Edible Blue Ridge Summer 2022

The Bees’ Needs

Spikenard Honeybee Sanctuary & Farm creates a refuge where bees can thrive

LAYLA KHOURY-HANOLD

WORDS

LISA ARCHER & LAYLA KHOURY-HANOLD

PHOTOS

H ONEYBEES, black swallowtail butterflies and ruby-throated hummingbirds flit from one cluster of yellow dandelions to another. Lush patches of green mountain mint and tree blos soms are flourishing. e sun warms the piercing blue sky. Spring has ar rived at Spikenard Honeybee Sanctuary & Farm, a non-profit set on 41 acres in Floyd, Virginia, just in time for the annual Dandelion Festival. Mid-April marks the arrival of the honeybees’ first nectar flow, kicking off a season of abundance and rebirth. Spikenard staff member Jody Keating greets visitors near the en trance, excitedly informing them that the farm has just had its first swarm. “It’s one hive giving birth to a new hive, and it helps clean out the [old] hive,” she says. “For us, it’s a joyful celebration.” At the visitor’s yurt, there’s a festive snack table set with dandelion pesto, dandelion petal butter, crackers and bee tea. Spikenard’s director, Alex Tuchman, and farm manager, Anthea van Geloven, are crouched next to a wooden box at the base of a nearby pine tree, where the swarm landed after flying out of one of the hives near the snack table. Tuchman has already transferred the clump to the box; van Geloven coaxes some stragglers with a long gray feather. Swarming is central to Spikenard’s small-scale beekeeping philos ophy and celebrated as “the most vital and sustainable method of ex panding the apiary, breeding queens, and selling bees/hives.” It’s a stark contrast to the approach taken by many conventional beekeepers, who discourage swarming to keep the hives as big as possible and promote larger honey harvests, and who kill and replace the queen every year. At a time when exploitative beekeeping practices, mites, viruses and cli

mate change are causing high colony loss rates, the need for a honeybee sanctuary couldn’t be greater. Since 2012, Spikenard’s biodynamic bee keeping practices, lush acreage of bee forage and holistic approach have proven critical to fostering healthy honeybee populations and supporting their role as essential pollinators. “We felt the need to create a safe place on Earth where the bees could truly thrive and where we really approach the bees with an attitude of service,” Tuchman says. “When you start asking the bees what they need, it’s an amazing exploration of learning that we’re all joining in on. But our methods of beekeeping really serve the health and the instinct of the bees first.” is methodology starts with honoring each hive as an individu al. So much so that, Tuchman says, each hive has its own personality, defined in part by their relationship to the beekeeper. “If a beehive is worked with in a gentle way, [the bees are] going to feel very comfortable with the interaction,” Tuchman says. “But if it’s a one-way street — like the beekeeper’s got his spacesuit on and he’s going in without really lis tening and receiving feedback— then the bees can be easily traumatized or get defensive in that relationship.” Tuchman goes on to explain that the latter approach fosters learned aggression, which, whether it’s incited by the beekeeper or by a traumatic event — like a bear knocking over a hive—can be passed down through generational memory. “We’ll be eight generations later and still this hive has this defensiveness because of something that happened a while ago,” Tuchman says, noting that Spikenard keeps track of their bees’ lineage. Another thing that runs in the family, and informs hive personal

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