A Discussion of Bees

When Howland Blackiston'73 steps up to the microphone at Massengill Auditorium on the Roanoke College campus Sept. 29, there may be a somber mood - for a few minutes. It won't last long because of Blackiston's obvious passion in speaking about the love of his life.

The title of his talk is "The Amazing Honeybee: Let's not lose them."It's serious stuff: We're losing honeybees in the United States at an alarming rate because of Colony Collapse Disorder, parasite mites, diseases, viruses and more.

Blackiston will talk about the threat to "30 percent of everything we eat" because of the decline in bee population. It's the emphasis you'd expect in any discussion of bees.

What you might not expect is the sheer enthusiasm and delight this owner of a powerhouse New York City area-company with a huge list of Fortune 500 clients brings to his talk about a tiny insect that not only buzzes and stings, but pollinates a good portion of our food supply.

Blackiston is a New York City native who became interested in bees while in elementary school. "A beekeeper who was speaking at the school absolutely captured my attention," he recalls. "He had a Disney-type movie that captivated me. There was nothing I could do about it then, but the seed was planted."

Fast-forward to prep school at Darrow in New Lebanon, N.Y., a school built on a former Shaker village site, one with old beehives. "We broke into the building with the hives," he says, and inspected the empty shells up close and personal. The bee seed sprouted. 

Finally, as an early-career adult in 1983, his family moved to the Connecticut countryside and Blackiston almost immediately spotted a story in a local paper about a beekeeper. He called the guy, went to visit, bought the beekeeper's book on the subject, and "I just couldn't get enough," he says.

So, he went into beekeeping.

He tried it commercially for a while, but long hours (beginning at 4:30 on a Saturday morning, the day of the farmer's market) and small profits ("$25 at the end of the day") quelled that notion pretty quickly. Still, he was "producing a fair amount of honey," which he gave to friends, and wax (candles, furniture polish, lip balm, etc.), and he learned to make mead, the Old English beverage created by fermenting honey with water and other ingredients. The mead gave him an excuse for a January "workshop" each year. "We schedule it for an hour," he laughs, "and it generally finishes four hours later."

Beekeeping, he discovered, was not as labor-intensive as he imagined. In fact, quite the contrary. "It's not difficult," he says. Bees "do very well for themselves...If I need to go away for a couple of weeks in the summer, I just go. The bees are fine."

"I need to visit the bees five, six times a year, 20 minutes to half an hour at a time. It's more work collecting the honey, frankly. That can take half a day. The truth is that when I'm home, I have to discipline myself to stay away. It is easy to get involved in what's going on in the hive. I don't think people know how fascinating their society is, their relationships."

The threat to bees, says Blackiston, "is serious and unprecedented. The big mystery with Colony Collapse Disorder is that they just disappeared. They left their food, their brood behind and just vanished." 

The awareness about colony collapse is widespread, says Blackiston. "I don't think there's a person in the country who doesn't know about it. It's prominent on TV, on the cover of Time magazine - everywhere." 

Blackiston wound up at Roanoke College, he says, because his father was a native of the Commonwealth (Hampton) and "he regaled me with stories of growing up in Virginia." 

The talk will be Blackiston's "first trip back to Roanoke College since May of 1973, when I graduated. I have a rendezvous scheduled with some people and I know that will be enjoyable."

Blackiston Bio

Name: Howland Blackiston
Age: 63
Hometown: New York City
Residence: Weston, Conn.
Company: Principal at King-Casey, a retail consulting and design firm based in Westport, Conn.; founder and former president and chief creative officer of Juran Institute, a quality management company
Education: Roanoke College, Class of 1973, Fine Arts major
Books: "Beekeeping for Dummies" (third printing 2015), "Building Beehives for Dummies" (2013), both John Wylie & Sons Publishing

Dan Smith, a member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame, is a freelance journalist, author and photographer in Roanoke.

Published Sept. 22, 2014