Buzzing With Purpose

San Diego native Hilary Kearney, founder of the urban beekeeping business Girl Next Door Honey, never set out to become a beekeeper. She got her degree in fine art from UC Santa Cruz with no solid career plans — she just knew she wanted to do something creative.

And destiny rewarded that open-mindedness with … a book. A book on beekeeping that Hilary bought for her boyfriend (now husband) who had expressed a casual interest in bees. Before delivering the book to her beloved, she read it and was fascinated.

Fast-forward to now, Hilary has leaned on 14 years of beekeeping experience to build a buzzing bee business based out of her San Diego home. She teaches natural beekeeping classes, manages an apiary, mentors aspiring beekeepers, gives classroom presentations and beehive tours, and performs bee rescues. She’s written three books, including Heart of the Hive (on Amazon), published in 2024, and she has an online store filled with her own puzzles, games, educational posters, and bee-themed stickers and cards. More than 110,000 people follow her educational beekeeping and personal exploits on Instagram, which includes her own popular Where’s Waldo?–type game of “queenspotting.”

All that business success didn’t come easily, and it didn’t follow the typical formula for profitable bee-based businesses, a lesson she learned early on. Most bee businesses earn revenue through selling honey or providing pollination services, but that model wouldn’t work for Hilary. “I really thought that we would be getting so much honey that I would be able to make the majority of my money on selling honey,” she says. “But unfortunately, we just don’t have control over how much honey we get, and with the climate being as it is, and the bees facing so many stressors, every year is different — we never know if we’re going to get honey or not.” 

Case in point: Almost immediately after starting her business, San Diego went into a seven-year drought. No rain means no honey. And even rain at the wrong times can also mean no honey, she says. “I quickly learned we could not rely on honey,” she says.

So she pivoted to education, something she was naturally drawn to, she says, and a skill uncommon in beekeepers. “Beekeepers are excited about bees, they’re passionate about them, and they want to share, but a lot of beekeepers aren’t very good at communicating or teaching,” she says. “I just saw that as an opportunity for filling a void.”

She started developing teaching resources that were both aesthetic and practical — things she wished she had when she was teaching classes but that could also empower other beekeepers to share their passion. For example, she made a set of vintage-looking beekeeping posters that feature her own high-quality images “from 1950, it looked like,” plus talking points and fun facts printed on the back.

“It’s just kind of a natural instinct, but it’s also a way to explore my creativity … through teaching, by making things for people,” she says. “I didn’t go to art school because I didn’t like how there wasn’t really a practical side of just being an artist — like you’re just an artist and you’re putting out your esoteric messaging, and I didn’t like how disconnected that was from being useful.”

The resources Hilary has developed have wider appeal than in only beekeeping circles — they’ve introduced the fascinating world of bees to the general public, something she knows is important for the future of bees. As people watch her journey, she has become more aware of and connected to the environment.

Hilary grew up enjoying the tide pools and gardening in San Diego, but she didn’t know much about bees. “Because I never thought about bees or cared about them before, it made me realize that many other people don’t either. Yet they are insanely important.”

She’s developed an appreciation for not only bees, but other insects. “Every time I encounter a creature that I’m grossed out by or maybe don’t want to like,” she says, “I’m always second-guessing myself. People feel that way about bees, and bees are amazing, so maybe this thing is amazing too, and I just need to learn something about it in order to change my attitude.”

Her latest book, Heart of the Hive, aims to help people better understand the behavior of bees. She created it as a resource for her own beekeeping students to replace the college entomology books (“huge tomes that cost $200”) she’d been recommending to her students, who rarely read them or absorbed much from them. The book answers questions like Why are bees in my pool? and Why do bees go to certain flowers? to help beekeepers make decisions.

The book is accessible to anyone, and she hopes by learning about bees (what she calls “a gateway bug”), people will not only understand and appreciate bees, they’ll appreciate all creatures — cockroaches, flies, rats. “Everything has a purpose, no matter how unpleasant it is — everything is an important part of the ecosystem,” she says. “And we shouldn’t be running around just exterminating everything that’s inconvenient to us.”

Instead, she recommends adapting your property to make room for critters — especially bees — to thrive in. Her number-one tip is to plant flowering trees — not only to provide decades of flowers for pollinators, but also to improve San Diego’s extremely low tree canopy. And instead of doing a hardscape, cover the ground in loose straw or keep it exposed to allow bees to nest in the ground (fun fact: Most species of bees nest in the ground). As for beekeeping, “it’s not like putting up a birdhouse” — she only recommends it for the very serious, after they’ve taken multiple classes, read books, and understood the commitment it requires.

She’s put her preaching into practice by planting multiple trees on her property, in addition to flowers and a vegetable garden with loose straw between the beds, all built around the multiple hives she maintains. And her neighbors have started to follow suit, planting flowers and trees in their yards. “I really think there’s a ripple effect that happens in the community,” she says of adding plants and trees to her yard. “The more that you do, the more that you can inspire others to do.”