Around Town

New Canaan’s Orr Family Takes Up Beekeeping

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Liam Orr, who on Wednesday enters the eighth grade at Saxe Middle School, stands with his two kid brothers and mom in a fenced area around the side of their two-story Colonial on Silver Ridge Road—a quiet, woodsy pocket of southeastern New Canaan that the family has called home for 10 years. Their Belgian shepherd mix, 7-year-old Spanky, watches his family through a sunroom window—until this spring, the area had been his personal dog pen. Today, anchored by three hives that dad Shawn built amid the Orrs’ rapid foray into a unique and stimulating hobby, the shaded area is abuzz with an estimated 500,000 honeybees. “You’re looking at bees that are going out to forage for nectar and pollen, and bees that are coming back with the pollen and nectar they’ve collected, into the hive so that they can store that for the winter,” Liam said. Prompted by the chance viewing at home of a documentary on honeybees last November—and driven by a man who, though not on hand for our interview, clearly delights his family with a penchant for delving with enthusiasm into new and hyper-focused interests—the Orrs have taken up an inclusive, creative and educational hobby that’s yielded real-life lessons in business and website development, marketing and the natural world.

Business

Town Resident Mariola Galavis Takes Over School of Rock New Canaan

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Mariola Galavis couldn’t put her finger on just what was making her unhappy in the summer of 2011. The Venezuela native—one decade in the United States at that point, including seven here in New Canaan—wasn’t necessarily depressed, yet panic attacks inexplicably had set in, just as a determinedly pursued, successful career in management consulting landed her in a job that offered security without purpose. “I felt like I was wasting my life, sitting there in an office, going to meetings all day, because it was just meetings and meetings and meetings,” Galavis on Monday morning recalled of a position she’d held for six years in Westchester, sitting now on a well-worn sofa down the hall from her dramatically different office here in town. “Then I said, ‘I don’t need it.’ ”

With support from her husband and parents, Galavis consulted a professional therapist (“I took charge immediately because I was like, ‘What the hell is going on with me?’ ”), quit her job to stay home with her two boys and, for the first time in her life, pursued a creative endeavor that still suited her mathematical mind. Last week, Galavis—an MBA from MIT under her belt and several years consulting with Andersen for manufacturing, utilities and oil companies in Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Miami—took over the day-to-day operations as the new owner of School of Rock New Canaan.