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 124 www.visitislandlife.com 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.