beyond. Former students returned simply for the chance to be part of the job again.
“But it wasn't just their hard work that made this harvest special. It was their attitude, and everyone else's who was involved,” Lisa says. “If I had to choose one word to describe this year's harvest, it would be joyful. Everyone worked hard, helped one another, and genuinely seemed to be having a great time.”
How Hildene harvests
At Hildene, only the surplus honey is harvested, the honey the bees have stored beyond what they need for themselves. And the harvest happens early enough in the season that the colonies have the time and the resources to rebuild their stores before winter.
That timing matters, because honey bees do not hibernate. When temperatures drop, they form a cluster inside the hive and continuously exercise their wing muscles to generate heat, keeping themselves and the queen warm through a Vermont winter. A colony needs at least 60 pounds of honey to make it through.
“We're not a huge commercial enterprise, and we're also not hobbyists. We're mostly a teaching apiary,” says Kyle Turner, a youth education instructor who works alongside Lisa in the apiary. “We're under different pressures than a commercial operation, so we get to baby our bees a little.”
For Kyle, that care is part of the appeal. “You have to be very in the moment when you're working with bees. You have to be very intentional in your movements, so it's sort of a meditative process. You also get to connect with the seasonality of life. We're doing this in the spring, this in the summer, this in the fall, and we get to pay attention to the world around us.”
Where the honey goes
Guests can find jars from this year's harvest in the Welcome Center. Some of the honey is set aside for events on the property, and couples married at Hildene can request jars as party favors for their guests. Some is given to the volunteers and community members who help make Hildene everything that it is. Even the wax cappings sliced from the comb during extraction find a use, heading to the goat dairy at Hildene Farm for soap.
It is a fitting kind of thrift for a place that has always farmed with curiosity. Robert Lincoln and, later, Peggy Beckwith farmed this land without depending on it for their living, which gave them the freedom to experiment. Hildene Farm carries that spirit forward today, in the goat dairy, in the gardens, and in the apiary, where the bees also pollinate the gardens, the greenhouse, and the flowers of the Formal Garden.
Honey bees and Hildene
The apiary produces honey, but its larger purpose is education.
Pollinators play an essential role in our food system. About one out of every three bites of food we eat depends on animal pollinators, and bees are among the most important pollinators worldwide. There are approximately 20,000 species of bees around the world, ranging from tiny to large and from solitary to social. Yet perhaps none is more familiar to us than the honey bee.
The honey bees at Hildene offer a way to help people notice and appreciate pollinators, and then begin looking more closely at the native bees and other pollinators around them. Hildene's two display hives, with their glass panes, let guests watch a colony at work. Kyle's favorite moment to share is the waggle dance, the figure-eight wiggle a returning forager performs to tell her sisters where the best flowers are. When school groups visit for a bee field trip, the students learn it themselves, dancing across the room to signal where the flowers are.
Every time a guest walks past the apiary and sees the bees hard at work, there is an opportunity to spark curiosity and appreciation for these small but essential creatures. Maybe that moment encourages someone to look more closely at the pollinators in their own backyard, plant something for them, or simply think a little differently about the important work happening all around us.
And if you are here before the cold arrives, the bees are still working. Look at their back legs. The packed clumps of pollen they carry home change color as the season moves through its flowers, orange one week and yellow the next. It is the most visible sign there is of one season leaving and another arriving - one that is hopefully, just as sweet.
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Hildene Farm in the dene is open to guests daily. Walk the trails, visit the goat dairy, stop by the apiary, and pick up a jar of this year's honey in the Welcome Center on your way out. Twenty-seven gallons goes quickly.
