Teen Fellow Blog: Beekeeping at Hall Apiaries

Oliver Emery, 2024 Teen Farm Fellow, is in 10th grade at Thetford Academy. Ollie loves watching and playing sports, softball and soccer to name a few. The Teen Farm Fellowship is his first job which was really cool to be able to be outside all summer long. He had fun traveling across Vermont and learning about different farms. Overall, his favorite part of this program was seeing all the different processes here at CCFEC, just to sell some veggies.

Beekeeping & Queen Bees at Hall Apiaries

The Farm Fellows traveled to Plainfield, NH to work with Hall Apiaries, where we learned about farming queen bees and different types of agriculture. Hall Apiaries represents a unique form of agriculture because, unlike a normal beekeeping operation, Owner & Director Troy Hall breeds his own queens to sell. This creates the benefits of disease prevention and the ability to breed for specific features. Both of these benefits help Hall Apiaries remain successful and profitable.

When we arrived at the apiary, we were immediately greeted with a large amount of honey bees. After settling in with the other beekeepers, we were given an overview of their operation and got to put the bee suits on. Personally, I was interested in this part because I always wanted to know how the suits prevent bee stings, and have wanted to try one myself. We then harvested queens from the artificial hives. These hives were split up into four quadrants, each of which usually had four queens in them. After we found the queens in each quadrant, Troy took them and kept each individual queen in its own small box to either mate with a colony or to sell. This process was really cool to experience (although it was very hot and sweaty in the bee suit!).

The visit to Hall Apiaries was a great way to expand my mind on how broad the term “agriculture” really is. When you compare Troy Hall’s agricultural operation to Cedar Circle’s, they are very different. Both have special features that make them unique.

One highlight of this trip was collecting the queens. This was really interesting because people have the common idea that bees will sting you if you get near their hives, but doing this work proved that thought completely wrong and changed the way I look at bees. The second best part of this trip was getting to wear the suit. This is only second on my list because it was too hot. When you put on the large white suit and veil you almost feel like an astronaut, but you also begin to sweat an outrageous amount.

Overall, as a fellow, I found this trip to be the most fun and intriguing out of them all because it was hands-on, I met some really cool people, and I learned how successful beekeeping operations work.