Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2011 | Page 124
FOOD
years, and got into milking her dad’s
cows – something she soon discovered
was a seven-day-a-week job. She had
seen Geoff briefly before they met
again at Brighstone petrol station
in 1981. That fuelled a relationship
that culminated in marriage, and two
children, daughter Rowan, who works
in London but is a keen sailor out
of Yarmouth, and son George, who
currently works with boats in Italy.
Mary and Geoff have 550 sheep
on the 320-acre Limerstone Farm,
also grow cereals, and carry out a
thriving Christmas business in turkeys.
But over the years Mary’s mother,
grandmother and grandfather kept
bees, so it was a natural progression
that she should continue the tradition.
“We already had this huge amount of
beekeeping stuff in a shed – bought by
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Geoff for a previous girlfriend – so I
decided it would be best to know how
to do it properly; took a beekeeping
course, and came back with a flat-pack
hive.
“Then we had more hives
made and when the Vicar
of Brighstone, Stephen
Palmer, who was also a
keen beekeeper, went
off to the Falklands
I ‘bee-sat’ for him.
Suddenly I was
getting a lot of honey,
and decided I needed
to do something with it.
“So although beekeeping
started as a hobby it has
grown hugely into a business. We used
to do ‘B & B’ for a while, but you have
to keep the house clean all the time. So
I decided it was easier to do ‘bee’ than
‘B & B’,” said Mary.
“Beekeeping has gone through
something of a renaissance recently,
but people are finding it is not that
easy to do. You have to give a hive the
best conditions you can for it to do
well. It has to be warm and dry in the
winter, not too hot in the summer,
and have enough food to survive the
winter.”
Mary’s many hives are located not
just at Limerstone but at Niton,
Godshill, Appleford, Kingston,
Brighstone and Calbourne, ensuring
good crops at various times of the
summer, and producing a vast variety
of honey, which can taste completely
different depending on the nectar
picked up by the bees.
Depending on the Queen Bee, there
can be docile hives or grumpy hives –
the latter often leading to troublesome
swarms particularly if someone is
wearing perfume or hairspray,
which they dislike.
“Some people are
frightened of bees and
the more you give
that impression,
the more they will
home in on it,”
explained Mary,
who sells her honey
at the Farmers’ Market
in Newport and the
occasional Island show, and
is also the secretary of the 160-strong
Isle of Wight Beekeepers’ Association.