CAPE MAY – How often does Douglas Marandino, head beekeeper at Cape May Honey Farm, get stung?
“Every time I’m out there,” he said with a laugh during an interview at his West Cape May store. “The angrier the hive, the more honey they seem to make.” Marandino and his wife, Andriana, opened the store and honey-harvesting operation in 2013 with just “$4,000 in savings and a lot of credit cards,” Andriana said.
It’s the holiday season, and the couple are using their time to ship out a flurry of Christmas orders, to places like Japan, Australia, France and India, and even to the small town of North Pole, Alaska. The fall and winter months mean hibernation time for their bees, which rely on their stored-up honey to survive until warm weather returns.
The couple split the work between themselves, which in the cold months means building and repairing hive frames and related equipment. Despite their success, they don’t have any full-time employees. They harvest honey, maintain hives, ship online orders and work the register, almost entirely by themselves, with occasional help from their children.
“Life is not always easy, it’s not always convenient for our kids,” Andriana said. “But as a mom, I’m happy that our kids are growing in this kind of environment. You take pride in what you do. The job you have means something for your community.”
Andriana is from Bulgaria, where she says beekeeping is a common at-home practice. She grew up around friends and family who had hives.
Her husband took an interest in beekeeping when he visited Bulgaria, and the couple began hobbyist beekeeping at home. They needed a new daytime job to care for their kids – they worked late at night, which would make home life difficult when their children began school.
“It’s not easy finding a daytime job around here,” Andriana said. “One day we were talking at home, and we said, ‘All right, let’s open a honey store.’”
Today, Cape May Honey Farm produces two to four tons of honey a year from roughly 120 hives. They also work with organic beekeepers across America to stock honey sourced from different varieties of pollen. But their flagship product, Cape May Wildflower Honey, is all made on the Cape.
Harvesting happens primarily in the summer months, depending on the weather conditions of the prior spring. It’s a balance: A spring with too many rainy days will keep bees inside their hives, but a dry season means fewer blooming pollinators.
“If god forbid we have a year where we lose a lot of hives, we won’t have strong production,” Douglas said. “If the weather is too cold in the spring, honey production starts late.”
2024 was one of those late years; they could not harvest until mid-July. “It rained a lot this spring, so the bees weren’t out collecting honey. If there’s a long stretch of rainy days they eat the honey they have already packed in the hive, which means less for us,” he said.
If a year is so bad that a substantial number of bees die, Douglas said that he can split a colony into two hives to bolster their ranks – assuming, of course, that he can get the new hive to accept a new queen.
Douglas handles almost every aspect of honey harvesting and nest maintenance. He creates, by hand, the wooden frames where honeybees create honeycombs and brood combs, where the queen bee lays her eggs. These frames slide out of the nest box, which resembles a large cabinet.
He slides the frames out of the box to find out whether honey is ready to be harvested. He is looking for honeycombs that are sealed off at the top, he said.
“Honey has to be sealed in the frame, if it isn’t sealed, it is still nectar with moisture that needs to dry out,” he said. “Bees flap their wings faster than we can blink to dry the nectar, until the moisture content gets to 17%. Humans need a special tool to measure the moisture content in the honey, but bees just know.”
Douglas’ nesting boxes are at locations across Cape Island. He spends many summer days driving from location to location to check on his bees.
Andriana said that honey’s flavor comes from the flowers that provide bees with nectar. The Cape May “wildflower” honey is derived from a mix of plants, like milkweed and the ever-hardy coneflower. Areas with large fields of single-flowering species can dial in on a particular flavor, but no such luxury exists on the Cape.
“Whatever grows in this area is all mixed together, we don’t have just fields and fields of blueberries. So we can’t make blueberry blossom in Cape May, for example,” Andriana said.
Cape May Honey Farm relies on organic bee farmers from around the country for these honed-in flavors, with products like raspberry blossom honey from Maine, orange blossom honey from Florida and blackberry blossom honey from the Pacific Northwest.
“We’ve learned all this as we go, and we’re still doing it, Andriana said. “We work a lot of hours, we put a lot of attention into what we do. A lot of people think: I have a business plan, I have the money to finance it, it’s going to be great. What we give this business is the soul and the personal touch.”
Douglas and Andriana opened their own business to escape late-night work, but they still find themselves shipping out orders late into the evening, or catching up on work early in the morning.
“But people notice the care, the soul of it,” Andriana said.
Visit Cape May Honey Farm at 135 Sunset Blvd. in West Cape May.
Contact the reporter, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 156.
