Taking care of our own
Bee boxes will help bring native pollinators back to Passamaquoddy Tribe’s blueberry barrens
At the end of each blueberry season, after the barrens have turned from blue, to crimson, to brittle brown, Darren Paul begins to plan for the next one. Mulching, pruning, and this year, constructing houses for his smallest seasonal workers.
With financial assistance from the Natural Resources Conservation Service Environmental Quality Incentive Program, Paul and his staff at the Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Company built 50 bee boxes over the winter to install on 2,000 acres of blueberry barrens owned by the Tribe in Washington County, Maine.
This project, and others, are made possible by the New England Pollinator Partnership, a collaboration between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NRCS, and others.
“We put out boxes for leaf cutter bees and other types of pollinators,” said Paul, a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe and manager of the company. “Then you just wait for pollinators to show up, and help your crop.”
Because blueberry plants rely on insect pollination to produce fruit, making the barrens more welcoming to native pollinators is an investment in future productivity. Native bees complement the services of domesticated honey bees — which the company rents for a month each spring — and provide natural insurance in case of the unexpected.
Say, the truck transporting the rented honey-bee hives from Florida breaks down, or worse, the industry experiences another Colony Collapse Disorder.
The phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear first made headlines during the winter of 2006 to 2007, when beekeepers in the U.S. began to report unusually high losses of hives. Ultimately, those hives cost the honey bee industry $2 billion to replace, an expense that trickled down to their customers. On average, the cost of rented honey bees is now the second-highest overhead cost of production for wild blueberries.
While Colony Collapse Disorder seems to have waned, native bees face a growing crisis. Pollinators are declining both globally and in the U.S. because of the loss, alteration, and fragmentation of their habitat, including for nesting.
Building bee boxes that provide the right size and shape cavities for native species to nest is one way to offset those losses. It may seem like a small action in the face of a big problem, but Brian Altvater, a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe and president of the Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Company, doesn’t discount small actions. Just take the Grand Falls Dam.
Altvater helped advocate for legislation to reopen a fishway at the dam on the Skutik/St. Croix River as part of a long-term restoration effort. Before that legislation passed in 2013, only a few hundred river herring were making it beyond the dam to spawning ground upstream each year.
In 2020, they counted 600 thousand.
“All we had to do to open the fishway was take a board out of the river,” Altvater said. “That’s all we had to do.”
He sees building bee boxes similarly — a simple action that removes barriers between native species and their habitat.
“Right now, our honey bees mostly come from Florida, and a lot of our indigenous species have been displaced and devalued,” Altvater said. “We need to be taking care of our own.”
That’s been the goal of the blueberry company from the beginning.
A revival
In the fall of 1980, the Passamaquoddy Tribe received federal recognition and compensation through the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. It was a critical turning point after two centuries of unfulfilled commitments and unmet requests for aid from the federal government that had diminished the Tribe’s population and land base.
The next year, the Tribe purchased the blueberry company from Northeast Blueberry and put the land into a trust.
“That was the start,” Altvater said.
It was also a revival. Altvater recalled raking berries as a kid in the late 1960s and said members of the Passamaquoddy and other neighboring Tribes that are part of the Wabanaki group — meaning “people of the dawnland” — had worked the seasonal blueberry harvest for “as long as I can remember.”
For as long as anyone can remember. Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Donald Soctomah explained that for millennia, the Passamaquoddy way-of-life was defined by seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering that provided occasion for meetings between families that lived in different parts of the Skutik/St. Croix River and Machias River watersheds — the Tribe’s ancestral homelands.
Soctomah said meeting locations depended on the weather and the time of year. In the springtime, families would gather at the head of the river to spear migrating salmon. In summer, they would come together on the barrens to pick wild blueberries and other plants. But it wasn’t just about sustenance.
“There was another layer — it was about gathering for the sake of gathering,” Soctomah said.
Today, as part of a commercial venture, the blueberry harvest is growing more and more mechanized by necessity. The company strives to realize a profit to support the economic autonomy of the Tribe by increasing efficiencies, including by using a mechanical harvester to collect berries.
Over the first three decades, the company produced an average of three million pounds of berries each year. Now in a good year they can bring in seven million pounds.
But Altvater said they try to strike a balance between mechanical and manual labor, both to provide job opportunities to members of the Tribe and to sustain cultural traditions — an equally, if not more, important aspect of autonomy. The company still relies on hand-rakers to harvest part of the crop in areas with uneven, rocky terrain that would stymie a mechanical harvester.
Typically, they hire about 600 people to hand-rake blueberries for a two-week period in early August. Families still travel from their homes throughout the watershed to work the harvest, stay in company-owned cabins on site, and gather for the sake of gathering like their ancestors did.
With the support of Tribally owned ventures like the blueberry company and a sugarbush operation called Passamaquoddy Maple Syrup, Soctomah said members of the Tribe can make space for other natural resource practices that are rooted in culture, not commerce, like cultivating gardens with native seeds, fishing, and gathering mushrooms. Practices that nurture the individual and keep traditions alive.
And he sees an era of renewed growth ahead. “In our school system, we are teaching children the Passamaquoddy language and culture,” he said. “People here are proud of their culture, and when they make decisions, it’s usually based on traditions.”
For Altvater, the bee boxes are a reflection of those values. “I want to see more of our own native species thriving in our environment,” he said. “It’s part of my lifelong dream to make that happen.”
Developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in collaboration with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, the New England Pollinator Partnership delivers technical and financial assistance to producers interested in implementing pollinator conservation practices on their land. If you live in New England and are interested in learning more about the partnership, contact your state Natural Resources Conservation Service office.
