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An Interview Reflecting on Bees, Life and Death
By: Ross Conrad
Only about 25 percent of the beekeepers in America operate on a commercial or semi-commercial level (25 or more colonies), and they manage roughly 97 percent of the nation’s bees. All the rest of the nation’s apiculturists are backyard beekeepers that tend bees part-time, managing less than three percent of the nation’s bees. Attempt to look up historical information about beekeepers and there is plenty to be found on the minority of large commercial operations. There are articles, old catalogs, census records, old invoices and honey labels that all help document such operations. Meanwhile, there is a paucity of information on the vast majority of beekeepers: the weekend warriors. Even here in the pages of Bee Culture we have a tendency to report on the large beekeeping outfits that manage hundreds, if not thousands of colonies as opposed to small operations. In an effort to help instill some balance and provide grist for future historians that may seek to document the kind of activities and motivations that animate the majority of today’s beekeepers, I sat down with Bill Mares of Burlington, Vermont on July 23, 2024 and discussed his life which has among many things encompassed: teacher, legislator, reporter/photographer, author and beekeeper.
Bill has never been a large-scale beekeeper, reaching a peak of about a dozen hives at most, but has kept bees pretty consistently since 1976. He has been a stalwart supporter of the Vermont Beekeepers Association over the years and he won ‘Best of Show’ for the comb honey division at the Vermont Farm Show in 1999. Much of what follows is in his own words, edited slightly for clarity and length.
Bill expressed a deep appreciation for the honey bee and what they can teach us: “…they’re such wonderful creatures. I came to that conclusion very early on and I tried not to be preachy along the way. I tried not to beat the drum and say ‘everyone should raise bees’ but I was more than happy to tell anyone why they are so much fun. This is citizen science. You get to use all five senses. They produce this wonderful product and they never stop being interesting. As Kirk Webster says, ‘the bees are the color and everything else is black and white.’ I thought that was a killer encompassing of the pleasure of beekeeping: your interactions are always changing, and you are not in charge. The bees swarm because they are telling you they’re in charge. Your job is always to stay a step ahead and if you miss the bus, you have to wait for the next bus. So they are always humbling. That’s why brother Adam and the other monks kept them as well as for practical reasons, as Jonathan Swift says ‘the sweetness and the light.’ If you let your guard down you lose a step…they remind you that you know some, but you don’t know all. It’s like life. You do the best you can, you’re grateful for the experience, you’re grateful for the products, and any time you stop and say what a smart person I am, your fooling yourself. You’re wasting your time because the point is to be working with the bees and not to be saying, ‘they are all mine and I snap my fingers and they do what I want.’ As a biological unit, they have a mind of their own and you never understand it all, so they are a wonderful teacher of humility.”
Bill Mares got his start in beekeeping like many do, with the help of a mentor. Bill’s mentor was Arnold Waters, a well-respected Vermont beekeeper at the time who took Bill under his wing and showed him the ropes. “I started hanging out around him (Arnold) and I knew enough to ask questions when I needed to but to also keep my mouth shut and take notes so I was never an intrusion on him or a silly worshiper… Arnold was interesting on an intellectual level and on an accomplishment level. How could I not be respectful of an expert? An expert who would answer your questions any time you want. An expert who would drive 35 minutes to show you how to get into a hive and remind you of the mistakes you were going to make and not to worry about it as long as you remembered the answer…I would have ultimately loved to have emulated him in his hive-side manner.”
Bill has had many chances to practice his mentor’s hive-side manner through his work with his state beekeeping association. Not only has he sat on the board of the Vermont Beekeeper’s Association (VBA), he served as President of the VBA, and was named Vermont Beekeeper of the Year in 2013. Bill taught over a thousand beginner beekeepers over the years through the beginner class he co-taught with other VBA members. Bill and I administered the Vermont Certified Beekeeper program for many years helping to ensure that beginner beekeepers have a solid beekeeping foundation to build upon. Bill has been a prolific author publishing some 20 books during his lifetime. Two of the titles focused exclusively on beekeeping: Bees Besieged published in 2005 and The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont published in 2020, that I had the privilege of co-authoring with him. At one point Bill worked closely with Central American coffee growers to help them supplement their coffee income and improve their coffee pollination by helping them incorporate beekeeping into their operations. Bill has also been a sought after speaker for the Vermont Humanities Council on the topic of honey bees and Vermont’s beekeeping history.
Bill Mares also served as Vermont’s delegate to the Eastern Apicultural Society (EAS) for a number of years. As Bill tells it, one of the highlights of his beekeeping journey was when he served as President of EAS and helped to bring their annual beekeeping conference to Vermont in 2012. “I thought that I had really arrived with a national reputation because I got to be President (of EAS) that year and I got to sing the praises of Vermont and brush shoulders with Kim Flottum and Tom Seeley, and other giants of both the industry and the academic community and have my name appear next to theirs. Choosing a team from the EAS board gave me a certain satisfaction and always remembering that everyone else knew more than I did, but I still could supply this kind of glue to the ultimate product. I was smart enough to choose a really good group of Vermont people, first and foremost with Diane Meyerhoff who wasn’t even a beekeeper, but she was trained as a community organizer and I mostly let her take over because there was a good template for how to run these events. You didn’t have to reinvent the wheel…I never tried to tell any of these giants what to do and I got a huge amount of help from Kim Flottum, Kathy Summers and Dewey Caron. I’d say they were the professional musketeers of the venture. I was always happy to defer to them as they had done this for twenty years. Why should I reinvent the wheel? I was just happy to absorb myself in the larger entity of EAS and enjoy it. Write a good welcome speech; a good farewell speech; choose a good aide-de-camp in Diane; and hang out and let everyone else do the work.”
When I sat down to speak with Bill, he had been diagnosed with late stage liver cancer and his doctor had indicated that he had a very short time left. At 83 years old he was exactly the same age as his mother had been when she died and he shared a thought process similar to what she had gone through during her transition in life. “She decided, probably at the age of 55-60, and she told everybody but not in a preachy way, ‘when I cease to appreciate the gift of life, I am out of here and you just get out of my way.’ Then she took the next steps which were to go to the Hemlock Society and find out what their options were as they had a dozen or so options, this cluster of drugs, that cluster of drugs, very clear with active ingredients and then the brand name. She chose a sleeping pill, or a component of a normal sleeping pill. The Hemlock Society was very helpful and said ‘you’re going to take X number of pills and this is how you deliver them to yourself,’ like a recipe. She put them up on the shelf in the kitchen, out of sight and reach of children and she renewed the prescription every three years as it required and she told us all this. She said this is what I am doing and she lived by that for some 20 years…and in April of 1990 she sent out the word ‘it’s time, I’m going.’ So she invited a family friend who was a nurse to come down from Colorado to administer this and since she had kept renewing the pills, she knew they were going to do their work. She says ‘I’m putting them in Häagen-Dazs® ice cream, I’m sorry I’m not going to do Ben & Jerry’s even though you want me to.’ So it became a family joke, and she sat one afternoon in bed and she put the pills in her ice cream. It took about 15 minutes. She laid back and went to sleep and that was it: a perfect death. She’d lived a full life. She had no regrets. She had affected and influenced the world around her and she demonstrated, this is what you do. You don’t wait for the medical establishment to keep you alive, or the lawyers, God forbid, or guilt ridden family. We’d all been on the train for 20 years. We’d all agreed with this process, so she had no guilt and it was a logical process. This was before our modern death with dignity laws so she had to do this undercover but she had a good doctor who had a good wink…It’s so civilized and you’re in control. The state is not telling you, ‘you can’t die’…and the family is in total support and you’re surrounded by love.”
Bill Mares followed in his mother’s footsteps and left peacefully for that great apiary in the sky on July 29, 2024 a happy person, surrounded by his family, at the time, place, and means of his own choosing.
Ross Conrad is a beekeeper living in Middlebury, Vermont. Ross endeavors to manage his bees in as an environmentally sustainable way as possible and works to share natural/organic beekeeping techniques with others through his writings, workshops, mentoring, and classes.
