Honeybee Consultant
Ray Lackey
I have been keeping honeybees for over 30 years on Long Island. My grandfather had bees when I was a kid in Pennsylvania but I left them alone. We had over 5 acres of strawberries and they were at the end of the field. When I moved to Long Island and started a garden and small fruit orchard, I found that people in the area killed everything with a point on the end so that pollinators were scarce. I started with one hive ordered from Sears and delivered by the Post office. Well, almost. I got a call from the local office saying that the bees had arrived but some of them were on the outside of the package, would I please pick them up? The postman didn’t want them in his truck????
I received a Master Beekeeper Certification from Eastern Apiculture Society at Ohio State University in 1995. I‘ve served four non-consecutive terms as president of the Long Island Beekeepers Association, Regional Director of the Empire State Honey Producers, and President of the EAS Master Beekeepers. I regularly speak in schools, scouts, nature centers, and adult groups on pollination, beekeeping, and pesticides. I also build, install, and maintain observation hives at nature centers and have written a booklet on Observation hive maintenance for schools, museums, and nature centers.
On LI, I kept about 100 colonies of bees for pollination and honey production and produced queens. I had bred and maintained a line of bees for about 15 years that were popular with LI beekeepers’ One afternoon our kitchen table was used to collect semen from 500 drones for inclusion in a breeding program.
When I was in high school, my science teacher advised me to list all of the things I was interested in doing, sort them into groups according to area of interest, sort the groups relative to interest level, and then pick my profession from the second group. His reasoning was “That way you will always enjoy coming home at night.” (I guess he recognized the early symptoms of a work-a-holic.) I did that. I enjoyed my professional work, “having fun, getting paid for it” as I put on my class reunion survey, but I definitely have outside interests. My profession is electronic engineering but my hobbies have included gardening, tropical fish, and honeybees. Small farm animals are an interest but job related travel requirements precluded things requiring daily care and now in retirement, we plan on traveling. (My wife is a “city” girl. Great looking!! Very nice! Keeping “bugs” has been enough of a strain on her.)
My technical degrees include BS Engineering Science with Honors from Penn State University in 1974 and MS Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of New York in 1978. Although officially retired now, I worked in the same building for 42 years with seven different corporate names over the door. My highest title was Head of Antenna Systems Research Laboratory. At last count I had 20 patents granted but I know that there are still applications pending upon my retirement. My expertise was Military Communications Interference Cancelling. But, just like Thomas Edison, I enjoy time in the bee yard.
In retirement, I am leading a church boys club, mentoring LEGO robotics at 4H camp, at the local middle school VEX Robotics team and a FIRST Robotics team for high schoolers, serving as President of the West Michigan Dahlia Club, and getting involved in the local Michigan Beekeeping community through the Grand Rapids Area Beekeepers, teaching beekeeping, speaking at various institutions and trying to breed a line of bees good for Michigan. Hopefully, this activity will keep me young, healthy, and out of trouble.