David MacFawn
Landi Simone was born in Germany, the only child of an American diplomat and his Mexican-born wife. Her early years were imbued with a myriad of cultures and languages, as her parents traveled internationally on various State Department assignments. By the age of ten, Landi had lived in Germany, San Salvador, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Mexico. Following her parent’s divorce, she and her mother settled in downtown San Francisco, where she lived until leaving to attend college. She spent a year studying classical voice at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on a music scholarship and then headed east, lured by the siren song of New York City and her father’s Alma Mater, Columbia University. With no financial assistance from either parent, Landi first found a clerical job at the University, which came with tuition benefits. She took night classes in a variety of subjects but became fascinated with the hard sciences after a class in astronomy. High marks in every class earned her scholarships and she enrolled in Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, graduating in 1976 with a B.S. in civil engineering.
Landi began her engineering career in New Jersey at a firm specializing in geotechnical or “soils” engineering, a subdiscipline of civil engineering working with soil, rock, and groundwater. She loved the work, especially since a large part of it involved exploratory testing outdoors. She moved to a better position at another firm in 1978, and became a junior partner in that firm three years later, when she earned both her license to practice Professional Engineering and her M.S. from Rutgers. In 1983 she founded her engineering consulting firm, one of only two woman-owned geotechnical firms in NJ and the only one owned solely by a woman. The company grew steadily and by 1990 boasted some ten employees. Two simultaneous events would put Landi on an entirely different path: the birth of her first child and a severe recession in the construction industry. She and her husband Paul decided that, rather than forsaking her infant daughter to knock on doors 60 hours a week and drum up business, it was time for Landi to close the doors of her consulting firm and become a full-time mom. Little Kira was joined by baby brother Adrian in 1992 and their mother began to look for ways to supplement the family’s income and still be there for her children. She began an organic produce co-op, purchasing cases of wholesale fruits and vegetables and dividing them up into baskets that members would pick up weekly. One of her suppliers, knowing of Landi’s fascination with animals and with gardening, in passing mentioned a beekeeping class being offered at Rutgers. It was 1997 and that casual comment would mark a watershed moment in Landi’s life.
Growing up in downtown San Francisco, Landi’s opportunities to connect with nature were few. A neighbor gave her some iris bulbs when she was eight years old and she planted them in a six-inch-wide crack of earth between the parking lot of their apartment building and the neighboring fence. The bulbs grew and bloomed and, with their purple splendor, ignited a passion for nature in the little girl. Her favorite haunts were Golden Gate Park and Muir Woods. A great uncle owned a small ranch house in central California, surrounded by mountains, forests, and the Arroyo Seco River, and home to rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, tarantulas, artichokes, apricot groves, her uncle’s prized dahlia garden, and gophers whose main goal, it seemed, was to eat the dahlias. On every visit, Landi thought she had traveled to heaven. She was a country girl at heart doomed to grow up in a city. As soon as she graduated college and rented her first small house with a yard, Landi planted a garden and never looked back. Since that first garden, she has never been without home-grown tomatoes and fresh bouquets on the kitchen table. The fascination with plants was paired with an equal fascination with the creatures that live in, eat, and pollinate them. Despite her mother’s terror of spiders, bees, and even ants, Landi found these animals fascinating and was driven to learn their names and study their habits. When she took that beekeeping class at Rutgers in 1997, she felt as if she had been whacked upside the head with a cosmic two by four. This was what she was supposed to do.
At that time, Kira had started elementary school and Adrian was in kindergarten. Paul’s urgings to return to her engineering career fell on deaf ears. She continued the co-op for a time but, as Landi’s fascination with bees grew and grew, so did the number of her hives. To keep her marriage, she grew the beekeeping only at a pace that would support itself and began developing ways to expand the income brought in by the fledgling operation, dubbed Gooserock Farm after the two-acre Gooserock Pond behind the Simone’s yard. She made handcrafted beeswax soaps, creams, lotions, and lip balms, and sold these products as well as honey at local craft fairs and markets. The number of hives and apiaries grew and eventually Gooserock Farm, with its small self-service store, the “Honey House,” became something of a local landmark, providing the Simones with an income that was ample, if not as bountiful as that generated by engineering.
Landi loved everything about keeping bees. She loved that it kept her outside much of the time. She loved the exercise provided by lifting the heavy boxes. She loved making her own equipment. And she adored everything about the bees themselves: the complexity of their biology and society, raising queens, the challenge of working with an organism that can do one serious damage, the fact that, no matter how long one has been keeping bees, there are always still things to learn, still surprises in store. And the fact that there is rarely only one right way to do something.
Interestingly, the same qualities that made her good at soils engineering made her a good beekeeper. Geotechnical engineering involves engineering something that is non-isotropic and non-homogeneous. One can dig a test hole at one location, move 50’ away and dig another hole only to find completely different subsurface conditions. Designing foundations and making recommendations for building on something so fundamentally unknowable involves a good bit of educated guesswork. And accurately identifying subsurface formations and characteristics requires a keen eye and first-rate observational skills. There are calculations, but then there is intuition. There is science, but there is also art. Most civil engineers – those that design steel or concrete structures, for instance – do not like geotechnical engineering because soil is just too hard to quantify. For every one soils engineer, there are probably twenty structural engineers. It takes a person who is comfortable with not knowing to be a good soils engineer. Beekeeping requires the same qualities. One can practice the same swarm management techniques on ten different hives, have five swarm anyway, three stay home and make a bumper honey crop, one supersede their queen and one become entirely queenless. And the beekeeper needs to take appropriate action for all ten to maximize their health and productivity without blinking an eye. A good beekeeper loves the fact that the same actions do not always produce the same result, because if they did, it would be boring. The beekeeper is happy to steer the colony in the direction he or she wants but accepts that ultimately the bees are going to do what the bees are going to do.
Most people are left-brain dominant (the scientific types) or right-brain dominant (the artsy types.) A few oddballs are both. Landi is one of these. Early exposure to multiple languages gave her facility with both foreign languages and with English. She learned to read and write at age three. She enjoyed drawing and painting. She loved music and was the star soprano in her high school choir. Bottom line, Landi always enjoyed making things. Whether it was a garden, a painting, an ingenious engineering solution to a problem, a magazine article, a bookshelf, a nuc box, or a PowerPoint talk, she has always been content when allowing her creativity free rein. And she finds that creativity is a great asset when it comes to running a small commercial beekeeping operation. The branding of her products, the variety of items made from only a handful of hive products, and the marketing of her farm have enabled Landi to make a modest living from only 100-150 hives, a number which would generally be considered sideliner rather than commercial. And creativity is an asset in managing not only the farm but the bees as well. Landi loves finding ingenious ways to accomplish management tasks. As an example, one apiary faced a meadow where the property owners, who managed a dog kennel, often walked the dogs. Landi needed a way to protect the people and animals from stings but still permit light and air to reach the bees, which faced east and had shade to the south. She erected a fence with a double layer of deer netting. The bees preferred flying over the netting rather than through it but the hives still received morning sunlight. Another example was when she realized that open feeding of hives eliminated the bees’ tendency to rob during dearth, she combined open feeding with individual feeding of lighter hives. The bees working the feed buckets were uninterested in targeting the weaker hives being fed individually because they were “on a flow.” And feeding during dearth following or during a mite treatment stimulated queens to lay copious healthy brood for a strong wintering population. Such techniques have enabled Landi to successfully overwinter 97-98% of her colonies in recent years.
Engineers tend to be very well-organized individuals and Landi is no exception. There is always a prioritized to-do list on the kitchen counter and not much slips through the cracks. A facility with mathematics is useful for everything from calculating correct mixing dosages of medication for a hive suffering from EFB to figuring how much emulsifier and preservative is needed in a new cream recipe. Building things is also a skill possessed by many engineers, and Landi builds many of her own hive components, her electric fences, even a hen house with a sunroof for her flock of chickens.
Engineering is applied science, using scientific principles and facts to creatively solve problems. The argument can be made that beekeepers are all engineers. The science involved is biology, and the problem needing a solution is how best to help the superorganism that is a honey bee colony survive, thrive, and in the process provide income for the beekeeper.
Like most beekeepers that are passionate about their craft, Landi loved talking bees. When her family delivered an ultimatum that she was forbidden to even mention the word “bee” again at dinner, she became active in her local bee club, and in the state NJBA, where she could talk about bees as much as she wanted, and in 2002 she started a short course that has, over the years, educated hundreds of NJ beekeepers. She was introduced to Eastern Apiculture Society (EAS) in the same year by a beekeeping friend and became a loyal life member, attending every conference since the first one at Cornell. VA beekeeper Billy Davis encouraged her to pursue the Master Beekeeper certification and, in 2004 at Seven Springs PA, Landi took and passed the difficult four-part examination. The following year she helped Dr. Collison and the team of Master Beekeeper volunteers with the grading and administering of the exam. At that time, the oral exam had only been in place for a few years and Landi, Billy Davis, and Brenda Kiessling decided that a grading rubric would help make the oral exam less subjective. Many hours of work went into accomplishing that goal, which was followed by a similar process for the field exam. Landi was elected Master Beekeeper Director and then, in 2015 was appointed to serve as Chair of the MB Certification Committee. In 2019 she was asked to serve a second term and agreed to do so.
The Master Beekeepers are frequently involved in teaching the EAS short course portion of the conference, and Landi began giving talks on topics ranging from soap making to electric bear fencing to nucs. EAS attendees began asking Landi to speak to clubs in their home states, and, as the years went by, she shared her passion for bees and her practical approach to their management to clubs in nearby Pennsylvania but also Arkansas, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and even Colorado. Covid-19 brought a surge in remote meetings and made it possible to visit with clubs in far-off locations. It always felt right to help new beekeepers because there had always been more experienced beekeepers helping her when she was learning, so Landi continued a tradition that is no doubt centuries old.
We are very fortunate to have Landi in the bee industry! Her many developed and learned skills are a great benefit and needed in the beekeeping industry. Her organizational skills and creativities serve EAS and national beekeepers well. Landi is a self-motivated self-starter which is very needed in beekeeping. We wish her the best of success.
David MacFawn (dmacfawn@aol.com) is an Eastern Apicultural Society Master Beekeeper and a North Carolina Master Craftsman beekeeper living in the Columbia, South Carolina, area. He is the author of three books, Applied Beekeeping in the United States by David MacFawn, published by Outskirts Press https://outskirtspress.com/BeekeepingTipsandTechniquesfortheSoutheastUnitedStatesBeekeepingFinance and https://outskirtspress.com/gettingthebestfromyourbees.
