ExclusiveOne San Diego beekeeper has a bee in her bonnet to educate others about apiary

Welcome to Epoch Insights with Tiffany. My name is Tiffany Brannan. Honey is one of the most miraculous substances in all of the food groups. We often see it and think of it as a common sweetener like sugar or some other kind of syrup. But it truly is amazing and often the plainer, pasteurized, really filtered versions aren't as close to the miraculous natural substance as ones which are thicker or raw or unfiltered or even better yet if you get them directly from someone who makes it. Because honey is truly produced by nature. It doesn't have to be refined. It is refined and created by bees. We all know the process of how bees make honey in a very general sense. But there are a few facts about honey which are just amazing. Like the fact that it never goes bad. It lasts forever. You can find honey that was in some ancient civilization a couple thousand years old and it's still edible. It might have crystallized and if honey isn't pasteurized or filtered, it will. But you can easily warm it up again by, for instance, if you just place it in the sun, it will become smoother again if you want to reheat it without damaging its properties. But honey is a very small part of the miraculous process which is beekeeping. There's an article all about a beekeeper's journey to the heart of the hive in the home section of the Epoch Times. It really could have been in many sections of this newspaper because, true, it's talking about entrepreneurship, which is the section in which it's listed. It's talking about a book. It's talking about, I think you could have put it on life and tradition because beekeeping is a very traditional aspect of human life. It's having been done for thousands of years. It could have been in the mind and body section because this is a natural process and honey has many health properties which are mentioned. It even could have been in the California section because this particular article is talking about a young lady who has made a thriving bee business in my area, which is San Diego, California. Her name is Hillary Kearney and she started out 14 years ago with her business. She didn't really know what she was doing when she started out. In fact, it was her boyfriend, now husband, who got her interested in beekeeping. She met her future husband in college and he had a lot of goals, a lot of bucket list ideas on his wall that she saw, and they included things like be a firefighter, ride a bike across the country, and get bees. That particular idea caught her attention so she bought him a book about backyard beekeeping, but she read it before giving it to him and she was really intrigued herself. Particularly the section about honeybees' behavior and intelligence, as well as the intricacy of their hives. She became very interested in the idea of beekeeping herself. And she started out her practice of discovering the world of beekeeping with a simple Craigslist ad. She simply said, if you have bees you want to get rid of, I'll come get them. She barely posted this when she got an answer, and at the time she didn't really know what she was doing, she didn't even have a bee suit. So her father had to help her and he knew even less about beekeeping than she did. Neither one of them had bee suits, so they wore three layers of clothing, and her father had a welding mask on with a towel wrapped around his head. And the people who came to the door with the bees laughed at them because they looked so ridiculous in their makeshift suits. Looking back, she doesn't quite approve of the way she dove into beekeeping headfirst, although clearly she understands her enthusiasm. She says now it would have been much better to have some kind of a mentor as she was getting started with this process. And that's why she would go on to start the business that she has, called Girl Next Door Honey. Now when you hear that name you might think, oh that must be some local honey business where they harvest and sell really natural, pure honey. But that's not really what her business is. True, she does harvest and jar her honey, you have to because if you don't harvest the honey, the hive will get too full of it and that causes the bees to swarm, because then they'll go looking for another hive and that's very dangerous. Now in some parts of the country where there are more four seasons, during the winter the bees will perhaps become more dormant, and there are very particular honey harvesting times. But in San Diego, she explains, with the year-round fairly temperate climate, it's basically harvesting time all year, although the main season is spring to fall. So harvesting honey is an important part of her work. She describes on her Instagram account, which is a very active part of her business, where she shows pictures of her bees and of her hives and her work, that canning and collecting honey is not one of her favorite things to do. In fact, she doesn't really enjoy it. It's a very tedious process. Even if you know what you're doing, it is quite dangerous and it's just very labor-intensive. It isn't about the honey for her. That isn't really why she got into this business. It was her love of bees and her curiosity about their lives and just enjoying working with them that made her want to become a beekeeper. So selling honey is a very small part of her business. As a matter of fact, she doesn't have a store or a pop-up stand. She does have a website, Girl Next Door Honey, on which she sells many things. Honey isn't one of the main items she sells. What she sells more is books. Books she's written, books she recommends, games based on beekeeping, educational tools, and a lot of information about her events. You see, mentoring and having seminars to teach people about beekeeping is more of her life's work, and it's what she truly enjoys doing. She now has a huge collection of hives, 50 in fact, in her yard. But she collects so many hives that she certainly can't keep them all herself. So she will actually bring hives to other people who are interested in starting beekeeping in their own yards. Now, she describes in this article that many people think setting up your own beehive is like putting out a birdhouse. You just put it there and bees come and everything is simple. But she explains it's a lot more than that. You have to learn a lot and do a lot. If you don't know what you're doing, you can encounter a lot of problems that can lead to failure of your hive. For instance, with her very first hive, and in her first year, one of the biggest mistakes she made was not realizing that her first hive had lost its queen bee. She says now that she doesn't know when this queen died, but after a month or two, she realized that the colony was starting to shrink. But by that time, it was too late, because a queen bee continuously lays eggs to replace the bees that die naturally of old age. And for a bee, old age is not very old. Most bees in the hive, the worker bees, live for only about six weeks. And if they die but aren't replaced, the population of the hive will shrink. And she explains that there are a lot of signs and tips that you can see to really understand what's going on in your hive. One of the games that she has on her website is Find the Queen. And it's a book, actually, but you can sort of play a game with it. You look through it on each page, there are a picture of all these bees, and you have to pick out which one's the queen bee. And then it's also made into a game, and there's even a puzzle. There are a few different bee puzzles on her website. Because identifying the queen is very important. The nature and personality of the queen is also vital to having a happy and peaceful hive. You see, some hives start to get more aggressive. And there's talk of things like the Africanization of hives, because it's true that in the last several years, more African bees have come to the United States. These bees aren't inherently aggressive like some people believe. Any bee can have a more aggressive nature. Now, sometimes it's just because the bees feel threatened, and she'll notice this when going to collect them. But if they don't calm down, and they continue swarming, she may eventually have to call in an exterminator, because she's in her bee suits, or she's protected. But she would be concerned for the safety of her client and the neighbors if the bees start swarming, because they could sting people. And she wants to make sure that it's always a safe experience. Now, nice bees, as she describes them, are usually pretty easygoing. They'll tend to calm down once they've been transferred. But if they don't calm down, and they remain aggressive, she'll replace the queen bee with a new one, because it's the queen who's laying the eggs and passing along genetic personality traits, if you can describe a bee that way. So it can be that defensiveness is genetic. So if there's a very defensive queen bee, she'll get rid of that one and put in a nice queen bee, who will lay nice eggs, who will be nice bees. This article is excerpted from Queen Spotting by Hilary Kearney, which is one of the first books she wrote. She's written several now. Most recently, she wrote the book Heart of the Hive, which came out in September of 2024. Because of this new book that's come out, Hilary has been honored in a lot of the bee world recently. She was on the cover of BeeCraft, which remarkably is a British publication all about beekeeping. And all beekeepers who really study look up to her as quite an excellent example. This past year, in over an eight-month period during 2024, she had an ongoing seminar where she had many apprentices, and she taught people both online and in person first-hand examples of beekeeping. She doesn't seem to be doing that right now, but that could be because she had a baby in December. So she's doing a little less beekeeping because of that, but I'm sure before long she will have another similar seminar. On her website, there is a listing for honey. But it describes that it isn't something that she wants to sell, partly because there actually is a bit of a honey shortage right now due to some drought activity in California, but also because she doesn't want people to just think of honey as a commodity. She only sells it directly to people who are attending her classes or educational events. She says, I always tell people they have to earn the right to eat the honey. They have to know how valuable it is before they can have some. The article describes how valuable honey indeed is. It has great antimicrobial properties, and it can effectively soothe coughs, sore throat, it accelerates the healing process when applied externally to cuts and burns. But honey is just one part of the beekeeping process that's very beneficial. She says virtually everything the bees make has some kind of beneficial health property. The beeswax, if eaten, can lower bad cholesterol. Propolis is the sticky resin the bees use to coat their hives, seal cracks, and kill mold. It's currently being researched to fight cancer. Bee venom has long been used to ease arthritis pain, and it's being researched for various autoimmune diseases. On her blog, which I was reading online, she describes how in addition to just eating honey by the spoonful or putting it in tea, you can actually chew on a honeycomb that still has some honey in it, and it has a nice crunchy texture, and you have the sweet flavor of honey, and then at the end you just have almost like chewing gum with some of the beeswax, which then you can just spit out. But you can really understand more how important the bees are to the whole process when you read about what she's done with it and read her blog, and all the different interesting challenges and adventures which beekeepers face. This recent book, Heart of the Hive, she describes as her love letter to the bees. She wants to teach people about these important creatures, in part because of how essential they are to world ecosystems, but also because they're simply fascinating. She always aims to understand things from the bees' point of view, and she never stops learning from them. Armed with her bee suit and her curiosity, she sets out to meet the yet-to-be-explained mysteries of the world of bees. I certainly found it fascinating, and if you're interested in maybe starting beekeeping as a very serious but fascinating hobby, I would definitely recommend looking at her blog and getting one of her books, and if you live in California like I do, attending one of her events live. She has several coming up, some of which are already sold out because they're so popular, or you can maybe attend one of her online events. Even if you're not quite ready to get a bee suit yourself, I think it's just fascinating to learn about beekeeping and this ancient tradition, which still is a fascinating example of the beauty and marvels of nature. Thank you for spending this time with me, talking about bees, the mysteries of beekeeping, and the many health benefits of honey. If you enjoyed this video, I hope you'll like it, subscribe to the channel, share it with your friends, and leave a comment letting me know what you think about this beekeeper's adventures. Thank you for watching!