Building A Sweet Life in West Barnstable
Ah, the sweet life. For many, the term probably conjures up thoughts of wanting for nothing, kicking back and enjoying all that you could possibly desire without the responsibility of work. Perhaps the image furthest from your mind would be waging a pitched battle with Mother Nature to reclaim the land and homestead of a once-thriving farm in West Barnstable that dates to the 1700s. For Steven and Jeanne Pelletier, their idea of retirement from corporate America aligns more with the latter than the former in building their own Cape Cod home and brand: Cape Cod Honey.
“We were looking for a little farm,” Jeanne says of the couple’s retirement plans. “We were actually looking out in New York state, but it was just too far.” Cape Cod to them had a different meaning. Jeanne continues, “I had always brought the girls to the Cape – and we love the Cape – but we always thought of it as a beachy area. Then we found this place and it was so agricultural.” “This place” was West Barnstable. Particularly, it was a three-and-a-half-acre plot of land that was once part of a larger 10-acre farm originally owned by Goody Crocker dating back to 1780.
The recent past hadn’t been kind to the property and structures on it. The pair purchased the property from a trust in 2013 and began the arduous task of bringing the property back. They’ve christened the property “Three Maries Farm” in honor of Jeanne’s great grandmother. The family matriarch was so beloved that Jeanne’s mother and aunt, Jeanne and her sisters, and all the women in their daughters’ generation have the middle name “Marie”.
The pair was up to the task. Although Steven is a software engineer and Jeanne a lawyer, it was Jeanne’s work as a preservationist that made the team particularly well-suited for the mission. She has helped restore several historical properties in Boston over the past thirty years, notably, The Ayer House – the last surviving residential commission of Louis Tiffany (a name more recognized for his ornate lamps) – built at the turn of the twentieth century.
The West Barnstable farmhouse and original barn still stand today thanks to the Pelletiers’ efforts, but more work needs to be done to open up the property. “We want to put in an orchard,” Steven explains. “And maybe have a little farmstand out front.”
An orchard would serve two purposes, of course. The enjoyment of the fruit which the trees would bear is one. Providing the growing number of bee hives Steven keeps in the backyard with a very convenient source of pollen is another. Bees will travel up to several miles in search of pollen, but why go to that trouble when you’ve got a smorgasbord of flowering trees mere feet away? In mid-July, the Asian chestnut tree was in full bloom no more than twenty or thirty yards from the hives. The air between the tree and the five hives was thick with honeybees. It was a veritable honeybee highway as they traveled back and forth, paying no mind to the two nosy humans standing aside the hives. “You’re fine as long as you don’t walk between the tree and the hives,” Steven advised.
“I’ve always wanted to try beekeeping,” Steven says, despite the fact he had an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting when he was younger. “I get stung a couple times a year.” Thankfully, no adverse reactions have occurred. To find out what it took to get into the hobby, Steven strolled over to neighboring E&T Farms to talk with Ed Osmun. “I kind of wandered onto the property, because I knew he sold honey,” he remembers. Ed’s advice? Reach out to the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association and take a class. “It was an interesting class. You come away with the basics, but they match you with a mentor, because you need someone to answer your questions.” Steven’s mentor, Steve Whittlesey, has become a friend.
With Whittlesey’s and the beekeeping community’s guidance, Pelletier began his endeavor. Currently, he tends five hives, three of which are fully functioning, with roughly 30,000 bees producing upwards of sixty pounds of honey available for the taking in July. The hive will produce far more, and a secondary, smaller harvest is taken in the early fall. The key is to leave enough honey for the bees so they can survive the winter on their stores. “The rule of thumb is to leave them sixty pounds of honey for the winter,” Steven explains. “If they don’t have it, we’ll make it up by giving them sugar.”
The honey is stored within the honeycombs on frames 5”x19” in size. Ten frames fill the removable box atop the stack of boxes that make up the hive. Each frame can hold over five pounds of honey. The frames are placed in a washing machine-sized centrifuge and are spun to extract the honey, filling the air with the enchanting aroma. “It smells wonderful,” Steven smiles. The bees can also smell the honey in the air. “They’re all over the screens and at the door, and they’re like, ‘Hey, we want that back!’” Jeanne chuckles. Even after a spin through the centrifuge, a small amount of honey will remain on the frames. Jeanne explains how they get cleaned, “We’ll put the frames back outside, and the bees will pick them clean.”
Two of Steven’s hives are noticeably smaller. One is a result of a swarm that occurred at Whittlesey’s nearby, where bees sought to break away from one of his hives. The other houses the “split” Steven separated from one of his own hives. You may be familiar with the sight of a massive ball of thrumming bees which will seemingly appear out of nowhere and attach themselves to structures for a few hours or days as the swarm looks for a new location to build their hive. “Swarming” is a natural response to an over-crowded hive. As the bees create a new queen, the old queen will seek a new home, taking some workers with her. For the beekeeper looking to expand his honey business, retaining any swarms is crucial. “You don’t want your swarms going somewhere else,” Jeanne laughs. “The goal is to split the hive before a swarm breaks out,” Steven explains. Removing a frame filled with the brood (larva), the workers tending to the brood will follow them. They quickly realize there is no queen, so they’ll create a new one and the new hive begins to grow. Pelletier doesn’t expect to get any harvestable honey this year from the splits. It’s more important to let the hive get established for future harvests.
Hive life is fascinating. Every bee has a role to play. The multigenerational arrangement is constantly evolving since the average life span of the female worker bees is only two to four weeks in the summer (longer to survive the winter). The male drones live a few weeks longer, whereas the queens can live for two to five years. As their title suggests, the worker bees do all the work, from foraging nectar and pollen to tending to the brood. The drones’ only role is to mate with the queen. Once that task is completed, they only consume the stores of honey, without any further contribution to the hive. This is precisely why the female workers kick the drones out in the fall. Come springtime, the queen will just make more drones to replace them. Workers will fan their wings to create a breeze in the hive to combat the heat of the summer. When winter rolls in, they’ll cluster around their queen and vibrate to create heat to stay warm. They’ll rotate through so everyone takes a turn being on the outside of the mass.
Still tied to the corporate grindstone, the Cape Cod roots have been growing for over ten years now. Jeanne and Steven spend just about every vacation and weekend throughout the year in West Barnstable working on the property, and plan to call the farmhouse home in two years. The growth of Cape Cod Honey will continue to be methodical. “I can see going up to ten hives,” Steven says.
The demand for their golden-hued raw honey is there. Jeanne sells bottles of it at Meetinghouse Farm around the corner on Route 149 where she sits on the board of directors of the nonprofit organization. By the end of the bottling process, a bit of pollen and beeswax will work their way into the bottles. “We’ll save those for our own consumption,” Steven says. “It’s still great honey, but it just doesn’t look as nice (as the bottles they sell).” Count edible CAPE COD’s own John Carafoli among the fans of Cape Cod Honey. “The thing with me is I love to eat local,” Carafoli says. “I can walk ten minutes around the corner and get local honey. I love it.” Carafoli uses Cape Cod Honey for cooking and pouring over items like his buttermilk corn muffins (see recipe). He and the Pelletiers have a running joke between them. “I always say my orchard provides the pollen for their bees. I should get the honey for free,” he laughs.
For some, the sweet life is just a bit sweeter with a little sweat added to the mix. For Jeanne and Steven Pelletier, enjoying some of their own Cape Cod Honey truly makes Three Maries Farm feel like home sweet home.
Three Maries Farm, West Barnstable
threemariesfarm.com
For more information on beekeeping, visit: Barnstable County Beekeepers Association
barnstablebeekeepers.org
Along with being co-publisher of Edible Cape Cod with his wife Cori, Larry Egan is a New England Associated Press award-winning writer and commentator, and host of the talk show The Handyman Hotline on Saturdays from 1-3 pm on 95.1 WXTK-FM. He can be found most afternoons on the trails of Cape Cod being worn out by his personal trainer: their Portuguese Water Dog, Archie. At no point did he have to use his EpiPen in researching this story.
