Our Beekeeper
Seth Croteau, Beekeeper
How did you get interested in Beekeeping? What is your philosophy regarding the creation of sustainable bee populations?
My wife and I have grown up around farms in Pomfret, Putnam, and Woodstock. I worked in my parents garden with my grandmother. I was one of eight children, so growing our own food certainly helped make ends meet. The garden was enormous, and we grew everything from fresh produce to potatoes to squash. I learned early on how to grow our best food without using chemicals and with plants that grow compactly allowing us to fit a variety of foods within space. 40 years later, my interest in beekeeping really began when my wife and I started making use of our 1/10-acre property in Jewett City to maximize our food independence. As time went on, I began to understand that we weren’t getting the pollination rates that we wanted to grow the best food efficiently. I spent parts of the next five years researching honeybees, the greatest group of managers of pollination on the planet.
I have a real passion for bees. Give me a smoker, and about 20 hours of time with the bees and I’m the happiest guy. I bought my first nucleus hive from Full Bloom apiaries and in about 6 weeks they began to SWARM…I was able to re-capture them, but that was a lesson I’ll never forget…Hearing the buzz, realizing they were out of the enclosure, but still hanging out nearby was scary and exhilarating at the same time. From there I went from one hive to two hives to 22 hives today….upwards of 35 next year.
Along the way I have learned from the best of the best. I get truly excited when I find people involved in the methodology. I have a mentor from New Britain who I purchased five colonies from when he was set to retire. That was the beginning of my apiary expansion in earnest. He has this natural innate sense for the bees that I have been able tap into and make my own. Another mentor that I am excited to meet this summer is Mike Palmer from St. Albans in Vermont. Mike has adopted methods from as far back as the 1800’s, from monasteries in England on how to make bees and bee-hives sustainable. In other words, creating and using native stock to make more bees as opposed to buying ready-made hives with quite often sub-quality queens.
