The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society hosts a monthly beekeepers club to share adventures about the ancient practice of cultivating a hive of bees. The purpose is at least threefold: to provide honey for family and friends; to populate our neighborhood with pollinators; and to keep busy with a hobby that tunes connects to nature.

The biggest challenge of beekeeping is helping the bees survive the winter. On the Islands, we are roughly 50 per cent successful. About half of our hives die during the winter, mostly because there aren’t enough bees in a hive to form a cluster large enough to maintain the warmth required to stay alive. This past winter we had a couple of very cold snaps.

New England is a difficult place to raise bees because the nectar flow season is short. In other parts of the country, in particular the southern states, bees gather nectar nearly year-round. Those folks are so successful at raising bees that they can supply the northern states with bees to replace the ones lost over the winter. They also raise queen bees, which of course are essential to the life of the bee hive.

The bees are transported in screened packages containing a cluster of three pounds of bees, which is about 10,000 individuals, and a brand new queen. Last Friday, I drove up to Plympton to fetch 26 packages from the Plymouth Bee Club. They had 540 packages trucked up from Georgia. They arrived at 2 a.m. Those bee club folks looked mighty tired. The packages were stacked up shoulder-high in a garage. Loose bees filled the air. In this situation, since they are not defending their hive, they are very docile — even overly friendly, hovering right in front of your face or landing on your shoulder.

Among their club members handling the packages were several people who had a connection to Chappy through the Heywood family. I picked up 26 packages for our club and rushed them back to the Island where they were distributed to beekeepers in nearly every town, including a couple to Chappy. The sadly vacant hives got a fresh cluster of bees and a new queen. By nightfall there were more than a quarter million more honey bees on Martha’s Vineyard and Chappy than there had been the day before.