With spring now in full swing, it’s a busy time of year for honeybees and beekeepers, particularly for one local beekeeper who goes the extra mile to spread his passion and advocacy for the population.

John Hedly serves as director of the Worcester County Beekeepers Association, an advocacy group of more than 1,000 members. It’s also the oldest county beekeeping organization in the United States.

“I didn’t know the Worcester County Beekeepers Association existed my first year, so I did my beekeeping on my own,” Hedly said. “Going online, finding out how to do this, how to do that. That was 14 years ago, and here I am.”

While the sight of hundreds of bees swarming close by might send some people running to the other end of the backyard, years of experience have helped Hedly get comfortable. Sometimes he’ll even do his work without gloves. He knows all the tricks to stay safe and predict how 30,000 honeybees will react to a visit from him.

“When you’ve got smoke coming into your house, what do you do?" Hedly said. "You sniff, there’s a fire somewhere. They think the same thing. When we open up that hive, there’s going to be a hundred bees up on top and they’re in the way. So when you put the couple puffs of smoke across them, they think there’s a fire. A lot of them will go down into the hive, collect some pollen and nectar, and then just wait.”

Hedly has always happy to give others a bit of his knowledge, often setting aside time to check in on newer beekeepers. On Thursday, he was with Barbara Lavallee, who has started her own beekeeping project at her Auburn home. She said there’s plenty of benefits to learning from a true expert.

“John stepped right up to the plate, he answered every silly question that I ever had, down to ‘Do my gloves fit the right way?'” Lavallee said. “He’s been very patient with me, he’s a tremendous mentor, he has a wealth of knowledge and he’s always there when I need him.”

Although he started beekeeping simply because it seemed like a fun thing to do, Hedly grew to appreciate and understand the dire situation we could all face in a world without them. Over the last 75 years, bee populations have decreased by more than 50%. The impacts are felt in our food systems, but bees are also critical to the habitats of other animals.

“Everything from crickets to grasshoppers to bats to birds and stuff like that, it lets them build their homes in the bushes and the trees they pollinate, so it’s a pretty big circle the honeybees play in the ecosystem,” Hedly said. “Einstein said almost 100 years ago, if the honeybee disappears, mankind only has three or four years to live.”

Saving the bees takes many forms, whether it’s Hedly’s advocacy work or small decisions you make in the backyard, like avoiding the use of pesticides. With passionate voices like Hedly’s championing the cause, Worcester County is in good hands.

“I got into it as a hobby, but they’re so, so important and I believe that,” Hedly said. “I believe in it so much that I go around to different schools and libraries and civic groups so people are more aware of what honeybees are to us.”

For more information on Hedly’s upcoming presentations or other beekeeping events in the region, visit the Worcester County Beekeepers Association website.