The Buzz About Honey

Come summer, when the flowers are blooming and the bees are buzzing, it is honey’s time to shine. The natural sweetener is a staple in some of our favorite summertime treats, but when you dig into the reality of commercial honey production and beekeeping, things can get pretty sticky.

Many large-scale honey businesses put profits over protecting our pollinators and enforce practices that can be harmful to the bees, the surrounding environment, and even consumer health. It is common for commercial beekeepers to use selective breeding to increase productivity. This leads to a smaller gene pool among the farmed bees, who become more vulnerable to diseases and mass die-offs and compete with wild, native pollinators for limited sustenance. Oftentimes, the hive is culled after honey is collected, rather than keeping the bees alive during unproductive seasons. Once collected, the honey is eventually processed and bottled with extra additives.

So, when it comes to honey — like most everything else — we prefer to shop small and shop local. It is much easier to make sure honey is pure and ethically sourced when you buy it from a local beekeeper — someone you can ask directly about their practices.

Better Beekeeping

There are lots of great things happening for the bees across the Bluedot universe, from folks building innovative beehives and planting pollinator corridors to beekeepers using their trade as a tool for environmentalism. You can find beekeepers — hobbyists, generational family businesses, and innovating new companies — ethically caring for bees in small towns and big cities across the globe. And they’re using beekeeping not only as a means for honey, but as a way to reconnect with nature, educate, and drive change.

Urban Beekeeping Is Buzzing

In 2010, Noah Wilson-Rich started Best Bees in his Boston apartment as a way to continue his research in honeybee immunology after completing his Ph.D. in the topic at Tufts University. Since then, Best Bees has grown from a bootstrap operation to the nation’s largest beekeeping service, managing and keeping data on hives in 21 cities.

Eat with the planet in mind!

The Bluedot Living Kitchen weekly newsletter delivers sustainable recipes and Earth-conscious cooking tips. Sign Up Now.

Best Bees installs and manages beehives on both residential and commercial properties. These clients pay for Best Bees to maintain the hives, but the work they are doing at Best Bees goes beyond maintaining productive bee colonies. “What makes Best Bees unique, and is really the main part of our mission, is our research,” says Paige Mulhern, creative director at Best Bees.

Early in their operation, the team at Best Bees developed a hive-tracking software called Buzz. Through this app, beekeepers in the field record all of their hive visits and gather data on the health of the bees. The data from their network of hives gives Best Bees a broad sense of how honeybees are doing as a species. 

“If we know honeybees are doing well, we can assume other insects and pollinators are doing well,” says Paige. “If they’re not doing well, it’s the same situation. So that’s really been our mission from day one — to improve pollinator health through our beekeeping services.”

In one of their research projects, Honey DNA, the team used DNA to analyze the protein found in the honey from their hives, allowing them to record what types of native plants their bees were foraging most. Then, Best Bees consulted their clients on what resources they could plant to help support the bees. 

“We’ve seen a lot of success and impact with clients who are inspired to add gardens and garden beds to their rooftops to support this pollinator oasis,” Paige says.

Best Bees is excited to share their data with organizations that may have more resources to make a bigger impact. In 2022, the United States General Services Administration awarded Best Bees a one-year contract to be part of their pollinator protection initiative at 11 different sites across the country. “Knowing that we are giving data to policymakers and being at the forefront of that change is really exciting,” Paige says.

– Julia Cooper

Keeping It Local

Brent Brown has always dreamed of farming the land, but on Martha’s Vineyard, where real estate is pricey, he decided to fulfill his dream on a much smaller scale. He started beekeeping and opened up Ginny Bee Honey Farms.

Brent operates a small apiary on the grounds of the Norton Farm, where he keeps 10 to 20 hives (depending on the season) from which he extracts the all-natural honey he sells at the farm’s produce and baked goods store.

Along with the Norton Farm hives, Brent also keeps bees on other properties around the island, but he doesn’t harvest the honey from these smaller hives, which need whatever they can produce.

“I only harvest honey from the bees in May, June, and July,” Brent says. “What they make in the summer is excess. When the flowers are out again in the fall, I leave that honey in the hive for the bees to eat during the winter months. I’m very cautious not to take too much honey.”

This is a crucial difference between Brent’s operation and other beekeepers who will harvest all of the honey and replace it with a less nutritious sugar mixture for the bees to feed on.

Ginny Bee honey is also natural, unlike commercial honey that can contain glucose and fructose, among other additives. Best of all, since the honey is the product of local flowers, eating it can provide some immunity to local types of pollen, and supporting Vineyard honey helps sustain the local environment.

Brent prioritizes maintaining large, healthy colonies that will yield as much honey as possible and keep the Island’s bee population up. His hives house 40,000 to 60,000 bees in the summer. But ultimately, for Brent, beekeeping is all about connecting with nature and with his family. “I work in the office all day long,” Brent says. “Beekeeping is a nice break for me. It gets me out in nature.” 

The Brown kids all help out with the bottling and preparation of an all-natural beeswax lip balm. Brent’s wife, Lisa, does all of the photography, among other things. “Everyone in the family has a little part in this,” says Brent. “I really created it for my kids, to help them learn about business and nature. Any profit we’re trying to save for college.”

He also makes it a part of his mission to educate others. During the summer months, Brent hosts tours of the Norton Farm apiary, where he talks about the lifecycle of bees and their important role in the environment.

“Being in the apiary and finding out that the bee’s primary goal is to collect nectar and pollen goes a long way toward understanding the importance of bees in our ecological system.”

– Gwyn McAllister

Buzzing With Purpose

Hilary Kearney never set out to become a beekeeper. She got her degree in fine art from UC Santa Cruz with no solid plans — she just knew she wanted to do something creative. But when her boyfriend (now husband) expressed a casual interest in bees, she bought him a book on beekeeping that fascinated her and jumpstarted her career. 

Fast-forward to now, Hilary has leaned on 14 years of beekeeping experience to build a buzzing bee business called Girl Next Door Honey based out of her San Diego home. 

Hilary didn’t follow the typical formula for profitable bee-based businesses. Most bee businesses earn revenue through selling honey or providing pollination services, but that model wouldn’t work for her.

“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,” says Hilary. 

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.

Instead, Hilary pivoted to education. 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.”

She also developed 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.

“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,” Hilary says. 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.

Through her work, Hilary has 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.”

– Bethany Mavis

Protecting the Pollinators

Whether it is advocating for change within a local community or inventing a creative solution for a system-wide issue, there are plenty of ways to support honeybees and other pollinators outside of beekeeping. Around the world, people are providing pollinator waystations in the form of blooms and protective hives. 

A Path for Pollinators

In the suburbs of South Melbourne, Australia, where concrete sprawls and nature is an afterthought, something unexpected has taken root. A once-barren stretch of pavement now supports clusters of native flowers attracting native bees and butterflies. 

This is just one link in Heartscape’s Melbourne Pollinator Corridor (MPC), a first-of-its-kind initiative in the country. Stretching five miles from the Royal Botanic Gardens to Westgate Park, the project uses native plantings to connect fragmented urban spaces, creating stepping-stone habitats for pollinators — bees, butterflies, hoverflies — that urban sprawl has been steadily squeezing out.

At the heart of it all is Emma Cutting, who founded The Heart Gardening Project, dedicated to transforming overlooked urban spaces into vibrant street gardens while fostering a sense of community. 

She hadn’t set out to rewild a city; she’d simply felt a desperate need to sink her hands into the earth after years of chronic fatigue had kept her isolated, and she started with a small patch of dirt outside her rented home. 

But once Emma learned of Australia’s struggling native bee population, nesting in the ground or in tree hollows and desperately in need of habitat, she wondered what a network of gardens like her own might do. Could it provide a way for bees and other pollinators to move through the city?

The idea took hold in the form of the MPC, which is deceptively simple: 200 street gardens spaced no more than 50 meters apart, with the short gaps allowing for cross pollination along the entire route. The corridor between the two major gardens consists principally of verge plantings (plantings in the strips of land between sidewalks and the street), even at industrial properties such as car parks and schoolyards. Project workers prioritize native and indigenous species chosen for their ability to attract and support pollinators year-round.

“The key,” Emma says, “is understanding that this isn’t just about plants. It’s about people.” Unlike traditional conservation projects, which often exist at arm’s length from the public, the MPC invites people to participate in rewilding their own streets. “Street gardening asks people to rethink public space,” Emma explains. “It’s not just ‘your’ garden — it’s everyone’s.”

– Kira Simpson

An Innovative Beehive

In Zimbabwe’s eastern border city of Mutare, a bright, peach-colored beehive sits on display at a graduation ceremony. Marymount Teachers College boasts a state-of-the-art apiary, part of a public-private partnership to further the country’s education development initiative.

The hive — dubbed the MacJohnson hive — protects bees from insecticides and herbicides and is revolutionary, in part because of its unique hut-shaped entrance.

With severe droughts leading to failing crops in Zimbabwe, thousands of small-scale farmers have turned to beekeeping to offset losses. Many use archaic hives from hollowed-out logs. However, local agriculture relies heavily on insecticides and herbicides. “Insecticides weaken bee colonies, and weak bee colonies are less productive,” says Ishmael Sithole, inventor of the MacJohnson hive.

Many of these new beekeepers are losing their bee colonies, as the traditional hives can’t protect the bees from chemicals used in farming. “Unfortunately,” Ishmael says, “most hives in use in Zimbabwe do not allow the beekeeper to confine his bees safely in the hive with ease.” But that, he says, is where the MacJohnson hive stands out. 

The MacJohnson hive is made using marine grade glue, well-seasoned timber, and chipboard screws to make it compact and immune to weather change defects. What’s more, he adds, “It gives bees entrance and exit points on one side of the hive, which are a series of precisely 10-millimeter holes which [protect] the hive from invasion by large hive beetles — a menace in other hive technologies in use in Zimbabwe.” When farmers are applying insecticides and herbicides, Ishmael says, a beekeeper using the MacJohnson hive can easily confine bees by placing a metal screen over the hive entrance.

Ishmael is proud of his invention and confident of the role it can play in protecting bees. “The MacJohnson hive will change the face of beekeeping not only in Zimbabwe, but regionally and internationally,” he says. “Beekeepers will be better positioned to protect their bee colonies against agrochemical poisoning during foraging trips.”

– Andrew Mambondiyani

Transforming Neglected Space Into a Pollinators’ Paradise

When you stroll along a city sidewalk, you might notice a narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb. The grass doesn’t serve any meaningful ecological function. It’s usually there simply because it’s easy for the city to install and more attractive than bare dirt. But ecologically, aesthetically, and functionally, this strip is a waste of space (unless your dog needs to poop). 

In the 1990s, horticulturist and gardening writer Lauren Springer Odgen dubbed these neglected, garbage-collecting, trampled-on areas “hellstrips,” and suggested that, instead of existing as patches of useless and often-dead grass, hellstrips could offer opportunities to beautify streetscapes and provide food and habitat for urban wildlife.

In Saratoga Springs, New York, a small environmental nonprofit called Sustainable Saratoga launched Hellstrip Heroes, a program that encourages residents to take advantage of hellstrips to grow native plants, pollinator gardens, and small trees. Participants are informally grouped into two categories: Hellstrip Helpers and Hellstrip Heroes.

“Hellstrip Helpers are the people who are planting annuals, or perennials, or trees in that hellstrip area, things that require less watering than turf grass,” explains Kelsey Trudell, Sustainable Saratoga’s executive director. “Hellstrip Heroes take it a step further and fill that space with native, pollinator-friendly plants that turn them into habitats — a sort of paradise for our native pollinator species.”

These “messy” hellstrip gardens, in which only moderately tended plants share restricted space and limited nutrients in the soil, are also great for birds and for insects like butterflies, bumblebees, wasps, and flies — all critical pollinators that help ensure that the plants will propagate into the next season. Pesticides and herbicides, obviously, are a big no-no. 

Ideally, says Chris Burghart, an active volunteer, hellstrip gardens can provide urban passersby with a sort of gateway to nature and its inhabitants that they might otherwise have little exposure to or ignore.

– Alec Ross

---

Print Print Print