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Rollin Hannan
Beekeeper
Hannan's Honey, Southbury |
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Honeybees are angels of agriculture
A lot of people call honeybees the angels of agriculture.
They’re not really known for how much they do, but they’re the
link that connects all agriculture.
The honeybees pollinate 90 crops throughout the United States.
In Connecticut, we pollinate apples, blueberries, pears,
squashes, and most of time a lot of the farm stands have bees
there for various other things. They do everything that most
people don’t see. I mean, bees have an impact even on milk
production. The farmer buys alfalfa and clover seed. Bees are
used to pollinate, to make the seed. So it’s a tie-in with
everything.
I’ll explain it this way. If you have a dinner plate and you
take one third of the food off it, that’s what the bees
pollinated. I don’t care what it is, the volume of food is what
the bees do. If we did not have bees, we would have one third
less food surplus in the United States.
Growing To Love Bees and Growing a Business
I grew up on a small farm in Southbury. We had animals, cows
and sheep, and I was fascinated by them. But it wasn’t my
calling in life. One of my dad’s friends had a couple colonies
of bees. I caught a swarm when I was 15 or 16 years old, and I
fell in love with it. I kept studying more and got really
involved.
So, 16 years later I have more than 400 colonies all over
Connecticut and Eastern New York. In the summertime, there are
50,000 to 70,000 bees in a full-size colony, so we’re probably
talking 2.5 million to 3 million bees that I own. But I do this
part time. My real passion is to try to take my bee business
from 400 to 1,000 colonies and make a full-time living at it.
I just bought a house six months ago on land we’ve used for 20
years. It’s a house that was built in 1765 – and old barn. And I
bought five acres. The Southbury Land Trust has been buying a
lot of land, production or farmland, in town and keeping it
open. They bought the rest of the farm, and I have life-use of
that and can put bees on their property.
Beekeepers don’t need a lot of land. Because you can’t have all
those colonies in one spot, we spread them out all over the
place. We need holding yards, and a lot of the farmers let us
put bees on their property.
My business is sort of two businesses in one. I run my bees both
for honey production and pollination. I pollinate a lot of the
major orchards in the state as a service to them. We can gain a
little more. Maybe there’s enough for 600 or 700 hives just on
rentals, dealing with the big growers.
On the honey side, sometimes you’ll make honey on pollination,
sometimes you won’t. It’s really where the business is geared.
Doing pollination you’re not going to make as much honey as you
would for just raising bees for honey production. It’s a
different style of bee management. But it’s kind of nice,
because most of my orchards sell my honey at their stands so you
get some income that way. And if one year’s better than another,
you have something to fall back on. |
