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Community Corner

Bloomingdale Resident Finds Passion in Beekeeping

Coleman's honeybees pollinate vegetables in the borough.

Leeann Coleman lives in a small ranch house on Morse Lake, in , where she plants lots of vegetables and flowers. Her neighbors have taken notice of her new, expansive hobby: beekeeping.

"My friends and neighbors who know I have bees will call me: ‘Oh, your bees are here. They’re in my bush!’ They’re all excited because it dawns on them that bees really can fly," Coleman said.

Coleman grew up in Pompton Plains, loving gardening from the time she was young, planting vegetables with her grandfather who grew up on a farm. She worked on a farm in Towaco as a teenager. She studied nursing, biology and art at William Paterson University, then fashion merchandising at Berkeley School. Her ideal career wasn’t quite at her fingertips.

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Seventeen years ago, Coleman and her family bought a small fixer-upper on Morse Lake, where she raised her children and worked full time at a print shop. Two years ago, she noticed her zucchini and cucumbers weren’t growing and seeing no honeybees, she did some research online. She signed up for the Beginners Beekeeping Course by the Sussex County Beekeepers Association. Then everything started to come together. She found her calling.

In 2006, a condition called Colony Collapse Disorder was discovered in bee colonies. Hives that had been perfectly healthy in the winter were suddenly dead in the spring, caused by factors that may include pesticides and migratory stress. This struck a chord in Coleman, who decided to jump in to what is actually a small industry.

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“You’d be amazed and a little concerned if you knew how few beekeepers there really were in the United States,” she said.

She bought a bee suit, supplies, five hives and bees. She also got a short haircut so the bees wouldn’t get caught in her ponytail.

“At the moment, it’s a hobby,” Coleman said. "But I found when I went to school and started beekeeping, it was a calling. I’m a kind of person who just absorbs information and hangs onto it. I’ve always worked, because you have to support yourself, but now I finally found what I was meant to do.”

Coleman set up five hives on her deck. A hive is a stack of boxes that model a hollow tree, with removable sections where bees build cells to keep their brood and their honey. Hives come in assorted heights. When full, the medium size weighs 30 to 40 lbs. 

“That tall hive there probably has 65,000 bees in it, but the hive itself is one life," she said.

She said bees make honey to eat so they can survive the winter. As a beekeeper, she merely goes in and steals the honey. But the bee’s purpose in life is to make the colony survive. Every bee has a different role, depending upon its age. 

“A young bee, when it first comes out, nurses baby bees. As it gets older, it has different roles in the hive and ultimately becomes a field bee. But if the nurse bees were killed, a field bee isn’t prepared to do the job of a nurse bee. So there may be 65,000 of them, but they’re really one," she said.

Coleman said that when a colony gets too crowded, it splits into two separate entities.

“The colony is the living being, so they reproduce the colony by swarming. The queen will take half the bees with her and fly away into the forest to find a hollow tree or suitable home and then they’ll take it over,” she said.

Coleman said beekeeping has taught her many things about the world and she feels a responsibility to educate people about bees. She said beekeeping is allowed in Bloomingdale, but is banned in many other municipalities.

“They don’t understand what it’s about. All they see is a bunch of stinging creatures flying around in the air and it freaks people out,” she said. 

“My kids are very lucky because they have been running through the woods, and there’s bear and fox and coyotes and bobcats and all kinds of things, and they’ve gotten to live a full life,” she added.

Coleman loves her neighborhood because it reminds her of growing up in the ‘60s with friends and neighbors who help each other. She said there is “a great sense of community.” But she will be leaving Bloomingdale next year.  

Coleman just purchased an 11-acre farm in Sussex County and will be moving once her youngest son, Eoin, graduates from in 2013. He will be entering the Marine Corps. She plans to expand her beekeeping operation, which will involve splitting the colony and doubling the number.

She sells her local honey, when it’s available, and other natural products she makes, including soaps, lip balms and creams. She goes to craft shows, farmers markets, and sells on Etsy.com. Her online business is growing. She recently got orders from Norway, Poland, Japan, Italy and Australia, she said.

Coleman says honey has antimicrobial and antibacterial properties. A daily spoonful of local honey is a daily dose of pollen, which helps build up allergy resistance. Eating comb honey and swallowing the wax will gently scrub the intestines and scrape off toxins that build up, she said, and soap made from honey is good for acne. Coleman said she has not been sick in two years.

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