ROCKPORT, Maine (AP) — Maine beekeepers are buzzing with activity as more people in rural as well as urban communities take up raising their own hives.

Beekeeper Jean Vose told the Bangor Daily News that every bee school in Maine has doubled its capacity in the past year. Vose, who tends to honeybees with her husband at Vose Apiaries in Nobleboro, is glad to see so much interest in bees today.

When the Voses started a beekeeping school in Waldoboro five years ago, their first class had 13 students. They now have 50. Dick Vose is a past president of the Knox-Lincoln County Beekeepers and Jean is the school’s director.

There are more than 270 species of native bees in Maine. Honeybees arrived with the English colonists in the early 1600s.

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