This will mark the 2nd year the PEIBA will present the “Golden Smoker Award” as an award given to an Island Beekeeper who has been keeping bees within 5 years and has started into the pollination aspect of beekeeping on PEI. This award was given to jason Campbell as the first time recipient in 2025. Nominees included Todd Dyment and Jordan Dennis.
Jason Campbell – 2025 Recipent of the Golden Smoker Award
I started Beekeeping in 2022 after taking the Beginner beekeeping course that Troy put on. I ended up getting two single hives from Wood’n’Hive in Nova Scotia which we took back home in the back of a Dodge caravan. They managed to get out and covered our back window. Our plan was to use them to pollinate our strawberries. By the fall I was down to one hive that didn’t swarm away. I was unprepared for how fast these girls could work.
2023 we decided that we were going to take a leap with bees to get our farm self operationable again. We ordered 25 nucs and dove head first into the hives. Little did we expect how much rain we would be getting that year, I spent more time chasing the swarms after days of rain than anything else.
2024 my wife and I enrolled in the Fundamentals of Beekeeping course through Dalhousie University to further educate ourselves in the caretaking and business world of beekeeping. We purchased 13 nucs and 14 buckfast queens to recover our winter losses and make new splits with the plan to go into pollination and make use of our situation of being able to control the crops around us for the benefit of the bees.
We sent hives to blueberries as well as apple orchards for pollination in 2024. When they returned, they got to work bringing in lots of nectar. We currently have a total of around 66 hives. We have Saskatraz, Italian Buckfast, as well as Carnolian bees. Our goal on the farm is to get close to 100 hives by the end of 2025.
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