[bright piano intro] [relaxing piano music] - Agriculture in the United States as we know it would not exist without them.

It's really that simple.

The estimate is that one third of the food we eat, literally one out of every three bites of food we take is attributable to honeybee pollination.

It's an opportunity to see into nature in a way that's really unavailable to most other people.

And the students, they all want to do it.

I think it's critical because somebody's gonna have to keep bees as we move forward.

[relaxing piano and violin music] [gentle music] When we move them, they're gonna be irritated.

The one thing they don't like is vibration.

They can't stand it, so it will set them off, but they'll be completely contained.

So we take the front off this, we can't move this hive anymore.

Six inches either direction, and they'll all literally hover in the air and die in front of them.

When we come in Friday, we'll just take the spool, stand over there and pull, and that little, it'll just flop off.

And they'll roar out.

[gentle music] [bees buzzing] Whenever you're ready.

[metal clanging] [bees buzzing] [gentle music] Anthony Snider, I'm Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences.

Went through my journals last night, was trying to figure when I started, and it was actually when I was in graduate school, back in 1991.

I was looking for something to do, to take my mind off studies, something to give myself a break.

And I went to a bee club meeting and was completely enamored after the first meeting.

The man that taught me was amazing.

He was a retired carpenter from UNC Chapel Hill.

Built his own equipment, he'd been keeping bees for 50 years.

Because it requires attention, when I'm in there, I can't be thinking about the papers I need to grade or the advising I need to do, or, you know, the lecture I have to give tomorrow that I'm not prepared for, all those things fall off and it's this little zone where you really have to pay attention to what's in front of you.

And every single time I go in, there's something new.

It's always something I haven't seen before.

It's just relaxing.

[gentle music] We did a bee class through the local club here because we didn't have the infrastructure at that point.

They only had seats for 50 people.

And I agreed that I would only put 25 students in there.

We had to turn away more than 25 students.

We could have easily filled that room, but then there would have been no community spots available.

And the students came to me and said, "Can we do this on campus?"

I said, "We can, but to make it work we need to be a club and we need to do an apiary," and they all wanted to do it.

So it made sense for me to be the advisor, the people who had just finished the bee class wanted to do the club.

They coalesced and they became the officers and set up the infrastructure.

And it started from that.

All of the officers are Certified Beekeepers.

- I'm Maddi Ruff, I'm an EVS major, I wanna save the world.

I focus on conservation.

Beekeeping was a new thing for me.

Didn't really do much outdoorsy stuff, kind of avoided bugs for the most part, anything that stung or bit, it was instant turn-off, not interested.

And then I did a project about honey, and I did basically an argumentative research paper on why Wilmington local businesses should use honey.

I was doing the honey project when I found out about the class.

After the first, you know, class or two, I was so intrigued, and just so interested, and already developing a passion for it despite the fact that I hadn't even like touched a hive.

I mean, nothing, no experience, and I was already just falling in love with it.

[inspiring music] - My name is Amber Franks.

I am an EVS major.

I've been very educated through this whole process.

I didn't know that much about honey bees at all or bees in general, but now I can depict whether or not something's a honeybee or if it's a bumblebee, and before I didn't really pay attention.

I don't know, I guess I love everything about it, really.

Oh, I'm a beekeeper.

[laughs] It's just cool.

It's so amazing, and you tell people, "Hey, I'm a beekeeper."

And they're like, "Wow, really?"

But I guess just the learning everything about bees and working with Dr. Snider, that's my favorite part.

He is in love with it.

And whenever you have someone who's in love with their hobby, then you learn so much.

He'll sit there and he'll just watch the honeybees, and just watching him watch them is just so fascinating to me.

I wanna be like him whenever I'm older.

- My name's Berry Hines Senior.

I'm retired military, and my occupation right now is I'm a commercial crop pollinator and beekeeper.

Well, I first got into beekeeping with my granddad and great-granddad, they both was living when I come along.

And so I've been around bees since I'm gonna say before school, approximately five, six years old.

Why do I love beekeeping?

Bees are very methodical.

You know, to me, they're mathematically correct.

I don't know if somebody has ever said that, but you know, you look at how long it takes them to be born.

You look at all this stuff, you look at the males coming from unfertilized eggs, see all of this is science.

And as a kid, I was interested in that stuff.

The books I read, as I say, I'm a great and almighty master beekeeper, but the bees didn't study at the same school that I went.

So the thing that I see is trying to get bees to do what I want them to do, that still fascinates me.

I just like working honey bees.

[inspiring music] One of the things that I do, is sometimes if I wanna think, I just want some quiet time, I go to the bee yard and just sit, you know, go drive up to the bee yard, just sit and watch the bees, and watch them go in and out.

Not only am I learning if there's a problem in the yard, but their perpetual motion, I guess, as you say, it's like the cat and the light laser, you know, I'm sorta like that.

I go to bees yard, bees always fascinated me.

- My name is Rick Coor.

I'm a beekeeper from over in Wayne County.

I have a queen rearing business.

It began when I was about 13 years old and an uncle of mine had a beehive.

And we used to ride our bicycles over to visit this hive.

In those days, Sears and Roebuck, in their catalog, offered bees for sale.

Get a package of bees, a veil, gloves, starter kit.

Just what I did.

Beekeeping's very satisfying, very interesting.

Just the natural cycle of the bee.

You know, every spring brings a renewal, new possibilities, new energy, new life.

So beekeeping then as pastime, as a hobby, as a pursuit, a person can learn about bees as simple or as in depth as they want to.

[relaxing music] [birds twittering] - Well, it's been here about a month, and it's looking really good.

We have a great queen.

We found her in the third box today, and there's a lot of brood and eggs.

- Coming right along, progress is being made.

[gentle music] [soaring music] - This is the coolest club on campus.

[students laughing] We're the only club that has livestock.

[students laughing] But the trick is that that means you have to keep the livestock alive.

- Yeah.

- So there's a responsibility attached to it.

[birds twittering] [gentle guitar music] - I'm David Tarpy, I'm a Professor of Entomology and Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University.

And I'm also the Extension apiculturist or the honeybee specialist for North Carolina Extension.

The research that we do at NC State tries to answer questions about the biology of honeybees in an effort to improve their health.

In doing so, we also work on practical solutions and collaborating with beekeepers to implement what we learn to make those changes actually happen.

[gentle guitar music] The Queen & Disease Clinic is an Extension initiative that is a direct offshoot of our research.

So a lot of our research is trying to understand what makes a honeybee queen good, and an effort of trying to improve the quality of the queens will go a long way to improving the quality of the colony.

And so we've learned a lot about what measures are indicative of a good queen versus a bad queen.

And so we bring those same scientific techniques to bear for beekeepers.

So they send us in queens and we can measure them in the exact same way.

And then we can send a report back to them saying, "These queens are good, or these queens are bad, and this is why."

And that then helps the beekeepers improve their queens.

That then eventually improves the colonies.

[gentle guitar music] - Latter part of the 1800s, a fellow by the name of Reverend Langstroth developed what we all use now, which moveable are frame hives where you can pull the comb out in a wooden frame.

And that's useful for a couple of reasons.

One, you can do inspections.

Also, instead of having to destroy the comb, you can take the comb out, take the very top off the wax that protects the honey in the cells, and then just spin the honey out the centrifuge and reuse them.

Which is really important because the wax, a single pound of wax takes eight pounds of honey.

It makes the most expensive thing in the hive in terms of effort required and resources required to make it.

The honey's not the most valuable, it's the wax.

[gentle guitar music] [relaxing piano music] They work through different tasks in the course of their lifetime.

When they're very young, they will act as nurse bees.

They'll secrete something known as royal jelly.

It's a hormone-rich food that all of the bees get for very short time period and the queen gets her entire time during gestation.

It allows for hormonal development of the bees, and they control who develops by how much.

So it's really just two castes.

It's the queen and the workers, and there's a differentiation.

As they age, they will do different tasks.

At one point, all they do is hang in the hive, eat food, and secrete wax scales out of their bodies that are used to build the comb, that are used to do the cappings.

And then they'll go to guard bees, they will line up across the front and protect the colony from bees from other colonies trying to get in or other creatures trying to get in.

And their last job in life is forager.

During that time period, will fly almost constantly, and they will literally fly themselves to death.

When they reach the end of their summer lifespan, their wings will be in tatters, they'll be rags.

And that eventually kills them.

In the winter they don't do that 'cause they're not forging, so they can live several months, but they go through each of those stages in the course of the lifetime.

With the exception of the queen.

All the queen does is lay eggs.

That's her sole job.

She is essentially created by the colony.

They'll select an egg or series of eggs, they'll usually do more than one, and they'll feed that egg nothing but royal jelly.

And as a consequence, her ovaries will develop.

Genetically, she's no different than the other girls in the hive.

They're all the same.

She just has developed ovaries and they don't.

There's a very short time period when she'll leave the hive she'll go out, she'll mate, and then she'll come back.

She'll store that sperm in her body, and she can control whether or not she releases it.

When she lays an egg, if she wants a female to be born, she'll fertilize the egg.

The females are all diploid.

If she wants a male to be born, she won't, the males are all haploid.

With only half the genetic compliment.

So it's interesting 'cause they're bigger, a lot bigger actually, they have no stinger, they never feed themselves, they don't do any work whatsoever, and they can go from colony to colony, and the guards will not intrude with them.

And they can walk up to the front and demand to be fed and the bees will feed them.

They don't do anything except mate.

Then when fall rolls around and they know they're not gonna need a queen, they're not gonna make any more queens, the females line up across the front and let all the males freeze to death.

It's called the drone sweep, they literally kill all the male bees.

[relaxing piano music] They actually go after four different things.

The thing that most people are familiar with is the nectar, and they'll bring that nectar back.

They'll create a literal vortex, and they're doing that to reduce the moisture content.

They're trying to evaporate the moisture out of that until it gets down to about 18.6%.

When the moisture content is that low, it won't ferment.

There's naturally yeast in that nectar.

If the moisture content is higher than 18.6%, it'll ferment it and it'll make mead.

Which is fine if that's what you're trying to do.

But if you're trying to store honey, it's not a good thing.

When they reach that moisture content, they'll wax it over, and that wax will prevent any more moisture from going in.

Honey will normally attract moisture.

And so the wax prevents that.

So that's their carbohydrate source.

Both adults and young bees, larval bees, use that to some degree, but definitely the adults.

That's the energy that allows them to fly.

They forage for pollen.

They will mix that with enzymes from their saliva and honey and they'll make a substance known as bee bread.

They'll pack it in the cells, and that's what they feed to the larva.

That's the protein that allows them to go through the metamorphosis and create their exoskeletons.

The third thing they'll forage for is propolis, which is essentially just rosins off trees.

They'll bring that back, and they'll knead it down, and they'll make glue out of it.

And they'll use that to close up any space that's smaller than three eights of an inch and to hold things in place.

They're really good, for example, when we pop the boxes apart, we'll hear them crack.

And that's because we're breaking that propolis seal.

They'll also use that propolis to literally varnish every wooden surface inside, and it has antibacterial properties.

So it actually makes the hive more sanitary when they do that.

And then the fourth thing they forage for is water.

They're trying to maintain a constant humidity and temperature, and so the hive happens to be in the sun in the late afternoon, they can overheat.

And so they will send foragers out, and they'll take droplets of water, and when they're running that vortex, they'll station droplets of water around the hive, and that as the water evaporates, it'll actually bring the temperature down in the hive as part of the vortex.

So there's the four things they go after.

[lively music] - If you think about how far bees can fly, they can fly three, four miles away.

And then come back with food stores.

So that's about 50 square miles of real estate that they have access to.

So finding a flower patch three miles away and being able to locate that and tell the other nest mates of where that's located is literally a needle in a haystack, and just very, very difficult to do.

So they've developed this very elaborate means of orienting novice bees from the nest to go out and find that same food source through these sophisticated body movements and other other signals, so that they can go right to that food source and exploit it while it's still there.

- Karl von Frisch, he was a German scientist, watched them, spent a lot of time watching honeybees.

And they do this figure eight motion when they're on the frame.

Not all of them, but a small number of them, they'll go up and they'll waggle their butts.

It's called the waggle dance, they'll sit there and vibrate.

They'll go up at the top of the figure eight, go around, come back up to the bottom, waggle, go the other way.

And they'll do this over, and over, and over again in the figure eight.

And what von Frisch figured out is that the orientation of the center part of that figure eight is the direction to whatever nectar source they're advertising based on polarization of the sun.

They see polarized light, so they can orient to that, and that angle is the angle to the sun.

The length of time she waggles is the distance to the flower.

And then he would mark an individual bee that was doing the dance.

And then he could go to wherever, he would decode it, figure out where the flowers were supposed to be, go to those flowers, and find that bee.

And it was that exact.

The other thing that happens is that these are called scout bees.

There's more than one scout.

They're all out looking at the landscape.

And that's all they're doing.

They have a double stomach, and they'll bring back a sample in the uppermost stomach.

They'll do the dance, and then they'll give a taste.

The foragers move from scout to scout, and based on the distance and the nectar content in the sample, they'll decide as a group where they're gonna go.

- Somehow they're able to, you know, all 50,000 individuals are able to make this collective decision that appear very intelligent.

They're able to know when the colony needs to split, and when they need to reproduce through swarming.

[gentle strumming] They actively debate different possibilities of new nest sites.

And eventually, through consensus, they agree on which one will become their new home.

And then they fly away and set up a new colony.

So the process by which they do that is really fascinating to me.

That's what makes them both remarkably successful in being able to co-exist, but also remarkably susceptible to problems in the environment because they're out foraging in the environment so they can be bringing pesticides and other diseases and other things back to the colony.

They're kind of biosensors of the local environment, where they can kind of sequester and concentrate bad things as well as good things.

[gentle guitar music] - The two queens were coexisting, which is rare.

They will normally kill each other.

And they were actually on two halves of the same frame, so they could smell each other.

And they were unconcerned, which is really unusual.

We could possibly leave them alone and they would both coexist.

But there's an opportunity that if we split them now, and we can get both halves of that split to become viable, in the spring, we can split again, and end up with six hives, rather than four.

So it's just an opportunity to increase pretty easily, since they just came out of nowhere, literally.

Both hives are doing extremely well.

And so what the plan is, is to take, essentially split this one in half, and then I brought extra frames.

So we'll backfill frames and put a second box on this and then take this one is mostly honey.

And take the stores out of that and divide it among all three colonies so we end up with three equal hives that won't rob from each other.

Got her.

- Got her.

- Okay great, that's perfect.

[gentle guitar music] - [Student] Wow, she's super tiny compared to the- - The other one's truly- - Right?

Yeah.

- Just giant.

- [Student] Yeah.

- Now we'll try to divide up the bees between the two colonies, and then we'll add, we'll make sure that both colonies also have a super above the brood chamber, and we'll take food out of the colony behind me to make sure they're all about equal in terms of stores.

[gentle guitar music] See how they're hanging out in the front of it?

They're trying to orient back to this hive already.

So we're just gonna let 'em try.

If we have to rebalance, what we can do is just shake bees into it again.

Sometimes you'll have to do that four or five times.

Because the queens were together, the bees all smell like both queens.

And so they're gonna default to whichever one's in the box at this point.

So it shouldn't be a problem at all for them.

They all look about equal right now.

It's perfect.

[gentle guitar music] [birds twittering] It used to be that you could just put a colony out and you never had to worry about it, nothing bothered it.

But because it's an introduced insect, and over the years, people have brought in other insects in including other types of honeybees, apis cerana for example, that co evolved with ectoparasites.

The Italian honeybee, apis mellifera did not.

And so as those parasites have moved into the beekeeping population, we've had all kinds of trouble.

One of the first ones was tracheal mites.

They're literally mites that go into the trachea of the bees and can suffocate them from the inside.

When I first started keeping, that was the major concern, and you treated it with menthol patties to kill the mites inside the trache, but it wouldn't hurt the bees.

The bees have developed resistance.

They're still here, but they don't affect the bees anymore.

They've evolved, they've now co-evolved with them.

Currently, we've got a new pest called small hive beetle.

Tiny little black beetle.

It's really good at defense, when it folds its legs up and folds its antenna in, there's nothing for the honeybees to bite.

The only thing they can do is chase them into the corners.

And so we put traps in there with a little bit of oil in the bottom, a little vegetable oil.

The bees will chase them into the cracks in the traps, they'll fall in, and they drown in the vegetable oil, and that keeps the number, you never completely remove them, but it keeps the numbers down.

If their numbers get up high enough, they'll actually start breeding within the hive and they'll contaminate the honey, and it'll get really rancid.

If it gets bad enough, the honey bees can't clean it, they'll all leave.

They'll abandon the hive and leave it to the hive beetles and go set up shop somewhere else.

- I think if there's one key stressor of these multiple interacting stressors for the bees that result in them not being well, the Varroa mite is really kind of a keystone problem because they vector pathogens, they compromise the immune system to let other diseases, you know, get worse.

Just remove that little vampire mite and I think a lot of the other stressors wouldn't nearly be as bad.

- To put it in perspective, it's like having a tick the size of a Frisbee on your body, literally, and the bees will have more than one.

About 10% of them are living on the the bees moving around the colony.

The other 90% are inside the capped pupa, and they feed on the pupa, and they can have seven, eight mites on them.

They also act as vectors for a couple of viruses.

There's a virus that deforms the wings.

There's one that causes paralysis.

When the mite count goes up, the viruses are introduced in larger numbers and you see a detrimental effect on the bees.

[sorrowful music] - Colony collapse disorder, as it was kind of articulated about 10 years ago when it was first kind of to say, you know, bees die for lots of reasons, but there were these observations of bees dying in slightly different ways than what kind of the normal culprits before.

It's always been a very kind of small minority reason of why bees are dying, but it's kind of taken on its own terminology and people are using it as a blanket reason for all mortality rather than just this kind of mysterious syndrome that has always been only about 3% of the bees dying.

It's really not a rampant problem, but yeah, that message tends to get kind of muddied by the public awareness campaign of the plight of bees.

And so it's all kind of wrapped up into one.

[sorrowful music] If you look at the beekeeping community, say 10 years ago, before CCD was really, you know, hitting a lot of the headlines, the beekeeping community was predominantly old, not a lot of beekeepers to replace them.

And it's very, very difficult to replace honeybee colonies, but it's even more difficult to replace beekeepers.

And so I think if there is a silver lining in colony collapse disorder and some of the problems that bees are having is that it's drawing a lot of attention too, and therefore a lot of attention from kind of a younger generation of of beekeepers that are getting into this area.

And there's a lot of excitement, a lot more diversity, and a lot of kind of youth and vigor when it comes to bees, and helping bees, and beekeeping.

And so I think it's really critical, and really applaud groups like at Wilmington, of starting a beekeeping club, raising awareness, and just being able to kind of, you know, continue carrying the torch.

[sorrowful music] [gentle rock music] - I think we were really excited at the prospect of, you know, getting a free colony and growing the apiary, that we didn't take enough time to really think about, you know, what if?

What if this hive is sick?

What caused this hive to swarm?

But we can't make assumptions like that.

And I mean, it cost us two hives instead of one.

There was nothing we could do.

I mean, it's a virus.

And I know that a lot of beekeepers have been losing their colonies this year.

It's been a rough year for beekeepers due to Varroa, but nothing from like one colony moving in with another.

But I mean, Varroa has been an issue.

It's taught me that, oh God, how can I not, I can't put it into words.

Like it's... [upbeat rock music] It's taught me that you have to keep going no matter what, I mean, life is gonna throw obstacles at you, and you're gonna have to face them.

And sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.

I mean, you've just gotta take the hit, and that can't stop you from getting back up on your feet and pushing forward to achieve whatever you're after.

Which I mean here, it's just been my goal to empower other people to love bees, and to not be afraid of them, and to respect them, and to just understand how important they are.

[bees buzzing] - Honey bees will decide in groups what they wanna pollinate.

The entire group will go, they'll only target that species.

So they're very efficient in pollinating in a way that no other species is.

So they're in high demand.

Blueberries here require honey bee pollination.

And so people move their hives in to pollinate blueberries here or other species.

There are people that make their entire living moving across the country, literally with transfer trucks full of beehives, going from field to field, providing pollination services as the spring moves north in the country.

It's really, really important.

[gentle guitar music] - So I'm still a beginner, so hopefully our viewers, you know, don't [laughs] judge me for any of my misgivings.

When I first started, I thought every drone was the queen.

Like, oh there she is, nope, there she is.

So as we get to the middle, it's more likely that we'll see the queen.

[upbeat acoustic guitar music] The more brood you see, that's usually a indicator that she's close by.

I told you everything about them fascinates me.

It's so true, like when they're in the little cell and you see the little butt sticking out, so cute.

[upbeat acoustic guitar music] My name is Katrin Milne.

We are at Red Beard Farms.

My husband Morgan and I own this land, about 17 acres.

We farm organically, we farm vegetables, but we also have mushrooms.

I actually teach Spanish full-time, and you'll find that a lot of small farmers, especially, at least one person has to have an outside job off the farm.

So that's what I fill my days with.

But then when I'm not at school I'm here on the farm.

We want this land to last for generations upon generations, and we want it to be kind of a functioning ecosystem.

So if you walk around our farm, you'll see all sorts of, you know, the flowers on the different vegetables, but also we have a honeybee pollen mix.

I grow herbs.

Something I realized when I was in the beekeeping courses that everyone had all these knowledge of different flowers, and when they're bloom, they're like, "Okay, well fall's coming, so the goldenrod is gonna be blooming."

So they had this whole knowledge of the whole ecosystem, which I loved.

To have bees on the farm is magnificent for pollination and fertilization of our plants.

And then now we can sell honey.

I don't know what other job you can literally see the fruits of your labor, [laughs] but also just spending your time outside and getting to know the land.

Like I know where exactly the sun rises in the summer versus the winter, and then where it sets, and how it changes in the sky.

I know that the Big Dipper's always over there, but then later in the winter, it'll be over there.

I mean, it's just being part of the land like that is, it's awesome.

[upbeat acoustic guitar music] - I'm Brian West, I've been beekeeping since 1989.

I've found two hives that were abandoned on a farm that I was renting.

I asked the owner of the farm whose they were and he said, "They're yours, and I'll hook you up with a commercial beekeeper that will mentor you."

And so that's how I got into it.

And for many years, it was just as a hobbyist.

I had three or four hives.

And then around 2009, I really wanted to take advantage of a pollination opportunity.

And so I started that with local produce growers, cucumbers, and also blueberries on a small scale, 200 hives or less, it's called a sideliner pollination business.

It's weeding out the small folks.

You have to be 2,000 hives, 2,500 hives for it to be viable.

And it's very tough on my level, especially with the diseases we're having, to make it financially feasible to do it.

And so you're seeing very, very large, almost corporate-scale pollinators out there.

And very few of the little sideliners like myself.

[gentle guitar music] I'm just passionate about it.

I love bees.

They're the most fascinating creatures.

And I've basically come to the conclusion that the more I learn about them, the less I know about them, you know?

The mystery unfolds even more for me.

And I do it because I just want to believe that if we keep trying, we're gonna find a cure for what ails them.

[gentle guitar music] - Have bees spread out in about 13 to 14 different counties doing pollination for different farmers.

Right now with so much land loss and things going into residential and other commercial type things other than farming, it helps you to grow more produce on less land.

Some farmers use the formula of two and a half or two hives per acre.

It depends on whether they're growing cucumbers or watermelons, and blueberries, or what have you.

They figure up that, and usually when they contact you, they want to know what do you have as far as hives to provide?

So it's a profession that is wide open, but right now the main thing is to keep the bees healthy, keep 'em alive, and be able to get them on the different farms.

One of the things I'm looking at now is mono crops.

Say if I'm just pollinating blueberries, I try to watch the health on those bees.

Mono crops can cause stress on bees.

But then you got the multi crop, that's what we're doing here, where we're growing several crops that need bees, and try to see, watch the health on these bees.

So that help us in return.

So you gotta kind of do a little research on your own.

What I'm trying to do now is I wanna see more young beekeepers involved in this because honeybees are very important.

They're not just, as you noticed with the pollination, honey bees are not just about honey and stinging.

Honey bees are a very important part to our food source.

And so I wanna see this profession go on.

Now at the time that my granddaddy was in it, he was pollinating, but it was just honey for the family.

But now what we're doing now is we're trying to help the farmers produce more crops and also to have more honey and then working with the communities where we're working in a lot of Tier 1 counties or what they call underserved counties to help come up with sustainable jobs where a lot of the jobs, factories are closed and things like that.

I want to see our young people understand farming and pollination because everything gotta be revolved around that.

And right now, I see that growing.

Agribusiness, I see a lot of towns with agribusiness now and raised beds and things like that.

So all of this all leads back pollination.

[bright music] [bright music continues] [bright music crescendos] [bright music slows] [gentle guitar music] - It's been very rewarding.

I feel like I've, you know, helped establish a nice foundation.

All of the officers have, I mean we've all worked together to make this what it has become today.

I mean, it's been awesome 'cause you get emails, "Hey, we read about your article in 'Atlantis', we read about your article in this magazine, or we heard about you on Facebook," and you know, we're getting the word out.

People are figuring out that we exist and it's really nice.

It's great.

I love seeing people interested in this because it's definitely securing the future of the club.

And I'm not ready to grad, not gonna get choked up, but [laughs and sighs] I'm not entirely ready to leave the club yet, but I love Lauren, I really do.

I'm definitely comfortable leaving the club in her hands.

We've been working together all semester now and she's a good leader, she's a good leader for their club.

- My name's Lauren, I'm an environmental science major.

So I was actually on WaveLink, which is like the website that UNCW uses to just keep track of all the organizations.

And I was like, "Oh, let's see if they have a beekeeping club."

And the did, so I emailed Maddi and Amber who were president and vice-president.

So I reached out to them, and I got started in the fall of my sophomore year, so last year.

- My name is Morgan Kolar, and I'm majoring in biology with a minor in environmental sciences.

Dr. Snider, our club advisor, I was taking his class on environmental policy, and then he eventually brought up the beekeeping club, and he thought that I should come to a meeting to see if I like it.

And I ended up absolutely loving it.

I went to all of the meetings, and I've been really involved now for almost two years.

- My name is Keyona Townsend.

I am an environmental science major.

So when I got here, I wanted to focus mostly on educating in science, so that's why I came here, and it's been great ever since.

I started in the bee club when I had a class with Dr. Snider who was so enthused about it, and telling everyone, "You should take this 'cause bees are important."

And I was like, "I'm scared of bees!"

I was nervous when I first got into the hive for the first time, but he made it so calm, and relaxed, and cool that I fell in love with it after.

- So in terms of growth, I think we have about 300 people on our email list and we have about 40 like average attendees.

So that's a pretty hefty amount, especially compared to most clubs on campus.

We do a lot of educational events.

So even within our own meetings, we've started doing hour-long lectures, seminar kind of things with Dr. Snider, really basic information so everyone has that very foundational idea.

So then when we do take members out into the hive, they're like, "Oh, that's a worker bee.

Oh, that's a drone."

So there's no confusion with all of that.

And we also do just a lot of things like with other like group organizations on campus.

So we did the health fair, where we went and talked about like the health benefits of honey.

We do a lot of stuff off campuses too.

- So I really think what we're doing with educating people, and just making people aware of what it is, and letting them come into the hives, and be like around them and make them feel comfortable with the bees 'cause you do feel more comfortable the more you're around them.

And the more you're around them, they're like, "Oh yeah, I wanna do this, like, I actually love this!"

[laughs] We're really big on going to fairs, going to conventions.

I'm actually going to be talking to a school.

We really want to like get younger kids as well.

And we've brought kids into the hives before.

So I think once you show people what it is, and let them experience it, I think that they'll want to do it.

- Now that I'm a beekeeper, it's very important to me, because not only are we outreaching to the younger generation that this is something that you should be looking into because it's gonna be our responsibility to take over and make sure that these ecosystems stay in line and that they are here to do their jobs, not only pollinate our food, but to sustain our like environment.

Especially as a black woman, I want to do more outreach for just not younger generation, but people of color too, to like say, "This is important to you too, because you're here too, and you need to know about this."

[gentle guitar music] [gentle guitar music] - It intrigued me a little bit.

I never really thought about it until a buddy of mine, we were on the way to play golf and we saw some beehives, and I said, "Why don't we do that?"

It's a fun hobby, it's fun to get out, is fascinating.

The local hobbyist in so many places, you can't have bees, but in North Carolina, you can, there's a law that says you cannot keep anyone from having bees.

So, and I think it's just, people are intrigued by it and we've got more and more chapters.

There are 79 active chapters in the state, and we have over 5,000 hobbyist beekeepers or members of the NCSBA.

And I think everyone gets so enthused about it that they are talking to their neighbors and now their neighbors wanna get involved.

So our numbers are growing.

- In North Carolina, we have a real wealth of beekeepers here.

We have most beekeepers in any other state in the nation.

And most of them are kind of small scale hobbyists beekeepers, or sideliner beekeepers, where their entire livelihood is not completely contingent upon their honeybees which is a very good opportunity to explore out-of-the-box thinking and to do some things that might not otherwise be tried by a larger industry.

- Well, my hope for the NCSBA and a beekeeping in this state, I mean, it is to reinforce what we're doing now.

We should be focused on beekeeper education.

We have a variety of different types of beekeepers so far as natural beekeepers.

We have people who believe in treating their colonies, different management practices, and they're all in this building today.

And so we're all in together.

[gentle guitar music] Morning everyone, my name is Rick Coor.

I serve as the President of the NCSBA and I am only one of an able leadership team that has brought forth this conference for you today.

And this morning, it is my privilege to stand before you and contribute to our meeting.

- We have probably 70 bee schools that are going on in the spring time.

And that's where we start educating in the Certified Beekeeper.

Then we take them from there with going to the Journeyman, Master, and Master craftsman level.

And those are our educators in the chapter.

The more they learn, they pass that knowledge on to the next group.

The mentor program is probably one of the most important parts of a chapter.

Where that new beekeeper comes in has got a thousand questions and you need someone to answer them.

- It's not by accident that we have the most beekeepers any other state, it's because we have a very excellent infrastructure in different branches that help support and compliment each other.

NC State University and Cooperative Extension, so our program and being able to do discovery and translation of kind of the new science and new approaches to beekeeping, so that's our role.

The Department of Agriculture wears the regulatory hat.

So they are charged with monitoring the health of the bee population, imposing quarantines, or doing other things to try to bolster and promote the health of the population.

And then we have the beekeepers, the NCSBA, that have the population and are receptive to those things.

We're able to kind of work together in those different ways to really support the honeybee population.

So a lot of other states don't have, you know, research programs, a lot of other states don't have apiary inspection programs, and therefore they just don't have that infrastructure to be able to work together in that way.

And so I definitely think it's not an accident that we have such a vibrant beekeeping community because of that dedication.

- It's a fair statement to say that without beekeepers, you know, that the honey bee would be all but extinct.

Overall, it is an appreciation of the environment, it's an awareness of the changing of our environment.

It also teaches people that they can, in a small way, impact their environment, and their environment may just be their yard.

In the end though, it's passion for beekeepers.

[gentle music] [lively music] - What we're gonna do is I'm gonna pop this.

We're not gonna smoke the front.

We're not gonna smoke the bottom.

- Okay.

- Where there are very few bees up here, we're gonna give a little bit of smoke at the top just to keep them from going ballistic.

And we're gonna brush them off, set them in there, set them on piece of plywood in the truck because if I put it just on the floorboards, they'll go under the grooves of my bed liner.

The plywood they can't get under, and we put the telescoping top on it.

- Okay.

- And then we take this empty we'll take the next frames in, and do that all the way down the line, stacking and putting the lid on each time because once we take the honey off, they'll find it within five minutes or start [indistinct].

- Okay, gotcha.

- You have to keep it covered.

- It was me, our old secretary Taylor, and Dr. Snider, who did the harvesting.

And I remember those boxes being very heavy.

We took them back to the TL building here, and then we punctured all the capped honey.

We put it into the honey extractor.

So we put the frames in there, and it takes a lot of work to crank that thing.

It's pretty big.

[laughs] And so then we strained that honey.

That had to sit for a day or two.

And then we were able to put that honey then into jars.

- Sharon Boyd was instrumental in working out an arrangement with Aramark, where they're carrying it in the P.O.D.s.

Very, very happy that that's happening because we don't have to worry about the marketing aspect of it, they handle all of it.

And so we literally hand it off to them, they write us a check wholesale, and then they just handle farming it out to the individual P.O.D.

stores.

We got up to 100 pounds.

We sold every ounce of our honey, and it went off the shelves, and within two weeks.

It was great, I loved it.

[laughs] I got a jar, y'all, bought a jar, so it was great.

[happy guitar music] [serene piano music] - So it's really important that we're bringing in this new generation that includes a wide variety of like different peoples of different backgrounds.

So it's really, really important that we're offering this club and allowing everyone who's interested to get involved.

- One of our main goals, or at least what I think is the goal of the club is to really teach people how to keep bees on their own.

I mean, we teach you how to like build the boxes and the frames.

We teach you how to do pest management.

And like, we teach you how to extract honey.

I really want people to then take all this knowledge that they get from this club and be able to apply it in their lives for a long time.

- The biggest reward is watching the amazement that you see in students when they start understanding how complex it is and how interconnected every individual in that hive is and how they're making these really odd group decisions that we don't completely understand how they're pulling this off.

There are lots of them who have, they're already starting colonies or they're getting their parents to set up colonies on their parents' property or they plan to do it as soon as they get out.

One of the students transferred to NC State, and I wrote him a letter of recommendation, so he's now working in David Tarpy's apiary.

Because he has the background, and he actually passed the Certified exam, so Tarpy said, "Sure, he's Certified, come on in."

It is good to see more and more of that happening.

Most beekeepers are older than I am.

It's really nice to see this next wave coming on.

I think it's critical because somebody's gonna have to keep bees as we move forward.

And it's, if we're gonna maintain agriculture, we're gonna have to have them.

Plus they seem to be getting a lot of just personal benefits from it as well.

They're enjoying being in there and learning something that most people don't know.

- It's a third of what we eat.

And if you go and look at what that list looks like, or you go into a grocery store and you take that third of it out, we are going to miss out on a lot of important food, a lot of the healthy food for us.

I think that's so vitally important.

You've got to stimulate the interest in bees.

If they don't see bees or know about bees, then they're not gonna have any interest in messing with them.

- Definitely educating people my age, our generation, and down is absolutely important.

We still have the most hives in our state than any other state.

And it would be awesome to kinda keep up that morale and continue to grow.

The more beekeepers there are, the more bees there are.

And as long as, you know, the beekeepers are doing this safely and responsibly and managing their hives and taking care of them like they would any other pet, then we're gonna be a state full of happy, healthy bees!

And I think that's something that we can be proud of.

- I hope that I can inform people about beekeeping, and just let them know that this is important, and not just because this place is doing it and they're doing great at it, but in smaller communities too, like you can start off small and work your way up, and that can actually help with economic growth and everything involved.

So just people should just be more aware.

- I've seen some times where we have classes where I got three and four generations of family sitting in the same bee class.

Some people use it for homeschooling and things like that.

So beekeeping, when I see those things, it really makes me feel good because I know I'm a part of that.

So that's why I love beekeeping.

You know, it's not a thing where you gotta be old or young, male or female.

So it's something that's it's a family thing, it's back to the old family farm.

You can go back there.

- And it's a great opportunity to touch base with being an earthling, really, to see something that's really cool in the world in a relatively safe and pretty structured environment that produces benefits as well.

So it's kinda cool.

[serene piano music] [lively guitar music] ♪ [lively guitar music continues] ♪ [lively guitar music continues] ♪ [lively guitar music continues] ♪