White Dog Apiary: A friendly home for bees

Nestled up high at 179 Benjamin Hill Rd. in the hamlet of Newfield sits Cathy and Mike Griggs’ White Dog Apiary, welcoming spring with thousands of little bee friends.

White Dog Apiary was established in 1990 by the Griggs couple. With a shared love of bees and beekeeping, the couple has turned their passion into a retirement project that keeps them busy as bees year round.

After returning from the Peace Corps, where he was a beekeeper, entomologist Mike came back to Ithaca and accepted a job at Cornell University, where he met his future wife, Cathy. After the couple married, they lived in Danby. In 1990, Cathy started working for Newfield Central School District as a middle school teacher, later becoming principal and eventually the director of technology and development for the whole district.

Having developed a love for the hamlet of Newfield, Mike and Cathy started house hunting for the perfect home there to house their family and their future army of flying friends.

“We had started looking at houses all over when our daughter was 5,” Cathy said. “You should have seen some of these places we were being shown! A lot of them looked nothing like the pictures we had seen. When we found this place and saw the kitchen, yard and garden, we had to have it.”

To help usher in spring, White Dog Apiary began April by offering beeyard opportunities to the people of Newfield, looking to place beeyards in new locations around the hamlet.

“Within a matter of days, we had over 100 inquiries from the community,” Mike said. “I have spent days and days driving around Newfield. I’ve gone down roads I haven’t been on in years and discovered ones I had forgotten about or had never known about. In a short matter time, I have now seen all of Newfield!”

Beekeepers typically compensate the homeowner by providing honey or hive products. A beeyard includes up to eight hives in a rural location away from buildings that is accessible by truck year round. The plot of land used is relatively small, approximately 20 by 20 feet, and not easily visible from the road.

The plots are in open areas that are mainly flat and dry and not very close to anything that would be adversely affected by flying bees, such as children, driveways, mailboxes and animals. All sites are vetted prior to selection.

“We were surprised at how quickly people responded and how many people were interested,” Cathy said. “It was amazing. We were very happy and very grateful to the community and are happy with how it turned out.”

As winter has slowly retreated, making way for warmer weather and more sunshine, Cathy and Mike are preparing for their upcoming busy honey season.

In addition to their beeyard placement project, Mike started shoring up his apiaries by replacing wooden outer covers to strengthen the apiaries his bees call home.

Bees are the most important group of pollinators, with the exception of a few species of wasps, as Mike, who has a Ph.D. in entomology, explained. Only bees deliberately gather pollen to bring back to their nests for their offspring and exhibit a behavior called flower constancy, repeatedly visiting one particular plant species on any given foraging trip.

On a single foraging trip, a female bee may visit hundreds of flowers, transferring pollen the entire way. In contrast, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps and beetles visit flowers to feed on nectar, not to collect pollen. Thus, they come in contact less frequently with the flower’s anthers (the pollen-bearing parts of stamens) than bees do.

Bees are diverse insects that form a very important group within the Hymenoptera, an insect order that also includes ants, wasps and sawflies.

According to the Museum of the Earth (museumoftheearth.org/bees/threats), in early 2007, honey bees began disappearing. Seeing a dramatic drop in numbers, beekeepers across the United States started reporting these losses. Colony collapse disorder brought public attention to the importance of pollinators, human impact on their health and the consequences of their potential loss.

Multiple factors have been discovered as the cause of honey bee colony loss, including diseases, parasites, pesticides, long-distance transportation of colonies, winter survival rates and limited floral resources. To learn more about bees, check out Museum of the Earth’s online bee exhibit, available through August at museumoftheearth.org/bees/.

Through White Dog Apiary, Mike and Cathy are not only doing their part in raising the numbers of our invaluable flying friends but educating and involving their neighbors and community in the endeavor as well. Cultivating the fruits of their hives’ hard labor has also produced a line of delightful products for sale that can be purchased via their website or at their adorable, well-stocked kiosk perched at the end of their driveway on Benjamin Hill Road.

White Dog Apiary offers a variety of different sizes and shapes of pure beeswax candles, honey-based balms and, of course, a variety of different honeys, ranging from 2 ounces to 1 gallon.

“You can order from our website or stop by and get what you need out of the kiosk if you prefer to pick up locally with contact-free access,” Cathy said. “If there’s something specific you want that’s not out there or you need a different quantity and have a special request, you can just contact us, and we’ll make arrangements to have it at the kiosk, where you can also leave payment.”

The retirement project that brought about the couple’s current business not only allows for them to indulge in their love of bees but also plays an important role in building up the crucial numbers of pollinators that have been dangerously declining for over a decade.

Information on White Dog Apiary can be found on its Facebook page and on its website, whitedogapiary.com.

Newfield Notes appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@vizellamedia.com.

In brief:

Spaghetti dinner

On April 22 from 5 to 7 p.m., come on down to the Newfield Fire Hall, 77 Main St., for Newfield Old Home Days’ spaghetti dinner. Come enjoy the best spaghetti and meatballs, prepared by Sam Kopf. Meal includes spaghetti and meatballs plus bread, salad and dessert. Cost is $12 for adults, $11 for seniors and $8 for children under 12.

Takeouts are available, and guests are welcome to bring their own container. All proceeds benefit the 2022 Old Home Days festival!

Poetry reading

On April 23 at 3 p.m., Kathleen Kramer will read selections from her newest volume of poetry, “Everything Matters,” at the Newfield Public Library, 198 Main St.

In “Everything Matters,” Kramer has used her own photographs as sparks and seeds for the poems that richly inhabit this collection. In so doing, she has given poets, photographers and their fellow travelers a great gift. Poets will find here yet again her inimitable gifts of patient attending to what wants to be revealed, along with the rigorous discipline of finding just the needed words to sing her subjects into being on the page.

Photographers will discover that her photographs also sing when we forgo the all-too-common descriptors of our efforts as “snapshots” or “captures.” With her gentle and loving attention to each of these beautiful images, Kramer has taken us further into her own unique spiritual language of glory and praise.

Having read and reread this volume with the slowness needed, we come to see poem and image as together doing what all classic religious icons do: open our hearts to the silent center, where we can be still and lovingly know another being, even as we in turn are known and loved.

For more information, visit tinyurl.com/y5kqbm6k.