Hello, My name is Jesse Bellavance and I recently moved to the wonderful town of Charlottesville with my wife and daughter from the Fredericksburg, Virginia area. We lived there for over ten years. My wife is a potter and I have just completed over 10 years of work as an environmental cartographer for the USMC aboard MCB Quantico.
More importantly, in relation to this web site, I am a beekeeper. Not a full fledged 100 hive beekeeper, but your average hobbyist who at the most had 4 hives up and running. The small number of hives should not reflect on how much I love beekeeping. For me, 4 hives was manageable and fit in with my busy schedule of work, night classes, and Brazilian Jujitsu. I guess you could say I am a jack of all trades. I may not be a master but might consider myself a journeyman.
Honey. Its whats for dinner.
Ever since I purchased the book The Hive and The Honey Bee and Richard Bonney’s two part series of books on beekeeping in 1994, I have loved beekeeping with a passion. The smell of a freshly opened hive with its soft wax and the gentle humming of a yet to be disturbed hive of bees. That is the life fore me.
I did not actually get to practice the art until 1997. Until that point I just read book after book and read the periodicals. I had a very academic sense of what beekeeping should be. In 1997 I moved to Morgantown to attend graduate school and managed to find a local beekeeper by the name of Barbara Fallon, who would take me under her wing. She was a great teacher and taught me how to be gentle with the bees, disturbing them as little as possible. I learned a lot from her despite my ham-fisted ways of doing things.
Before we moved here I had three hives of honey bees on my Uncle’s property in Woodford, Virginia. It was the ideal setting. He had plenty of fruit trees, vast gardens, and a large resource of surrounding farmland for the bees to draw upon. In addition, the site was secluded, faced the south, and was on top of a hill with trees behind it providing shade during the summer. My bees were happy until they decided to succumb to colony collapse disorder or my own mismanagement. I am still not sure of the culprit.
However one hive still thrives on his property which I even managed to cull over 80 pounds of honey from not more than two weeks ago. Next year I will help my uncle with the process for establishing some new colonies.
Now that I am a new transplant to the Charlottesville area I hope to find someone close to Cville that will let me set up some hives on their property. In return they will get free honey of course and the satisfaction that they are helping honey bees become stronger naturally.
During the last few years I have stopped using many of the toxic medications used to treat for mites. Apistan being the key miticide. I try to purchase queens that have been genetically chosen for strong hive hygiene, good temperament, and resistance to mites. After that I wish for the best and hope that proper management will help. I do use some pest control measures such as essential oil treatments for mites and terramycin for American Foul Brood but that is about it. I cannot say my hives are organic but they have far less chemicals than most hives out there today.
Jesse Bellavance
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