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A few clouds. Low 63F. Winds light and variable.
Ashley, Adam and Jim Howe near beehives on their farm in Shaftsbury.
Ashley, Adam and Jim Howe near beehives on their farm in Shaftsbury.
SHAFTSBURY — However Wild Farm of Shaftsbury shouldn’t exist.
It’s a small farm in a country that has lost over 100,000 farms since 2011. It’s an apiary, where one report claims a 45.5 percent recent loss in managed bee colonies. Yet However Farm is thriving, sending out honey to Bennington, Brattleboro, up north, and out of state to New York and Massachusetts.
However do they do it? The key is in the name itself. However Wild Farm is a play on the Howe family name, a title forwarded by family friends the Everharts (echoing their own name in the bargain). On the farm are three generations, the eldest being Gail and Jim Howe. Running the farm are son Adam and his wife Ashley, with a minor assist from their two children Asher and Addison. They all live in two houses on the farm’s 36 acres. The name However also suggests an attitude. Against the odds, with quick humor and determination, the Howes persevere. In 2019 they even added the iconic Harwood Hill Orchard to the Wild Farm.
But first came the bees. What started as a homeschool project for Adam became the family business.
“My father used to have them (bees), but I thought he was crazy … Who’d wanna get stung?” Jim says. “But, I dunno, some sorta inspiration … And we had a friend that had bees, so...”
They started with six hives in 1995. Jim explains: “We were totally uninitiated… We put ‘em in the back of the pick up, covered ‘em with a tarp. It was really warm by the time we got here (to the farm). The bees were very upset. We had Ma keep driving around the block until we found a place to put ‘em.”
The first day “I got stung so much around the ankles that I couldn’t walk. Had to go in the house and put my feet up. Adam came in, and I thought, ‘that’s enough of that for awhile.’ He wanted to go and get some honey” and did. I asked if Adam got stung. “Oh, he got stung, but he could still walk.”
As Jim Howe says, “If you work with bees, you’re gonna get stung.”
From that humble, painful beginning, the farm grew over the decades. When asked how much honey the farm produces annually, the Howes fall silent. Adam ventures an answer. “Tons.”
How many? “Well,” he says with an impish grin, “tons.”
The Howes are more effusive about the flavors of the honey, a product of the nectar the bees take in from the surrounding countryside. Basswood yields a minty honey. Buckthorn honey yields a caramel-flavored honey that the family especially likes. Overall, though, the Howes can’t control where the bees fly off to and what nectar they take in. Adam points out that although bees can fly up to two miles away, he hopes they don’t because such a distance consumes whatever honey the bee has stored up. Collectively, the bees are consistent in providing two honey flows — in spring and fall — but the Howes never have had abundance in both flows. Some years both flows are lean.
They showed me the Honey Barn, featuring the hot room, extracting room, and bottling room. The honey is brought into the hot room to keep it warm until extraction time. Once in the extracting room, frames of honey are placed on the conveyor belt of the chain uncapper to remove the top layer of wax, enabling honey to be spun out. The uncapped frames are placed in the extractor, which spins to remove the honey. Honey and wax are then pumped into the continuous wax spinner that spins even faster and contains knives to shave wax away from the honey. Honey is then pumped by pipe overhead to the bottling room and into a silver holding tank. From there, honey is directed into 55 gallon drums, 5-gallon pails or a bottling tank. The bottling tank is used to fill various honey containers, including the bear-shaped kind — the ones common on breakfast tables. One of the Howes fills each container, one at a time. (Have you been to a brew pub and seen bottles whizzing around a track, being filled and capped, no human in sight? The Howes’ bottling is not that.)
The wax, by the way, goes into a line of soap and candle products.
Fascinating as the process and the product are, I’m drawn more to the patriarch, Jim Howe. Jim moved to the area from Bennington in 1960. Then he was surrounded by farms. Today, a couple of what he calls “hobby farms” exist, but not many others. Early on he worked on cars for Hemmings Motor News in Bennington. He would “go look at cars for ‘em. If they wanted ‘em, I’d fix ‘em up. I didn’t do paint work, but I’d do the rest.”
I asked him which car he was proudest of. “When I think of vehicles, I don’t think of pride. I think of complexity.” He liked trying to understand the mechanics of these cars. His favorite — ironically because of its simplicity — was a 1904 Maxwell touring car, which had a “horizontally opposed, water-cooled engine. It was a very early car, and it was just fun to see how they did things back then.”
Neighbors know when the Howes’ bees have returned from warmer climes, since bees blanket the nearby waterways and standing pools, sucking up needed water. The Wilsons up the road talk of the Howes’ kindness and humor. Once when Pete Wilson was laid up needing back surgery, the Wilsons returned home to find a couple cords of wood split and neatly stacked. When Vicki Wilson texted Jim Howe to ask who was behind the magical transformation, he texted back, “I suspect elves.”
In 2019 the Howes bought the Harwood Hill Orchard, planted first in the 18th century. They revived the pick-your-own tradition and planted several historic species, including the kind that fell on Isaac Newton’s head (Flower of Kent) and another introduced by Johnny Appleseed.
Pick-your-own starts Labor Day weekend. Location: just off Route 7a in Bennington, 55 Houghton Lane.
My suggestion? Bring your family and get over there. However you can.
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