MIDDLEBURY — For veteran beekeepers at Champlain Valley Apiaries in Middlebury, late summer is the sweetest season.
It’s now, after all, that a year’s worth of hard work pays off. Beekeepers last week began extracting honey from the business’s 1,200 colonies, which dot Vermont from Whiting north to the Canadian border. In a time when honeybees are falling prey to more and more stresses — like parasitic mites, pesticides and mono-crop diets — the act of making honey is a welcome reminder that in some places, like Vermont, honeybees are hanging on.
