THRIVING HIVES

oneybees are the pandas of the insect world,” says HLeigh-Kathryn Bonner, founder and CEO of Bee Downtown, a Morrisville-based company that maintains beehives on corporate rooftops and campuses not only in “ the Triangle, but throughout the Southeast. These clever insects do more than produce honey—they are expert and efficient pollinators, and play a pivotal role in our ecosystem. Over the last decade, parasites, disease and habitat destruction have made life in the wild difficult for bees, creating a more urgent need for beekeeping. No one is more aware of this than Raleigh’s “celebrity” beekeepers, several of whom have founded companies to showcase the talents of these important little critters.

THE BUZZ TURNS INTO A BOOM

Bonner learned beekeeping from her grandfather on their family farm. It’s a tough business. “A beekeeper works crazy hours, constantly at the whim of the bees—Mother Nature is always in control,” she says. “You can work hard all year and you’ll never know until you open the hive: There might be honey, there might not!”

Bonner grew up so enthralled with beekeeping that, while studying global studies at North Carolina State University, she asked her apartment landlord if she could keep a hive on the roof. When he said “no,” she turned to her internship manager at the American Tobacco Campus in downtown Durham. Burt’s Bees, which has a corporate office on W. Pettigrew Street, gave her an emphatic thumbs up. “They loved it, and I loved it,” Bonner says of the two hives she put on Burt’s Bees’ rooftop.

Local media also loved it, and soon after her hives made news, Bonner got requests for rooftop hives from Capitol Broadcasting Company, SAS, Bandwidth and Murphy’s Naturals. “It wasn’t meant to be a business,” Bonner says. “I just wanted to keep bees.”

Today, Bee Downtown maintains nearly 600 colonies in five states, including local companies like Bank of America, which has two beehives atop its North Hills tower; Align Technology; Biogen, Microsoft, Cisco, Freudenberg Performance Materials, MetLife and the Carillon tower in Charlotte. “Surprisingly, honeybees really thrive in an urban environment,” Bonner says, crediting the long growing periods and wide variety of ornamental plants and flowers in public and private gardens.

Corporate beehives are a win for businesses that install them and the employees who work there. Bonner quickly learned that many of her clients’ employees wanted to get involved in the beekeeping process. “As soon as we put bees on a corporate campus, employees are interested,” she says.

In response, Bee Downtown now offers two ways employees can participate and learn through bees: a Corporate Hive Program that includes beekeeping classes, hive tours and honey tastings; and the BDT Leadership Institute, which offers leadership and teamwork training based on lessons taken from how honeybee colonies operate.

SAS gets this. “People want to work for companies that stand for something more than just making money,” says SAS Chief Environmental Officer Jerry Williams.

Bonner also took some lessons from her bees when it came to structuring her own company, deciding that Bee Downtown was better positioned as a for-profit, totally self-funded social enterprise. “We have to be self-sustaining to be sustainable,” she says. “We want to set a healthy standard for corporations: Do good and do well.”

SAS takes that standard seriously. The Cary-based company has been inspired by its Bee Downtown hives to launch a data analytics project. “We use advanced analytics and event stream processing to stream data from the hive to the cloud so we can continuously measure the health of the hive,” Williams explains.

BACKYARD BEES

If the thought of observing a bee colony up close intrigues you but you don’t work for a corporation that hosts a rooftop hive, Buddha Bee Apiary is happy to install one in your own backyard. “When I was a boy, I was terrified of bees,” says Alfredo Salkeld, Buddha Bee’s head of hive growth. “If a bee flew by at a picnic, I would run inside.”

Then, while working as a marketing director in Raleigh a few years ago, Salkeld sampled some local honey, had an interesting chat with the purveyor and decided it was time to overcome his fear. He asked if he could visit the honey purveyor’s bee yard. “Once I put on my first bee suit and walked in with the bees, I was hooked,” he says.

Justin Maness, former lead beekeeper at Bee Downtown, founded Buddha Bee Apiary in 2019 to help people fall in love with bees, as well as to make a lasting impact on the environment. Salkeld is committed to the mission Maness established for Buddha Bee Apiary. “There’s just something that clicks when you open up the hive and see the bees with pollen covering their legs, or their

bellies full of honey, and you think, ‘This could be coming from my shrubs.’ It makes you more aware of the natural environment.”

When working with clients, Salkeld carefully selects the perfect spot for the hive. Each Buddha Bee Apiary box includes an established queen bee (selected by the hive), 30,000 female worker bees and 300 male drones (whose sole purpose is to eat and mate with the queen). Every two to four weeks a Buddha Bee beekeeper checks in on the health of the bees. “People think the hive is like a plant, that you can just occasionally water it and that it will thrive on its own—but they really need extensive upkeep,” he says. The company’s beekeepers regularly check to make sure the bees are bringing in food and the queen is healthy. They also make sure the bees aren’t carrying diseases, or hosting mites or other parasites.

A healthy colony can quickly outgrow its space. When this happens, they “swarm,” taking approximately 60% of the colony with them. Salkeld says he can usually sense when the colonies are getting big, and then splits the hive, taking a few frames of food, a few frames of brood (baby bees) and eggs, and the queen. “Opening the hive is the fun part,” he says. “You never know what you’ll get when you look inside—there’s always something new to learn.”

As soon as the original colony senses the loss, the bees naturally raise a new queen by setting aside a few promising eggs and feeding the potential queens a special diet known as “royal jelly,” a honeybee secretion used to nurture larvae and adult queens. These developing queens will fight to the death to determine which one will ultimately rule the hive. Salkeld keeps an extra careful watch during this process until the new queen has gone on her first mating flight and is laying eggs.

A BEE-FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT

A passion for horticulture led Alice Hinman to beekeeping. Like Bonner, she tends hives on Raleigh rooftops through her Raleigh-based nonprofit Apiopolis, caring for the hives while the businesses below enjoy their tiny penthouse guests and slather their bees’ honey on English muffins. However, unlike beekeeping-focused Salkeld and peoplefocused Bonner, Hinman devotes most of her attention to naturalizing the local environment through native-plant gardens.

“Re-wilding is the key to having a sustainable relationship with bees,” Hinman explains, adding that while bees can fly up to 5 miles from their hive, the closer their food source, the better. “A colony needs a full acre of multifloral plants to be really healthy.”

In pursuit of creating a more bee-friendly Raleigh, Apiopolis was awarded a grant to start a native plant nursery, which Hinman hopes will attract environmentally-aware gardeners throughout the Triangle. She is also collaborating with the City of Raleigh to create native flowers, plants and prairie grass installations in vacant lots.

To make this work, Hinman has had to think outside the box—or hive. “Honeybees are not native to the United States, and we have to take some extra steps to maximize their viability,” she says. “Beekeepers have used Langstroth hives since the 19th century. I thought some improvements were overdue.”

Prior to 1851, beekeepers dating back to the sixth century used domed baskets, called bee skeps, for hives. Before that, the Egyptians kept bees in cylindrical hives made of clay. “Bees evolved to live in a hollow tree and do best at about 76 degrees,” Hinman says. So, to maximize survival of her hives, Hinman wraps them with simple insulation.

Hinman’s front yard reflects her priorities. “I accidentally grew a forest,” she says. “There’s an absolutely overgrown black-eyed Susan out there that self-keeps like crazy. The birds and butterflies love it.”

PREVIOUS PAGES

Developing queen bees fight to the death to determine who will rule the hive.

Photo courtesy of Buddha Bee Individual bees by Antagain/Getty Images OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM

Justin Maness founded Buddah Bee Apiary in 2019.

Photo courtesy of Buddha Bee

Ben Dictus, principal beekeeper at Bee Downtown, shows visitors an active hive.

Photo courtesy of Bee Downtown BELOW

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner is founder and CEO of Bee Downtown.

Photo courtesy of Bee Downtown

Alison McAfee, who studies queen bee quality and fertility within NCSU’s top-ranked Department of Entomology, says there are 4,000 bee species native to America, and the honeybee is not one of them. Honeybees are singled out among bee species, she says, because they are essentially livestock. Colonies can be trucked in and out of fields, and managed to be ready for specific crops—as with almond pollination jobs in California, which require over one million honeybee colonies each year.

While honeybee health is vital, McAfee cautions that an overpopulation in any one area can pose a risk to native bee species, which are also important to ecological health. “Honeybees compete with other bees for food sources, and research suggests that honeybees and native bees can transmit pathogens to each other—particularly viruses,” she says. “The more honeybee colonies there are, the more opportunity there is for spreading disease.”

McAfee is supportive of the Raleigh beekeeping community because spotlighting honeybees opens up discussions about native species, many of which are at greater risk than honeybees. She hopes honeybee supporters will follow Hinman’s lead. “If you really want to help pollinators, put your efforts into creating pollinator-friendly habitats,” she says. “Plant native forage sources, transform public and private lands into pollinator corridors, donate to funding agencies or get involved with native bee societies.”

BELOW

Founders of The Pleasant Bee, Sarah Myers and her father, Al Pleasants, with Myers’ children: Eleanor (4) and Jackson (6).

Photo courtesy of The Pleasant Bee THE SWEET STUFF Sarah Myers epitomizes the savvy, modern beekeeper. Known as “The Bee Lady,” Myers got hooked on bees while attending NCSU, where a fellow student recommended fulfilling a science requirement by taking a “Bees and Beekeeping” entomology course. “I really fell for bee biology—the idea of these individual creatures functioning like a super-organism, all working for the benefit of the whole,” she says. By the time she graduated, Myers had the equivalent of a minor in entomology. Since then, the single hive she and her father, Al Pleasants, won at a workshop has grown to more than 20, and she has served as the first female president of the Wake County Beekeepers Association. Myers and her father produce raw honey for The Pleasant Bee, a father-daughter venture they created in 2008. Raw honey allows the natural pollens and nutrients to remain in the final product. Myers points out that while grocery store honey is highly refined for uniform texture and taste, local Piedmont honey is usually ambercolored and often comes from tulip poplar trees. But there is some variation. “We have some hives near cotton and soybean fields, as well as a few hives that gather nectar from the arboretum, so each jar might have a slightly distinct taste.” Myers has used her bee smarts at previous day jobs as well. Originally recruited to lead a bee health outreach program for Bayer CropScience, she also put her knowledge to work at SAS, where she used data from the company’s Bee Downtown hive analytic software to more effectively manage beehives. Myers and Pleasants sell The Pleasant Bee honey at the Midtown Farmers Market, which sets up on Saturdays from April through November at The Commons in North Hills. Their honey and beeswax products are also available through their online shop at thepleasantbee.com.

DON’T WORRY, BEE HAPPY Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, founder and CEO of Bee Downtown, insists that getting to know bees will inevitably boost your environmental stewardship. Why? Because bees recognize faces. If you’re calm and gentle, Bonner says they are happy to see you. If you’re stressed or unhappy, they can get riled up and loud—and may even sting you. “They can tell if you’re bringing bad energy,” she says. “You have to go in saying and thinking, ‘I love you, I’m here to do good.’” BEE SMART Want to learn more about bees and beekeeping? Check out these resources: Apiopolis: apiopolis.org Bee Downtown: bee-downtown.com Buddha Bee Apiary: buddhabeeapiary.com The Pleasant Bee: thepleasantbee.com Wake County Beekeepers Association: wakecountybeekeepers.org North Carolina State University’s Beekeeper Education & Engagement System (BEES): entomology.ces.ncsu.edu/apiculture/bees