Three years ago, a bear, intelligent in its nefariousness, bypassed an electric fence and broke into one of Jim Watt’s apiaries.

It was late in the season, and underestimating his bees’ vulnerability, Watt hadn’t baited the fence as he typically did: with peanut butter and bacon fat to entice predators to lick it, “get zapped” and know not to intrude any further.

His hive was trashed as a result.

“It noticed there were some other tasty things behind the electric fence, and it pushed down the electric fence where it wasn’t electrified,” Watt said, belting an incredulous laugh. “It was a really smart bear. It went in there, and it didn’t go after the honey. It actually went after the larva, which is like the protein that the bear needed to get through the winter.”

From a trivial sting to less predictable setbacks, like intrusions by natural predators, beekeeping is a laborious undertaking that can be fraught with problems.

Fortunately for Watt, a math teacher at the Derryfield School and co-owner of the Concord Bee Company, he is a problem solver.

When another of his electric fences was destroyed in an act of vandalism, Watt applied for a grant through the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Hampshire to help fund a replacement. When he experienced trouble getting his bees to survive through brutal winters, a perennial challenge for New England beekeepers, he began using organic treatments to knock down the Varroa mite populations in his hives.

This season, 80% of Watt’s bees survived through the winter, a good omen for the business he owns with his daughter, Katie Watt.

“It’s fun to grow as a business as an agricultural enterprise. My goal had always kind of been, ‘Can I run this and not lose my shirt doing it?’ And we actually are beginning to be a sustainable operation,” Watt said. “The nice thing about bees, and why I never feel bad about our business plan, it’s really running a business where it’s good for the environment and our product is good for you. We’re really proud to have good honey, and it’s sustainable, environmentally and economically.”

This phase of relative success wasn’t always self-evident. Before becoming the face of the Concord Bee Company, Watt and Katie were hobbyists carting around a copy of “Beekeeping for Dummies” to various farmers’ markets.

Katie remembered one evening during “the early days” when, sitting at their kitchen table, she and her dad watched as a frenetic cluster of bees filled the air outside. In what Watt confesses was “not my best parenting moment,” they waited for the queen bee to find a nearby tree where her hive could land and then climbed it, bringing the bees into a hive box.

“We had never caught a swarm before. Now, we’ve done it two or three times,” Katie said.

Their operation has only grown since then. During the pandemic, they began designing packaging and building a website. They forged community partnerships that allowed them to sell their honey in retail spaces, like farmstands and the Concord Food Co-op. “That’s when we saw the business grow exponentially,” she recalled.

Concord Bee Company now keeps 23 hives at three local farms. Rather than barter with money, Watt and Katie exchange pollination — which helps farmers increase their crop yields — for land use and the ability to freely collect their bees’ honey.

Every evening, Watt works a second shift tending to the hives, ensuring they are happy and healthy and watching for signs that the hive might be ready to swarm or, worse yet, signs that it might be infested with mites.

“They’re really just awful pests that can cut into a hive and make what is a somewhat healthy hive, they can really hurt it and make it sick, since they carry tons of pathogens for bees,” he explained.

The Bee Company is steadily working toward an operation that’s large enough to designate some hives for honey production and keep others for the sole purpose of reproduction. A hive that does both can become strained; it “steals too much energy,” Watt explained.

He is already beginning to sell to other beekeepers a kind of hive coveted for its hardiness. These hives, called nucleus hives, have withstood New Hampshire winters with help from the father and daughter duo, who ensure they are well insulated and well fed through the cold months.

For Watt, who said he was the first person in New Hampshire to get a master’s degree in beekeeping from Cornell University, ensuring the hives’ survival through winter comes down to one tactical and ethical choice: treating the bees kindly.

Katie, a recent graduate from Bates College, is bound for a job as a lab technician in Boston. During her time at Bates studying biology, she took a summer job working at a lab that examined the differences between commercial and small-scale apiaries, like the ones she now owns with her dad.

“When you have thousands of beehives, it’s hard to give all of those bees the same treatment and maintain the hives as much as they need. If you are trying to rush through all the hive inspections, for example, sometimes the bees get really anxious or annoyed and they produce this pheromone that kind of smells like rotten bananas,” she explained. “I found that the temperament of the bees is a lot better on a smaller scale.”

As they consider their buzzing business, Watt and Katie would like to continue to grow, but aren’t willing to do so at the expense of their flying workers.

“I don’t want to run thousands of hives; that’s not my goal. I would prefer to just run a small, sustainable business,” Watt reflected. “But we’re early in our life cycle, we’re building it up, and there are lots of avenues for growth.”

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com