Who We Are

Hey there! We are Linda and Dave Safford in Exeter, New Hampshire.

We’ve been keeping bees for 6 seasons this year. Our story goes like this; a friend of ours was going to put beehives in our yard, but then lost her bees. I (Linda) decided that beekeeping sounded like fun, so I signed us up for bee school during spring break. When I told Dave that we were going to bee school, his response was “why on earth would we do that?” To which I responded, “because we are going to be beekeepers, it will be fun!” Thankfully, Dave is a good sport and went along for bee school and the whole beekeeping thing! After our first day of bee school, Dave and I came home and promptly got on Craigslist for equipment. We found someone who had hive bodies, suits and a smoker for a reasonable price, we bought it. At our second bee school session, we proudly told our teacher what we had done, she warned us that starting bees in used equipment could be dangerous and there may be disease in the boxes, and we shouldn’t use the woodenware at all, in fact, we should burn it! Shoot, so much for getting ahead of the game…. We had an incredible bonfire in February, waxy woodenware burns hot and fast! Lesson learned.

We purchased new woodenware and began our adventure with two packages and have gone from 2 hives to 6 hives over the years. Some good years with no winter loss and some bad years with a few hives lost over the winter. This year all six of our hives survived the winter and they are going gangbusters so far this year.

Our goal for our apiary is to be sustainable, meaning that we don’t buy bees, we split our hives and make our own queens if we need them.

We also learned in our first two years that you do need to treat bees for Varroa mites otherwise your hive will eventually abscond or die from mite overload. We use an organic formic acid treatment and we don’t treat when the honey supers are on. We do all that we can to be as organic as we can and raise healthy bees that make delicious honey.