from Medford Leas Life, May 2010
In September 2009, Medford Leas Life reported that the promised apiary had been installed on the Lumberton campus. As everyone has noticed, it’s been an unusually warm spring, so Correy Melissas, the bee tender and daughter of the late Mickey Gray, opened the hive on a warm day in the third week of March to see what was going on.
She found the bees to be, as she put it, “happy and plentiful.” Correy issues a newsletter when she has something to report. In it she said, “The entire first level [the hive body] was empty of bees, brood, and honey. The upper body was filled with all the bees and a few frames of untouched capped honey. This is good news because it means they were able to store enough honey on which to live through the winter,” which had been a goal for the first year of the hive.
She will be taking various steps this spring that are needed to maintain the hive and stimulate the bees to produce honey that she should be able to extract this summer.