Photography by Doug Young
When Sag Harbor beekeeper Mary Woltz brought her hives to the Milk Pail Farm in Water Mill to pollinate the apple trees last May, she constructed a barricade to protect the bees from the wind that blows across the orchard from the Atlantic Ocean. In a sea of white and light pink blooms, the weathered wooden crates were arranged like a fort around the buzzing hives, with enough room inside each box for bee observation; a place where Woltz could sit just out of the bees’ flyway and watch them come and go for as long as she liked.
“This is my favorite thing to do,” she says, “to watch them bank as they fly in and land. I would spend hours sitting here watching them if I could.”
Woltz is not alone in her fascination with these tiny, inscrutable and extremely important insects. These are not wild, endangered, indigenous bees, but European honeybees; domesticated farm animals that are raised for honey and to pollinate crops. The keepers of honeybees on the East End of Long Island are gardeners, farmers, educators, nature lovers, conservationists and entrepreneurs. Even with the inevitable threat of an occasional sting, they do it anyway.
Hive mind
Woltz was managing a biodynamic farm and garden in Rockland County, N.Y., in 2002, when she learned about beekeeping from Gunther Hauk, a pioneer in alternative apiculture. That same year she was hired by Hamptons Honey Company to manage 100 hives, even though she was still learning beekeeping. “I had just over a year’s experience,” she says, “but they had even less experience than I did.”
When Woltz began her own beekeeping business, she took many of the hives she had managed for Hamptons Honey Company as her own. Over the years she adopted more conventional techniques, but her background in biodynamic practices still shows in her approach. Unlike most conventional beekeepers, she has only bought bees a handful of times in her 20 years of beekeeping. “I’m grateful for that introduction because I still rely on the deep relationship with the animals. I find that if you relate to the honeybee colony as a superorganism, that will guide your decisions.” Woltz launched a website for her company, Bees Needs, eight years ago and the bees she manages, whether they are foraging in her yard or a client’s, originate from her apiary.
The terroir of honey
Honeybees will forage up to about a mile away from their hive, and beekeepers can tell by the time of year the honey is harvested (generally early July on the East End) and what is blooming nearby what kind of nectar has flavored it. Honey needs no refrigeration and can be safely stored indefinitely.
Like wine, honey is an artisanal product made annually in limited quantities — each hive will produce about 40 pounds of honey a year. Unlike wine, however, the artisans in question are winged insects.
The winged workers that make Deborah Klughers’ Bonac Bees honey have won numerous awards, including two first place awards in the Eastern Apiculture Society Honey Show. Her website includes photos of the places and the plants her bees are pollinating.
Klughers recreated herself as a Master Beekeeper after a mid-life divorce, and 10 years later manages her own bees, as well as over 100 colonies of bees for over 40 clients on South Fork estates and farms. “Most of my clients are rock stars and actors who never come out and see the bees because they are afraid of getting stung,” she says. “But they love the honey, and they want to do something good for the environment.”
Woltz’s honey has also been recognized with a pile of accolades, in part because the productivity of her hives allows her to harvest several times a year. This practice lets her really dial into the bloom source, allowing her to label the light honey harvested in early June as primarily derived from black locust. The nectar for the slightly darker honey of summer comes from linden, sunflower, lavender and privet, and her girls make their fall honey with goldenrod, Japanese knotweed and buckwheat. Each harvest has a distinct color and flavor.
On Long Island, feeding honeybees sugar water is a common practice when natural forage for honeybees is scarce, but Woltz is able to avoid it, improving the flavor of the honey. “I won six Good Food awards for my honey. Six is a magical number,” she says with a laugh. “I can stop there.”
Bee’s dreams
Chris Kelly of Promise Land Apiary is one of the few beekeepers on the East End with formal education in the subject. He studied entomology at Cornell University and has been keeping bees for over 50 years.
Kelly had a front row seat to environmental changes on the East End that made modern beekeeping more difficult; killers such as a parasitic mite called varroa, pesticides and the sort of land development that replaces meadows of flowering native plants with roads, houses and lawns. “I used to say that bees did all the work, but varroa changed all that,” says Kelly, who described the need for constant vigilance and annual treatments to keep honeybees from dying en masse.
In addition to teaching, Kelly manages bees for farms, private homes and golf clubs in South Carolina, Long Island and upstate New York. He’s in the fifth year of a project at the East Hampton Airport, managing hives on that 800-acre property. The bees don’t complain about the air traffic and most people don’t even know there are honeybees foraging in hundreds of acres of spring-blooming maples, lowbush blueberry, clover and aster. “I haven’t had to clean them out of the cockpit of a Gulfstream yet,” Kelly says.
Sophie Veronis, one of Kelly’s recent clients, moved into a new house in Westhampton on a half-acre, already knowing she wanted to create a pollinator garden of native plants. “In spring of 2023 we got one hive, thanks to Chris, set up in the far corner. By June they had already swarmed.”
Veronis says the relationship between the plants and the bees flourished on her property, and she gives the bees props for that. “They are very gentle creatures,” she says. “When we harvested the honey, I had my children help and they were a little nervous, but they were fine. I had 45 jars the first year.”
Bee-people pride
Simon Bromberg is a student of Kelly’s whose interest in keeping bees was more about the environment than honey, and started around 2011 while working in golf course management. Fairways and putting greens are notoriously poor habitat for bees, but that didn’t stop Bromberg. “If golf courses are managed properly, they provide some of the only meadow forage for bees that we have left out here,” he said. “I was trying to push from the inside. I’m a subversive. I managed hives for one of the memberships that I was employed by.”
Bromberg can’t see himself ever giving up the practice of beekeeping. Standing in his North Sea backyard, veiled but barehanded, he is slowly and methodically examining frames heavy with bees in a hive that will soon swarm. He seems to be in a flow state as he searches for the queen, a larger and darker version of her hive mates. “This for me is very calming. The bees are going about their business.” Bromberg has 12 colonies of his own and manages 35 or 40 for farms and individuals. “There is something so magical about being around the bees.”
Over on Shelter Island, Tim Dalton may be producing more honey annually than is sold at the local IGA. After working as a funeral director in the family business for many years, Dalton was eager to spend more time outdoors when he started beekeeping seven years ago on two acres of land on Shelter Island. Although raising bees was a retirement project, he quickly found himself besotted. “They are magnificent creatures to watch.”
Dalton is self-taught, relying on YouTube videos and his own research, but since starting with three hives, he’s now up to seven and still looking to grow. He gives his honey to friends and family and even gifted a few pounds to the doctors and nurses who attended him during a recent illness. Dalton has an annual ‘honey day’ in his basement, during which he gathers, spins and bottles his yearly harvest. “One year I got 850 pounds of honey from 20 hives,” he says. “I don’t do things halfway.”
“Tell it to the bees”
Science and methodology aside, people who spend a lot of time around bees seem to develop spiritual feelings about them, no matter how practical their methods. For Woltz, it’s a belief in the feminine oneness of the hive that inspires her to speak to each colony as she, or her, and to empathize with and encourage “her girls.”
Bromberg says there is a touch of old-school superstition that requires people who keep bees to make sure the critters know every secret. “Tell it to the bees. It’s an old tradition, kind of like making a wish,” he says. “The bees are supposed to know everything that is going on. If you tell them your deepest desires, they will help you.”
