The Valley Hive

Abuzz with Community Spirit

BY JENNIFER RICHARDSON PHOTOS BY TAMI AND EDEN CHU

Keith Roberts, co-owner of The Valley Hive in Chatsworth, asks me this question a few minutes into our interview. Pressed for a number, I guess a thousand, only to be told to add a few zeroes and double it. His main point is that a bee makes about 2 million trips to retrieve the nectar from those flowers, and it sets the tone of appreciation, even reverence, he shows for these industrious creatures as we continue to talk.

As he puts it at one point, bees are “more than just flying stingers.”

Roberts started The Valley Hive in 2014 with Danny Finkelstein, offering a variety of beekeeping-related products and services, from raw honey to courses on beekeeping and colony management.

Asked to describe the business, Roberts can’t resist a pun. “We’re cross-pollinating,” he tells me, explaining that The Valley Hive serves both those who want to enjoy the literal fruit of the bees’ labor, as well as the actual beekeeping.

“Everything revolves around the love for bees and the people who keep them.”

It’s also a place where people can get a close-up look at bees, thanks to the shop’s eight-frame vertical observation hive, which was hosting about 15,000 bees at the time Roberts showed it to me but has the capacity for about twice that.

It’s the same type of hive that introduced Roberts to bees when a chance visit to the Los Angeles County Fair brought him by the booth of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, an organization founded in 1873, dedicated to the care and welfare of the honeybee.

“The hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”

He spent two hours asking the beekeeper at the booth everything about bees, went to a Barnes & Noble and bought all the books he could find on the topic, then found a mentor in a professional beekeeper, the late Walt McBride.

By 2009, Roberts had started his first bee-related business, Enterprising Bee Company, doing bee removals from people’s homes, making honey, lip balm, lotions, and candles, and fielding calls from urban beekeepers who needed help. One of those beekeepers was Danny Finkelstein. Shortly thereafter, Roberts and Finkelstein teamed up to launch The Valley Hive, which now has more than half a dozen employees.

The Valley Hive also sells plants in its Topanga Nursery, part of the Chatsworth site and an obvious complement given Roberts’ assertion that “the best beekeepers are gardeners.”

“I tell my students, ‘If you don’t have a garden, then start one. Start one before you get the bees and you’ll begin to understand the cyclical nature of beekeeping: If it doesn’t happen outside the hive, it’s not going to happen inside the hive.’”

Inside The Valley Hive, Roberts is excited to share that their honey competition for backyard beekeepers will be back this October after a pandemic-induced hiatus. The event also includes a competition for the best honey-based recipe and raises money for the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association’s funding of honeybee research.

When asked what he wants people to know about The Valley Hive, Roberts doesn’t tout his products or services. Instead, he returns to a theme of our conversation: community.

“I envision our business, The Valley Hive, to be representative of a colony and being here for the community—being a resource for education, for wonder and appreciation for one of the most valuable pollinators on the planet.”

Outside of their location in Chatsworth, The Valley Hive sells locally sourced, raw honey at the Calabasas and Westlake Farmers’ Markets. You can also find them online at TheValleyHive.com.

Opposite: Tucked away in the back of the nursery, accessible by invitation and special gear only, several hive boxes buzz with honey-producing bees. Keith Roberts, beekeeper and co-owner of The Valley Hive, shows the activity inside the hives with just a smoker to remind the bees to be docile.