1 Victoria Shouldis Beekeeper John Snowdon of Westmoreland tends to a hive on his property. Zoom

By Victoria Shouldis

John Snowdon will be the first one to tell you he has learned an awful lot from his bees. He has learned to take his time, slow down and focus on what interests him.
He has learned that a successful manager – whether that means the manager of a successful communications company or of a set of hives in a shady part of his backyard – brings in smart workers and then lets them do their thing, with as little interference from the manager as possible.
And he has learned that those bees may have us beat in terms of their rules of society. There’s no bee in the hive plotting to steal extra stores of honey or clover from fellow bees or lying about affection toward another bee. Drones know that they have but one path in life – to live, mate with a queen and then die – and they do their work with pride. The queen knows she is the queen but does her share of the work (laying up to 2,000 eggs per day), isn’t excessively prideful and seems often to know when her time has passed.
And the worker bees, they work. They protect the hive. They protect the queen, for example, forming a shivering wall around her in the dead of winter, so her temperature remains in the 90s.
It is fair to say Snowdon is fond of his bees – though he stops at giving them names. There’s one thing he’s fond of telling new beekeepers.
“You may love your bees, but your bees don’t love you,” a saying that helps to remind him and beekeeping rookies that whatever good you mean to do by your bees, you are always interlopers in their already perfectly functioning universe.
Snowdon, who lives with his wife, a couple of dogs, a cat, a gazillion honey bees, and a bear (technically the bear is only a visitor, and he is kept from the bees by a fence) on a beautiful parcel in Westmoreland, first got into bees about three years ago. He was running a successful business, his kids had grown and moved on, and he realized he was “a man without a hobby.”
What he was, however, was a guy with a fondness for the “back to the earth” philosophy found in the magazine Mother Earth News.
“Years ago you’d always find articles about raising honey bees,” Snowdon said. “And I discovered that Mother Earth News” still existed. And so, in fact, did the articles about honeybees. So Snowdon and his wife ordered a catalogue, and he bought himself a couple of hives and various supplies.
Snowdon is a strictly natural guy – no pesticides or insecticides. Many beekeepers treat their bees for common ailments, such as hive-decimating mites or Colony Collapse Disorder. But overall, Snowdon has better luck with his bees surviving without being treated and he believes it lets them develop their own genetic defenses.
So, Snowdon bought a couple of hives, a queen and supplies (he says a rookie beekeeper can probably get away with spending as little as $500, though $500 to $1,000 is a better range). Many bees for new beekeepers come from the south and that is something Snowdon and other northern beekeepers are hoping to see change. A bee, like any other being, adapts to its environment, and a bee genetically set to endure chronically warm, humid weather is less likely to adapt well to our winters.
Snowdon has his hives set up in a shady part of his backyard – it looks sort of like a row of old office filing cabinets. Each “cabinet” has holes in the bottom where the worker bees essentially take turns flying out for work. The workers then work around the house – creating safe spots for new eggs and, of course, creating honey.
The beekeeper himself doesn’t need to spend a lot of time tending the hives. It is work suited to people with varying temperaments – scientists, sociology fans, back-to-the-earth people, people who realize, as Snowdon did, it’s time to slow down and look around.
Snowdon said one can easily spend an hour or so a week at minimum checking in with them, adding new boards (creating new bee apartments) when one board is experiencing overcrowding. But Snowdon finds a certain peace just being near his bees, and the bees tend to be okay with that.
“Sometimes I take my lunch and just go sit out there near the hives in my chair,” said Snowdon, noting an incredibly comfortable and lived-in green rocking chair that sets just a ways from those bee filing cabinets.
Snowdon gets somewhere between 45 and 55 pounds of honey per year – the extraction process is gooey and can turn your kitchen into a bit of a sticky mess. He could probably harvest more (beekeepers typically harvest once or twice per year), but he likes to leave them plenty of honey to feed themselves through the long winter months. He doesn’t sell much, although many beekeepers do. Snowdon prefers to eat some of the product and give a lot of it as gifts. It’s a great hobby, he said, and one that needs to be picked up by the next generation.
“There’s too many of us old white guys who are beekeepers now,” Snowdon said.
He said it is essential for new beekeepers to seek out other beekeepers and apiary groups. There are various beekeeping groups throughout New Hampshire, and workshops are offered regularly.
Snowdon said the honey bee population and its care are important to our whole ecosystem, and he thinks, too, that we all could do well by moving back to a more natural way of doing things: not using chemicals on our lawn, and at least sometimes, eating stuff we had a hand in raising.
“Here’s what I have for breakfast every day: homemade granola with yogurt with fruit and honey over it,” Snowdon said.