Bee a Beekeeper
Beekeeping can be a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor--helping to keep you active and outside and helping to improve pollination in your garden and neighborhood. The prospect of strengthening local pollinator populations, as well as harvesting honey and wax, make beekeeping an extremely popular hobby these days, with local beekeeping clubs reporting record interest in classes for beginners, and hives popping up in more and more neighborhoods. It is not hard but requires commitment!
How do I get started? The Honey Bee Conservancy runs introductory and advanced beekeeping workshops in many cities across the U.S. with a focus on urban and suburban beekeeping. If you do the workshop and decide you are hooked, then you should join their Urban Beekeeping Apprenticeship Program which is a year-long certification that provides burgeoning beekeepers like you with the tools, information, and training to become an ethically-minded, well-informed beekeeper.
What is the time commitment? This is a high time commitment, but an extremely rewarding hobby you may enjoy for a long time. Worth it!
How should I expand this narrative arc? This is a really original extra-curricular and there are many great ways to expand on it! Some of these can even be done if you don’t have your own hive.
Organize a BeeBlitz event. Become a citizen scientist and gather photos and data about native bees that be compared across sites and cities. Then host an event to recruit like-minded people to build a database of bees in your neighborhood that should be nurtured and protected.
Sponsor a Hive through the Honey Bee Conservancy. Their national Sponsor-A-Hive program strategically places buzzing bees in gardens and urban farms that are doing exceptional work to grow fresh produce for schools, soup kitchens, senior citizen centers, and low income neighborhoods.
Get a job in a beekeeping store and help train novice beekeepers like this HS Senior in Washington State.
Raise honey bees, collect the honey, bottle and brand it and sell it at local stores and farmer’s markets.
Plant a bee-friendly garden and start an online and physical awareness campaign to get your neighbors to do the same. The number of hives disappearing each year is enormous and one of the best things we can all do is plant flowering gardens that bees like to feed in.
Get permission from your Town Hall to take over a planted area in your town and plant a bee-friendly garden there. This is a bee version of our Guerilla Gardening impact project and you can follow the steps in our blog post here to get started.
Hot Tip: This is a fantastic extra-curricular and you can expand on it so many ways. The most time consuming thing will be actually starting and caring for the hive. After that the rest is easy!