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View ProfilesPublished June 13, 2023 at 1:48 p.m. | Updated June 14, 2023 at 10:03 a.m.
Amid the stately halls of Champlain College and the rambling centenarian houses of Burlington's South End lies a secret garden: a hushed acre of greenscape hidden behind dusty parking lots and the deep corners of urban backyards.
At first glance, the green has the look of a forgotten quad, dutifully mowed by groundskeepers and disregarded by everyone else. But visitors who enter it walking west descend into a hollow brimming with native perennials such as milkweed, bergamot, lobelia, hyssop, butterfly weed, coneflower, beardtongue, goldenrod, aster and phlox. The hollow is known as the Perry Pollinator Garden, and it sustains an even greater treasure: the honeybees of Champlain Apiary. Their trove? Wildflower honey.
Seven Days joined the apiary founder, Champlain College associate professor Kristin Wolf, to meet this summer's crew of winged workers, sample the product and learn more about how the presence of bees benefits the larger community.
Champlain Apiary has its modest headquarters in a few wooden boxes known as Langstroth hives, stashed in a side yard beside the pollinator garden. The yard is protected by a fence with a large picture window that gives visitors a glimpse of the hives through the safety of the glass.
Wolf estimates that the average annual bee count peaks between 40,000 and 50,000 western honeybees — chosen because they make honey, unlike Vermont's native bees. She also keeps several plant species in the garden to benefit native pollinators and deter competition from the hive dwellers.
Nationally, western honeybees play a critical role in pollinating commercial fruit and vegetable crops. In Vermont, native pollinators are plentiful enough to pollinate most crops, according to Laura Johnson, pollinator support specialist at the University of Vermont Extension.
But honeybees provide plenty of farmers with a new revenue stream. They do the same for Champlain College, funding the apiary and the learning experiences it offers to students and the community.
Visitors who enter the apiary yard with Wolf can don a full bee suit and even gloves. After 20 years' experience keeping bees, Wolf is bolder: On our visit, she wore a regular long-sleeved shirt and pants, along with high rubber boots and a bee veil for head protection.
Wolf stuffed a bee smoker with dried white pine needles foraged from the road where she lives in Waterbury, and the air filled with a sweet, acrid, vanilla-tinged scent. The smoke interferes with the bees' ability to communicate and makes them hungry, she explained, sending them into the hive to gorge on honey. The result is calm, sluggish bees.
Wolf sent a few puffs of smoke into the nearest hive as dozens of bees darted in and out. She held up a dead male, or drone, which she identified by its larger size and massive, wraparound eyes. Up close, the dense, blond coat on its thorax revealed itself to be composed of thousands of fine hairs.
A female, or worker bee, landed nearby. She was smaller but mighty, her back legs weighed down by pollen that she was carrying back to the hive to serve as a highly nutritious food source for her family.
Slowly, Wolf pried off the top cover of the hive box with a hive tool, revealing hundreds more honeybees as their buzzing grew louder. She pointed out the crayon-yellow "bee bread" visible in some of the combs, which is pollen mixed with a bit of nectar that ferments into a nutritious, fat- and protein-rich food source. She also pointed out the combs filled with nectar that, when cured and capped by the bees in a thin layer of new wax, would become honey.
"Oh! This is very hard to see, but if you look right in the middle of this frame, there are almost like little grains of rice in the empty combs," Wolf said. "Those are eggs." When you see them, she added, "you know the queen has just been there and that she's laying, because those eggs only last for three days."
She gently pressed the hive tool into one of the wax combs to reveal the near-microscopic egg that would soon become a larva. Continuing to pull out vertical frames, one at a time, she called attention to the propolis the bees use to insulate the hive, the royal jelly that provides nutrition to larvae and the queen, and several combs containing drone and worker pupae. She excavated an alabaster drone pupa that would have emerged within the week; the drones must be culled regularly, she said, to minimize the spread of varroa mites that carry diseases that can devastate the hive.
Wolf's work is methodical, hypnotic and astonishingly rich in sensory input. Hundreds of bees enveloped her in a slow-motion cyclone of activity, buzzing more loudly in response to the occasional puff of sweet smoke.
"You come in here, and there is no sense of time," Wolf said. "I'm always late for everything, because you start to go through [the hives] and it's such an endless source of fascination."
The fruit of this careful stewardship will be about 200 pounds of honey from this year's two to three hives — "which is wonderful," Wolf said. "The average on a hive in Vermont is about 60 pounds." The yard can host up to five hives, though Wolf said that tends to be a lot for the space.
Inside the building next to the yard, Wolf produced a painter's palette of honey for us to sample, from white-gold to dark amber. Honey tastes and aromas are as varied as those of wine, beer and coffee, ranging from fruity to spicy to medicinal. The color and flavor depend on the bees' nectar source.
Some honey is polyfloral, like Champlain College's wildflower honey, while other products are monofloral, which means their nectar is derived primarily from one type of flower. Clover honey is the most common example, but honey connoisseurs are increasingly seeking a broader range of flavor profiles, from manuka to buckwheat to apple blossom.
Champlain College's product is a light amber color with a sweet, mellow taste that consumers have described as floral, Wolf said, with notes of fresh fruit and mint.
"And a lot of people said citrus on the end, but I've never really gotten citrus," she said.
The honey and other bee-based products are sold about 200 yards away at the campus store, as well as online. A six-ounce jar of honey is $7, while lip balm and ski balm made from the beeswax go for $4 and $5, respectively.
The profit from Champlain Apiary's products goes back into support for the bees' ongoing care, educational programming, and student-led production and marketing of the honey and beeswax balms. Wolf also employs the bees to provide experiential learning opportunities in courses as varied as environmental ethics, science and society, and global studies. Over the past 10 years, she has led students on beekeeping excursions in the Peruvian Amazon through a college partnership with the Fundación Honey Bee Impact, an organization founded by her beekeeping mentor, Germán Perilla.
Former Champlain College student Hayden Coy, 25, was so impressed with Wolf's work that he returned to the apiary with a group of fifth and sixth graders through his employer, the Boys & Girls Club of Burlington.
"I took the kids there because I knew how smart Kristin is. I found myself always captivated by the things she said," Coy said. "I knew the kids would be, as well. They really listened to every word and kind of just ate it up."
Coy plans to bring another group of students to the apiary through the Boys & Girls Club this summer — one of several field trips that Wolf hosts for younger learners each year. On June 5, she hosted a group of second graders from the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington.
This reporter (and Integrated Arts Academy parent) joined the students' teacher, Heather McGrath, and other parent volunteers in helping the students into their tiny bee suits. The children made their way into the apiary, where they went from nervous to delighted as Wolf carefully carried over a frame crawling with bees. The biggest surprise was how unbothered the bees were. As Wolf had promised the students, "if our bodies are calm and our voices are calm, they're not dangerous."
"I thought it was really fun and interesting," Malachi Doherty, 8, said. "I also thought it was kind of scary ... because you were walking through these big clouds of bees." But as the visit went on, his fear receded because he was "not getting touched by anything," he added.
Dahlia Groves, 8, agreed. "It just felt good to be calm," she said.
Wolf felt that same sense of "little kid wonder" when she first visited an apiary in her twenties, she said. She credits that feeling with leading her to where she is today, 20 years later.
"It was such a sensory experience that you are so socialized to be scared of," Wolf said. "When that myth was debunked for me, I was sold."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Hometown Honey | Champlain Apiary delivers a delicious educational experience"
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