How a Fisheries Expert from Tobago Plunged into Beekeeping
In the flickering sunlight of a spring morning, Calvin Alexander’s bees are wide awake. Quiet through the winter, they’re now eager to see what nectar they can find outside their warm hives.
And Alexander is just as excited for this annual pilgrimage to begin.
As a hobby beekeeper and founder/owner of Bailey Beattie Apiaries in Warwick, Alexander started with two experimental hives just for fun. But he slowly learned the myriad benefits of beekeeping, so he added three more, and now after nine years, he has 17 hives scattered from Tiverton to Ashaway.
It might seem like a strange hobby for a professional fisheries liaison who collects data and monitors subsea telecommunication cables full-time for Sea Risk Solutions, a maritime risk mitigation company. But as the eldest of six children growing up in Tobago in the Caribbean, he learned agriculture and farming from his parents, plus his father was a commercial fisherman. They tended a vegetable garden and fished to feed themselves. After studying agriculture at University of Trinidad and Tobago, he came to Rhode Island to focus on aquaculture and fisheries technology at University of Rhode Island. His devotion to beekeeping actually stems from growing his own food and developing knowledge about interconnected food systems as a child.
“We were all involved in agriculture in some form, and what we grew is what we ate,” he remembers. “Even to this day, it drives me a little crazy when people look at agriculture as a recreational thing. I look at it as a way to grow and eat something; there are a lot of benefits.”
His urban residential backyard is a testament to this ethos. Some call him a homesteader, he says with a chuckle, but he surveys a small vegetable garden and peach and apple trees flanking five beehives as merely a modest contribution to sustainably feeding himself and his family. His wife, Kerri, and two young children help too, harvesting all summer, canning peaches for winter consumption and developing honey recipes, he says. This sharing of generational agricultural knowledge honors his family, including his late mother and mother-in-law, who are the company’s namesakes.
Proffering his journal, he says that documenting knowledge is another important element of learning about the natural environment and its impact on bees’ activity. With his diary he tracks honey yields, seasonal environmental changes, and monitors diseases like the Varroa mites that just infested two of his backyard hives.
“We’ve been experiencing warmer winters and that directly impacts winter management of my bees. They use more of their honey stores during winter, so I have to ensure adequate emergency feed (adding sugar water at the top of the hive) so they’ll move up and easily access it,” he explains. “Another observation was that with warmer springs, some plants bloom earlier, which can result in an earlier honey flow. I have to be prepared for that and change the configuration of my beehives to accommodate the influx of nectar.”
This occurred a few years ago, he says, when the black locust trees bloomed two weeks earlier than the year prior, and he extracted honey in early June.
“It goes back to farmers and fishermen—people who observe nature. They look at their notes and that informs a lot about the climate and what’s going on here and globally,” he says, pointing to the names of his hives: Aristaeus, the Greek mythological hero of beekeeping; Speyside, for his hometown; and Aretha and Beeyoncé for the Queens of Music. “We are at the forefront of this knowledge.”
Avoiding waste is another key principle of his business, Alexander adds, and is an enduring lesson from childhood. He only harvests from the hives what he needs to sell at any given time, and leaves plenty for the bees’ sustenance, even if that means slower sales for his cottage business. And rather than discarding it, he collects all the beeswax from the honey super frames. He and Kerri use it to make lip balm and candles, and they’ve also experimented with making beeswax wraps for food storage.
All this production may seem like it needs a big, high-tech space, and that might be true for a larger business with thousands of hives. But Alexander’s small yield of 1,000 pounds of honey per year that he sells to friends, neighbors, colleagues and the public doesn’t demand a cavernous commercial facility. So, for now, his Mission Control is his basement. It’s here that the honey supers, a six-foot pile of frames, buckets for collecting honey, and an extractor wait for the season to begin. A mini station for product photo shoots hangs next to the stairs, where glass jars of sweet honey and candles line up for the limelight. Other gear, tools and equipment for harvesting honey and maintaining a small business sit organized here, too. It’s not much now, he admits, but with his dreams of growing into a larger space, developing a website and e-commerce platform, and maybe even hiring an employee, this space will help launch him into the next phase.
In the meantime, he’ll focus on his bees’ health and protecting them through the seasons, which means constant monitoring. So, on this chilly day with a slight spring breeze, the sun warms the hives as he slowly taps a knuckle on the side of the brood box. Through a stethoscope, he listens to the bees’ gentle buzzing emanating from inside, almost like a distant plane engine, and knows they’re happily protecting their queen and building their nest.
“In summer, they take off, just like an airport, in and out. I like standing here and just looking at the bees. It’s so relaxing,” he says from his hives that are tucked in the protected corner next to the trees. “People may think I’m crazy; they think I’m chased by bees. I understand, but beekeepers are unique, and special. No bees, no food.”
Find Bailey Beattie Apiaries on Facebook and Instagram @bailey-beattieapiaries.
Annie Sherman is a freelance journalist in Newport, writing about everything from food and business to interior design and the environment in the Ocean State.
