Lee and Stockbridge — When local restaurateur Rebecca Clerget first embarked on beekeeping about 15 years ago, she never “bee-lieved” that endeavor would wind up saving an endangered hive. But that is exactly what happened as she safely retrieved a large bee colony nesting at Stockbridge’s Town Hall and transported the hive as well as its queen bee to High Lawn Farm’s apiary in Lee.
Clerget serves as a part-time administrator with the Tri-Town Health Department and moved with the agency staff as the group relocated their offices in January from Lee’s Aeroldi Building to the Stockbridge Town Hall. “This summer, we started noticing bee activity above the front doors of the [Stockbridge] Town Hall,” she said. “We kept watching them building their comb (the structure within a hive) and wondering, ‘Were they going in behind the wood or if it was it all outside,’ because it was an odd way for them to build right out in the open.”
With a beehive forming over the main doorway, Stockbridge Town Administrator Michael Canales acknowledged the need to “act quickly but also responsibly.” “It was important that we find a way to save the colony,” he said.
Coordinating with the town’s highway department and other officials, Clerget arranged for a lift to be able to access the hive and recover the bees, not a small feat.
On September 22 at 8 a.m., Clerget bravely donned a protective apiarist suit and took out the comb, layer by layer. “The deeper I got in, the more bees there were,” she said. “It ended up being a much bigger colony than I had expected.”
Placing the comb into empty honeycomb frames and then depositing those frames into a typical bee box, Clerget drove down the road, dropping the insects off at their new permanent home.
Fortunately, the extraction resulted in just a single injury—a sting to her ankle, the only part exposed to the elements.
Clerget began keeping bees as a hobby in 2010 when she lived in Washington, D.C., but it is not something she does for profit. “It’s just a fun thing,” she said.
Starting out, Clerget practiced “urban beekeeping,” maintaining the hive in a space on top of a hotel. Since then, she has always maintained a couple of hives, noting that practice is “very different” in a city than in the Berkshires where a beekeeper must be concerned about bear infiltration.
With her husband Gilbert Clerget, Rebecca Clerget owns Lee restaurants Café Triskele and appetito Pizza & Gelato on Main Street. Without a space for a hive and not wanting customers to be interfered with bees while dining, she teamed up with High Lawn Farm in 2023 to build a small apiary behind one of their fields. The Clergets use the fresh honey in baked goods, the honeycomb in cheese plates, and the pollen in desserts such as bee pollen ice cream.
And the partnership worked out well for the Stockbridge hive as High Lawn agreed to add the saved colony to their three-hive apiary where the bees are reportedly doing well.
“[Clerget’s] efforts not only protected the Town Hall but also safeguarded an essential part of our ecosystem,” Canales said. “Bees contribute far beyond honey and beeswax as they are indispensable pollinators for the apple orchards, pumpkin patches, and farms we all enjoy across the Berkshires.”
