The Buzz: Re-Wilding New Castle
Trustee Meadow Management Strategy Enlists Bees (and Possibly Bats!)
Gardeners and flower enthusiasts throughout New Castle who noticed their favorite buds really booming this year may also have noticed the increasingly lush and colorful semi-wild meadows around Bull Hill and Dobbinsville. Its timing impeccable, a letter from Tom Maddux in the current issue of the Weekly extolls this very fact, noting that these areas “contribute more than ever to the beauty of New Castle.”
Valarie Leary, who keeps a plot in the community garden near Read’s House, commented that “the wildflower spots around town really do look gorgeous this year.” She was impressed with the season’s vegetable bounty as well. “The garden did great,” she said. “It really thrived. Everyone said they had more veggies than they knew what to do with.”
These horticultural successes are not unconnected: for both, we can thank a collaboration between the Trustees and beekeeper Tom Lunt… and the hundreds of thousands of buzzing, black-and-yellow pollinators it has brought to town. And if Trustee Tommy Wilson’s plans come to fruition, in 2022 New Castle may also see the re-introduction of bats, which are both pollinators and predators of pest insects like mosquitoes.
In any city, open spaces for reflecting and connecting are important for more than just the visual appeal and market value. Studies in recent years have shown that parks and natural spaces actually improve mental health for residents. To all of those ends, the Trustees of the New Castle Common, led by Tommy Wilson, have taken a strategic approach, developing several of the large lots they maintain into lightly-cultivated wild areas. These include the aforementioned meadows around town as well as the sprawling, 70+ acre Hermitage Natural Area.
Part ecological endeavor, part cost-saving measure, the practice of ‘meadow management’ has developed in recent decades into a tool for re-wilding formerly developed areas and enabling public use while reducing the costs of maintaining large swathes of land. It is used by universities, ranchers, wildlands restoration projects… even our own Delaware State Park system (where I first learned about the practice as a part-time park maintenance worker).
Wilson described the goal simply, as seeking to “maintain natural and environmentally healthy areas.” Taking an active approach to doing so, he noted, started about five years ago: “I got the idea while riding through lower Delaware farm lands. I saw several meadows and thought it would be great for New Castle to have fields of wild flowers instead of mowed grass.” Working with local companies (more on that below), Wilson developed a multi-year plan to make the transformation possible.
The honeybees introduced into New Castle’s meadows and at the Hermitage - and the bats hopefully to come next year - are just a (literally tiny, if very numerous!) part of the picture…
Reclaimed by the Wild - Hermitage Natural Area
The Hermitage property was not an original part of New Castle Common, but a large, working farm into the 1950s, one of a dozen that once surrounded the city. It remained the home of the Deemer family until 2007, when the historic farmhouse - already unoccupied - was irreparably damaged in a fire. Then the Trust purchased the property in 2010. By that time, numerous species of trees and other plants had already reclaimed most of the original farmland as forest, according to James Meek.
Currently in the last days of his 12-year term as a Trustee, Meek has been the principal caretaker of the Hermitage since around 2014. Following a suggestion by then-Trustee Dorsey Fiske that it be developed as spot for birding, he worked with Tom Brightman, a former meadow designer at Longwood Gardens, to develop a five-year plan to create the Hermitage Natural Area.
With the help of many volunteers, Meek cleared trails through the woods that had taken over the old farm, and “worked over the years to create meadows around the farmhouse by removing weedy shrubs and trees and planting seeds of native species.” More about the five year plan for the Hermitage can be read on the NC-CHAP webpage for it (linked at the bottom).
Meek summed up the general strategy for the care of the Hermitage and other large, wild parcels owned by the Trust. “Both are committed to be natural areas and have bees on them and wildflowers in them. Part of the reason for that is the desire not to have mowing there, to have pollinators that are good for the environment, and something that is beautiful.”
Wildflower meadows also require fewer “inputs such as from water and fertilizers, which in turn means less expense and less potential for pollution,” according to Dr. Leonard Perry of the University of Vermont, writing about the practice in 2005. “Better water infiltration means less erosion. A good meadow increases biodiversity, resulting in fewer pest and disease crises, and more attraction [for] wildlife.” Though the Hermitage is still a work in progress (as are the other meadows), the increased vibrancy and diversity have already become apparent.
Aside from his often very physical duties and his efforts to recruit volunteers and visitors, Jim Meek is an affable interpreter of the site with a wealth of knowledge about its history and ecology that he eagerly shares with visitors. It remains unclear who will take over after he departs the role, but Meek expressed a hope that whoever replaces him will find ways to increase outreach and get more people aware of and involved with making the Hermitage sustainable. “I don’t think the Trust is interested in maintaining a garden,” he said, but suggested the place offers big benefits for hopefully limited effort and resources. “It could be very nice if we simply keep it mowed to keep the grass down and make it a place that you can walk in the shade.”
Meek also briefly discussed the dog park that the Trustees have tentatively agreed to build on the property, with the understanding that it would be maintained by the City once built. While he and others are looking at other dog parks in the county and starting to analyze a local site, the real action will begin in the Spring, when the Trustees consider their next budget for capital improvements.
The Trustees and the Bees
The open meadows around town that have been seeded with native wildflowers include areas on both sides of Wilmington Road between Chestnut and 6th near Bull Hill, as well as along Route 9 in Dobbinsville, and certain fields at the Hermitage. The plan for these areas was developed by Wilson with guidance from Drew Hayes of ForeSite Associates, a local civil engineering and landscape architecture firm, as well as Antonio’s Lawn Service. “We held meetings and monitored the fields very closely,” Wilson described. “It actually takes a lot of attention, much like any garden. [We] ride through the meadows on a weekly basis. Keeping the invasive weeds out is a major problem, but we are learning more each year.”
The establishment of the meadows was part of the same light-management approach taken with the Hermitage property. However, the first few years did not produce particularly visible results.
According to Tom Lunt, the beekeeper from Fort Casimir Honey Company whose busy buddies have helped turn things around, “they had a sign that said pollination meadow, but nothing really came of it... there just wasn’t enough pollination going on.” Tom decided to speak to longtime friend Pete Toner, who directed him to fellow trustee Wilson. Lunt asked, “what’s up with the meadows?” and noted that he was thinking about getting some bees. “So Tommy Wilson said if you get bees, we’ll re-do the whole thing… The original plan was I was going to buy two hives, and they would buy two hives, and I agreed to manage [all the] hives.”
While the Trust still owns only the two hives, both located in the ward meadow by Bull Hill, Lunt has kept adding bees and additional hives. He now manages about twenty on Trust lands in New Castle, including the meadows and the Hermitage. With each hive housing approximately 60,000 bees, that’s over a million extra pollinators buzzing around town. “This is only my third year beekeeping,” Tom said, “and I have been absolutely astounded at the amount of impact that they’ve had just with yard flowers and flower boxes.”
Though they are (very) many and have been embraced by most, Lunt was keen to make clear that “honeybees are very docile and don’t have any intention of stinging you… They will defend their hive but are classified as ‘defensives’ and will not go out of their way to sting you like a yellow jacket or wasp will.” Meanwhile, “they each visit tens of thousands of flowers, so it’s amazing the impact they’ve had. People talk about how crazy their garden is this year…”
Each hive of European (or “Western”) honeybees (apis mellifera) is home to one colony, headed by a queen and run by female worker bees. While male drones might make up as much as 15% of the colony in the Spring, at this time of year as the hive prepares for cold weather, they are long gone. “There is no mating in the winter and [drones] wouldn’t live through the winter… so the girls literally drag them outside to their death. Through winter it’s just a girls’ club.”
The boxes that make up each hive stack up (as they fill up with honey) over the Summer. Then, Tom says, the upper boxes get removed but “we don’t take anything from those two boxes. That’s their little house... They will basically form a big ball of bees and shiver to create friction. And they will climb up and down each frame, eating the honey as they go. The idea is they shouldn’t run out of honey before nectar is available in the Spring… In our climate, bees need about 60lb of honey to make it through... The only time they leave the hive in Winter is to do ‘cleansing flights,’ which is basically to use the restroom outside. So, they need everything before it gets real cold. My job is to make sure they have it.”
Maintaining the hives also requires regular treatment against the mites that have been determined as responsible for the ‘colony collapse’ affecting Western honeybees throughout the world. Lunt explained, “it’s a parasitic mite that was introduced in the late 80s called the Varroa Mite. It is a species-specific mite and only feeds off of honeybees. It is an Asian mite, so it was feeding off of the Asian honeybee for tens of thousands of years. They developed ways to cope, hygienic behaviors to fight against it. But the European honeybee has only been interacting with this mite for a few decades. For evolution, that’s five seconds ago. So they’ve just been devastated. And they’re going to need some time to figure it out and in the meantime, we just have to keep treating for it.”
In the Spring, the bees “want to swarm.” But not to worry.
“That’s the hive’s way of reproducing,” Tom clarified. “They will split in half. The original queen will fly away with half the [colony] and find a new home. And they leave behind a queen that’s ready to emerge, and she will go out and get mated and start her own hive. So now we have two hives.” Precautions are taken to make sure this behavior does not affect nearby residents. “The problem that we worry about as beekeepers in a community is, we don’t want our swarms ending up in people’s soffits and walls and stuff like that. So we try to make sure our hives don’t swarm…”
To avoid such unpleasant human-honeybee interactions, beekeepers like Lunt use ‘swarm traps,’ boxes you may see in trees near the hives in the meadows and at the Hermitage. These “are basically mini-hives,” Tom explained. “in the Spring we put a lure in there in that smells like queen pheromone, that’s basically just lemon grass oil. And I caught six swarms this spring, so it definitely works.”
Tom uses the excess honey from his hives on Trust property around New Castle - as well as hives he maintains elsewhere - for Fort Casimir Honey Co. The company’s products have quickly become very popular locally, with no-notice pop-up sales known to sell out within hours. Like the bees and the flowers, Tom describes his arrangement with the Trustees as symbiotic: “It’s an agreement – they want the bees. And I want to put bees as many places as I can.”
Wilson was also very positive about the collaboration. “We thought the bees would assist with health of our plants as pollinators,” he noted. “As it turned out, the benefits of having them are great, and having our volunteer Beekeeper has been a wonderful addition to our overall team.”
Looking Forward: More Bees… and Maybe Bats
If anything, there are a few areas where the bees and other local pollinators may have been too effective. Wilson, Meek and Lunt all lamented the difficulty of keeping some invasive plant species under control in the meadows at the Hermitage and around town. “All the invasive stuff they’re trying to get rid of has been really pollinated to the point where the seed bed was so thick they’ve had to cut it several times this year trying to get rid of it,” Lunt said. “They’re trying to get rid of all the non-native stuff and other undesirable stuff growing there…”
The downsides of plentiful pollination notwithstanding, Tom believes the “introduction has gone great, it’s been pretty seamless. And the reaction, at least to me, from all of the locals has been really positive.” The future may see beehives set up in the Dobbinsville meadow along Route 9, and more added at the Hermitage Natural Area. Tom noted, “the Hermitage can handle a lot more hives than are there. Bees forage in a 3-mile radius. So that covers the entire town, wherever I put them in town. So it’s almost insignificant where I put them, as long as they’re in town. But the Hermitage is an amazing little sanctuary.”
While a reference to bat houses in the Trustees’ June minutes turned out to be a misunderstanding about Lunt’s swarm traps - no bats have been introduced yet - Lunt was eager to extoll bats’ benefits as well. “If we don’t have a bat program, we should absolutely push to. I don’t see them around like I did when I was a kid – and I think there’s just not housing for them. It’s just a lack of places for them to live.” It is certainly not for lack of bugs for them to eat, as our regular need for town-wide mosquito treatments makes very clear.
In fact, this is something very much on Trustee Wilson’s mind. “Bats will be introduced next spring,” he said, “if the Board approves the bat houses, which I don’t see as a problem.”
With the introduction of bees and the application of best-practices meadow management strategies, the Trustees (with help from Mr. Lunt) are transforming what had been overgrown, underutilized lots within the Common into more usable and enjoyable public spaces. And this project is still young. Of whether it will endure, Wilson noted, “everyone on the Board strongly supports the meadows project. I can assure the citizens they will be around for a long time.”
Sincere thanks to beekeeper Tom Lunt and Trustees Meek and Wilson for speaking with us about these topics. Each offered a wealth of information. There was also much more to our discussion about the Hermitage with Jim, so we will take a closer look at just the Hermitage, its history, and how it has been transformed into an enjoyable, walkable Natural Area in a future newsletter.
What are your thoughts about New Castle’s open spaces? Do you know them, or even notice them? How do you think they fit into the life of our town?
Thanks for reading.
Further Reading for the Intesely Interested…
The New Castle Community History & Archealogy Program (NC-CHAP) web pages on the History of The Hermitage, and the Development of the Hermitage Natural Area
Fort Casimir Honey Company’s Facebook Page
ForeSite Associates’ project page for The Meadows
On the principles of Meadow Management: “Successful Wildflower Meadows,” by Dr. Perry, quoted above; and Mid-Atlantic Native Meadows: Guidelines for Planning, Preparation, Design, Installation and Maintenance by the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation with Mahan Rykel Associates
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Very interesting - I've never heard of the Hermitage! Gotta go there.