- This is a first on Techrides in a couple of ways.

We've had multiple people in the car, but we've never had so many people or guests in the car.

And now we've got rain.

(upbeat music) Today on Techrides, come along for a ride with Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, Founder and CEO of Bee Downtown.

Bee Downtown installs and maintains honeybee hives on corporate campuses and urban areas to help rebuild healthy honeybee populations.

Get to know Leigh-Kathryn and Bee Downtown while collecting a few hundred honeybees out of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority beehives.

The honeybees will be riding along with us in a beautiful red, 2018 Jeep Wrangler JL Rubicon.

We will discuss the lessons Leigh-Kathryn learned while building her business, as well as a few leadership lessons from the bees themselves.

(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, welcome to Techrides.

I'm really, really excited today to be with Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, the CEO and Founder of Bee Downtown.

And, actually, I was gonna say what Bee Downtown is, but why don't you explain it?

'Cause I think you'll do a much better job.

- At Bee Downtown, we install and maintain beehives on corporate campuses and we use those hives to facilitate year-round employee engagement and leadership development programming.

So we have hives in North Carolina and now in Atlanta, Georgia.

- That's really, really fascinating.

We're here at the Georgia World Congress Center and we wanna them for letting us film here today, but you've got beehives all around the city now, some pretty major companies like AT&T, Invesco, my old company, ICE.

Where else?

Tell me where else-- - Georgia Power, Chick-fil-A, Intercontinental Exchange, AT&T.

So we've got a lot of companies that all came together, Ponce City Market, that all came together to try to help rebuild honeybees within the city.

- Right, well, this is really cool.

I love this idea.

We're gonna talk so much more about it when we get in the car and go for the ride.

But before we do that, I wanna talk a little bit about these bees right here.

So I've got a few questions just about, so we've got three boxes, right?

Are these three separate hives or is this one hive?

- Three different hives.

- [Edwin] Three different hives.

- One queen in each one.

- One queen in each one, okay.

That's how you tell the hive.

So, why three?

- We like to have three because we want to be able to use the hives to help other hives.

So if one hive on the far left isn't as strong as the hive in the middle, we can share resources.

So it gives us the ability to understand which hives are doing well and not, we can share resources.

And the bees, they're kind of like trees.

They work off of each other.

So we like to have three in an area and it gives companies enough honey, it's great for the agricultural environment of the city.

And it gives you something to look at as well.

- Right, and how many bees are in each hive?

- This time of year, so in the Summer, you're at peak capacity.

So there's about 50,000 bees in each of these.

- [Edwin] 50,000?

- 50,000, the queen lays around 1,500 eggs a day.

- Wow, a day!

- A day, yeah, she's busy.

- So there's one queen.

And you, did I read that you mark the bees or you color the bees to identify the queen bee?

- Yes, so we mark the queen and there's a, worldwide, there's a coloring system.

So this year you mark the queen with basically a paint pen and she's bright green this year.

So for the year that ends in nine, and that's how we can know how old a queen is.

- How do you even get the queens to color her?

- Yeah, we pick her up and we put her in a little container and we hold her kind of tight to the back end of the container.

And we press her with the paint pen.

- Okay.

- So they're hardier than you think they are, but you do have to be careful.

You don't wanna hurt the queen.

- Are we gonna be able to see the queen later?

- Potentially, she's probably hard to find.

It's like looking for a needle in a moving needle stack that just barely bigger than the rest of the bees.

- Okay, so 50,000 bees in each hive and what kind of radius do they cover?

'Cause their whole mission is to go around and pollinate all the flowers and plant.

Like what are they doing?

- So the bees fly within a three to five mile radius.

Typically, three, if there's enough floral sources.

So that's 18,000 acres of surrounding community that these hives, from the minute they go in, start to positively impact.

- Okay, and they're also creating honey in there, right?

- They are, so all of the boxes at the top, those are all honey supers.

We're about to pull all of the honey, we'll extract the honey, give it to the companies at Georgia World Congress Center.

We're gonna work with their chef and we'll get the honey tested for the floral sources and we'll pair the type of honey and the floral source with foods that will match well with the honey flavor.

- Okay, and how much honey will they produce?

- It's all up to mother nature.

So on average we say about 30 to 50 pounds in a city.

They can produce over a hundred pounds of honey in a couple months, but one honeybee by herself makes 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life.

- Wow, okay.

And how much is that one honeybee?

How long does she live or he?

- She, about six to eight weeks.

And then she literally works herself to death.

Her wings start to break down and that's why the queen is laying so many eggs a day because their life cycle, this time of year is pretty short.

- Okay, and they all have different roles and jobs that they do in there?

- They do, there's job designation to the day.

So the time they turn a different age, they'll move to the day to the next role.

So there's guard bees that are protecting the hive, there's nurse bees taking care of the baby bees.

There are undertaker bees that pull bees that were at the end of their lifecycle that died in the hive, out to the ground to keep their hive clean.

So they all have different jobs.

- One of the things you do at Bee Downtown is you use the way bees work together as part of your corporate training and development program, right?

- Yes, absolutely.

So an example of that is, all the bees have their own job descriptions and their own roles in the hive, but they're all working together for the good of the hive.

And it's not necessarily trust, like we would think about, as humans.

But when we look at that in comparison to a team, the core fundamentals of leadership, self-awareness, trust, high performance teams and culture, well, that trust fits in with the beehive very well.

The hive is all working together, they're not micromanaging, they're not double checking each other's work.

They know that they're each bringing their best self, every day to get the job done.

- Cool, so have you ever ridden in a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon?

- No, and honestly I'm a Jeep girl and I tried to convince my parents to let me have a Jeep Wrangler.

And they said, no, so I've got a Liberty, but it has always been my dream to have a Jeep Wrangler.

So I'm very excited.

- We've got a really cool one today for our ride and I'm excited 'cause I've never ridden one and I get to drive it, but we're gonna have a special, a few guests with us, right?

You're gonna take some of the bees with us on our ride, right?

- It's not fair for me to get to experience the Jeep and not the bees.

So we're gonna pack some up and bring them in the back of the Jeep.

- How many are you gonna pack up?

- Probably around a thousand, 2000.

So we might have more bodies in the car than people would expect.

- Okay, cool, well, let's go.

Let's get them.

- Awesome.

(upbeat music) So you'll hear cracking when I open this and it's propolis.

So the bees bring back tree sap to the hive and that's how they glue their hives together.

(smoke puffing) - So that smoke calms them down?

- It evokes a natural reaction to a forest fire.

So they start gorging themselves on honey because they think they might have to leave.

So it helps keep them calm in the sense of it masks their alarm pheromone.

So if a bee starts letting off the alarm pheromone, it masks it.

- But it makes them think, "Oh crap, we gotta get in here and get all the honey we can."

- Yeah, and it's so it keeps them busy.

But then if a bee gets mad, it masks the pheromone of them being mad as well.

So these are the honey supers.

So there's no eggs in here.

But this is all pure honey.

So if you want to stick your fingers straight into there and taste the honey.

Yeah, just press all the way into it.

- [Edwin] Oh, okay, wow, that's cool.

- Fail.

(both chuckle) And see, they immediately just start eating the honey.

- Oh wow.

- And they'll fix it.

- That's delicious.

- Isn't that cool?

- [Edwin] So they're gonna, are they eating or fixing or both?

- Both, so if you wanna hold it, you can feel the weight of honey.

Honey weight is double water weight, about.

- Oh wow.

- So you can feel how much weight is in the honey.

- Yeah.

- So five gallons of honey doesn't go as far as five gallons of water would, just because of the weight of it.

- That is really cool.

I want some more of that honey.

- It's good, right?

- It's really good, yeah.

How do they actually produce the honey?

Like what's happening in that process?

- They're going to nectar and floral sources and they're just simply dehydrating it.

They're bringing small bits of pollen into it as well, but like-- - [Edwin] Does it come?

Where does it come?

It comes out of their body or something?

- They have two stomachs.

So they have a normal stomach that's connected to their digestive system.

And then they have a secondary stomach that's just to store nectar.

So it's really just like a shopping bag and it's not connected to the digestive system at all.

And they regurgitate it into the cells, okay.

- [Edwin] Okay.

- But you can see them right here, they're all eating it.

- Yeah.

- And they'll fix that really soon.

- I want some more.

- Yeah.

(upbeat music) (smoke puffing) You can hear how much louder they get.

- [Edwin] Yeah, that kind of stirred them up a little, I guess they're-- - They moved down.

- [Edwin] They're going down.

- So it helps make sure that we just don't have a ton of bees in these boxes.

(upbeat music) This is where we'll see them.

- [Edwin] So it's like a multilevel house.

Every level is-- - [Leigh] Yeah, this is the, these two boxes are the maternity ward.

It's where the queen's laying eggs.

There's baby bees developing, there's pollen and nectar.

- Wow, there's a lot there.

- Yep.

(upbeat music) - So see all those different colors.

- [Edwin] Yeah.

- [Leigh] That's all pollen.

- [Edwin] Oh, okay.

- And you can see the sumac's been blooming, so you can see how much darker this honey is.

If you taste this honey, it's completely different than the one you just tasted.

- [Edwin] Really, okay.

- What we'll do when we do Honey Tastings is, we bring all different types of honey so that people can learn about what honeys they like and don't like, and their flavor profiles-- - [Edwin] So is that honey, like, what's it?

Is it older or newer?

- It's just, lighter honey comes in the Spring, darker honey comes in the Fall.

So it's not necessarily older or newer.

It's just a different-- - Right.

- Different honey.

But you can see, all these are spaced out the same distance.

If I didn't put this frame back in and I moved it over to one of these hives, they would build bees wax right here to keep the space the same.

- Okay.

- Because they have something called bee space, which is 3/8 of an inch.

It's the most efficient use of space you can have in the beehive.

So when we pull the honey, we'll pull these boxes, these honey boxes off.

(upbeat music) And that's it.

- That's awesome.

- Pretty easy.

- All right.

- Not a hive check, but it's easy to go in and grab some bees.

- Well, you got our riders now.

- Yes.

(upbeat music) (car doors bang) (upbeat music) - You are like a, I read a fourth generation beekeeper?

- I am, my mom's side of the family is an agricultural family.

My mom's farm has been in the family four generations and old school farms had beehives on them because the agriculture was much smaller and you needed it to pollinate your crops to increase crop yield.

So a lot of times the farmers were also beekeepers, to have bees on their properties.

And so my grandfather has been keeping bees for about 75 years.

He started when he was in college at NC State.

My uncle started much younger, but he went to NC State and took Introduction to Bees and Beekeeping, a generation before I went to NC State and took Introduction to Bees and Beekeeping, from the same professor, so.

- No way, why did you coming from this beekeeping family have to take the intro?

It seems like you could like teach it.

- I didn't know anything about bees really till college.

- Okay.

- So it was, I really loved the horses and the cows and we used to be much more like a cattle farm than a large-scale beekeeping operation.

So I was very much into that side of the agriculture.

And then I fell in love with the bees when I took Introduction to Bees and Beekeeping.

- Okay, so this is a first on Techrides in a couple of ways.

One is, we've never had, we've had multiple people in the car.

We've never had so many people or guests in the car.

- Yeah.

(Leigh chuckles) - And now we've got rain.

(upbeat music) You fall in love with the bees at school.

And then how does this idea to like put bees in corporate environments come along?

- So I wanted a beehive when I was in college.

It was my junior year, I really wanted a hive.

I asked my apartment complex if I could have one, and they said, no.

So I asked the company that I was interning for, if I could put a beehive on their rooftop.

And they said, "Yes, go for it."

And it was also the campus that houses Burt's Bees World headquarters.

- Oh, okay.

- And Burt's Bees didn't have any bees at the headquarters.

So they were excited, they wanted bees.

So our first, the first two partners we had at Bee Downtown in North Carolina were very big names.

- When you got them installed, was that like as a business or you just wanted the bees that, like the first one?

- It was just a project.

Like it was never meant to be a full-time business.

And then I'm a dreamer and I go big really fast.

And then all of a sudden I was like, "Maybe this could be a business."

So I went to my parents and I asked if they would invest in my living expenses for the first year.

And the deal was, I mean, I pitched, like we had a Shark Tank episode in our living room with my parents, full pitch deck.

They told me to leave, they deliberated.

I came back and they told me, I had one year to be profitable, pay myself a livable wage and show growth.

(upbeat music) - So you start the business, for real then, what is the business model?

You're like, can I go out and say, "Hey," how do you start?

How do you do that first call?

Like, how do you even?

- It was a sustainability play.

It was, we'll put beehives on your campus.

Every third bite of food people eat, is thanks to a honeybee.

The honeybees are dying at alarming rates.

So we can help because studies show bees thrive in urban environments.

They really see the value in the services Bee Downtown provides them.

The 90-minute hive tours or the Honey Tastings or the Winter beekeeping classes, the leadership development courses, they really see the value in that.

So that's what now Bee Downtown charges for, so.

(upbeat music) - You got the bees and the services.

And then you're also doing these leadership development courses, right?

- Yes.

- Okay, so tell me about that.

What do those courses offer?

- So I mean, I come from a family of storytellers and then the bees are one of mother nature's best storytellers.

And they've been telling us a story of their decline that everybody knows pretty well at this point.

But another story that started to come forth with the bees, the more time we spent with them is that, they can teach us so much about leadership.

And there's so many analogies that you can pull from a beehive about what it means to be an effective leader.

So we've been building for the last year with a retired Colonel from the U.S Army, who is a Professor Emeritus at Duke University, his Army War College expert in leader development, the BDT Institute.

So it's all based in a field of study called biomimicry.

And it's looking at naturally occurring process to solve real world problems.

So we take the inspiration from what you can see and learn in a beehive and apply that to effective leadership characteristics or effective team characteristics.

- Okay, so gimme some examples of it.

- Yeah, so if we look at it from an individual level, the beekeeper, when they go to work the hives, they come fully prepared.

Every time they approach the hive to work the hive.

Everything they do, they do is the intention to help and the service over self mentality of leaving the hive better than you found it.

And for an effective leader, you have to have that service over self mentality, you have to come prepared for work every day to do your best job.

If you're not prepared, things go wrong, you can't fix them.

And the way the beekeeper approaches the hive to do no harm is how as leaders we should lead.

- So like a servant leadership, which is also kind of how the queen bee is, right?

Because the queen bee is really serving the entire hive?

- She's not the queen like we think the queen would be, she does not reign in the hive.

- She's not giving everybody orders.

- Yeah, there's accountability in this beehive.

And one of the things that is a quote from Joe that I love is, "A beekeeper is an enabler of the natural capacity of bees to do their good work.

An effective leader is an enabler of the natural capacity of their teams to do just the same."

There are times where as a beekeeper, you have to step in and shepherd the hive along and help the hive, but the majority of the time, you let them do what they do best and you're hands off and good leaders are the same way.

They know when they do need to step in and help the team and the business.

But they also trust their team.

As a leader, you can't just know your role.

You have to be able to revert back and help when it's needed.

- Right.

- And you see that a lot with effective leaders, but you see that not happening a lot with ineffective leaders.

- And I think to be, a lot of times to be an effective leader, it's good to know, have done the jobs that you're asking other people to do.

- Right.

- Because you can better understand it, explain it, coach them.

(upbeat music) - What we have that I think makes Bee Downtown very special is there's a built in sense of nostalgia to Bee Downtown.

I can't tell you, probably 95% of the times I sit down in a meeting with somebody, they will say, "My grandfather was a beekeeper," or, "I remember we used to have a family farm and we had beehives out at the farm."

And it makes people happy to think about a simpler time or to think about their grandfather that might not be here anymore, their grandmother that they jar honey with.

And that works really well for us because our hope at Bee Downtown is to leave people happy.

- So you came to Atlanta through the Engage Fund and then the Engage Fund is kind of interesting because what they're doing is kind of bridging the gap between Atlanta as a hub for very large corporations and several Fortunes 500's.

But they're bridging that gap between those companies, like AT&T and ICE and Invesco and Home Depot, and then the startup community in Atlanta.

- It's a brilliant model.

Like it works really well.

- Right, and for you, it was great 'cause it got you a foothold in a lot of those companies.

- So we find out Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-A is a beekeeper.

The CEO of Invesco, Marty Flanagan, his wife is a beekeeper.

The CEO of Georgia World Congress Center is a beekeeper.

They're all like these undercover beekeepers.

Ann Cox from the Cox family.

She's had bees on her property for years.

It's not random that all of these top leaders, that everybody looks to as an effective leader are also beekeepers or have some sort of involvement with bees.

(upbeat music) - Let's talk about our friends there in the back.

- Yes.

- How many bees are in there?

- There's probably about a thousand.

- A thousand?

- A thousand in there.

- So, having these guys on the ride with us reminds me of, I've, in the last couple years just kind of learned how there's this entire industry, where bees are moved all around the country.

Without bees, you don't have strawberries, blueberries, a lot of our fruit, nuts.

And particularly, I was reading about, in California, the almond industry has really blown up over the last 10, 15 years or so.

And there aren't enough bees in the natural California environment, local bees to pollinate the almonds.

- Right.

- So they basically, every year, will collect thousands of bees, maybe hundreds of thousands, millions, from different parts of the country, and they ship them to California to basically help produce almonds.

- Yeah.

- Right.

- Honeybees are the only producer of almonds.

And that's the commercial beekeeping industry.

There's, every year about, around 1.5 million hives are going out to California and they get moved.

They start like in these peppers in Florida and they get moved, and in February, they're in the almonds in California and they come back across the U.S. and they're in the blueberries.

And there's a whole industry of just moving these hives.

- A couple of years ago, I thought I read there was a massive decline in the number of bees, right?

We lost 50% of the bees or something like that?

- Every year we lose about 40% of the bees in the U.S, honeybees.

Honeybees have been around for 110 million years.

They are able to withstand so much and they're an indicator species.

So the fact that they're declining, they're trying to tell us, we have got to have a reality check with how we treat the earth and we need to start doing a better job of protecting it and preserving it.

- So if all the bees are gone, what happens?

- We're in big trouble.

They are responsible for 70 of the world's top 100 food crops.

Every third bite of food you eat is thanks to a honeybee.

- Would you like to see happen in terms of keeping the bees and that population healthy and sustainable over time?

What would you wanna see?

- I would just love for people to fall back in love with agriculture, to fall back in love with the amount of work that goes into taking care of the environment, because we're so used to having things done for us and easy, and immediate and mother nature teaches you patience.

You cannot rush mother nature.

And my hope is that people start to love the earth again and with Bee Downtown, if they can see those beehives, and then they wanna go to their farmer's market and they meet a farmer.

And they kind of fall in love with agriculture again, I think people will fall back in love with taking care of the earth as well.

We just have to put a value back into agriculture, which, it's not there right now.

And so we had, when Bee Downtown started, I got laid into by multiple beekeepers saying, "You're trying to profiteer off of bee decline.

You should never charge people to put beehives somewhere.

That's a gift, just take the honey from it."

And I used to think, "Well, maybe I am doing this wrong.

Should I be more careful about this?

Should I not charge people?"

And then I realized, if I don't charge people, they don't value the amount of work that goes in to keeping those hives healthy.

- Well, and they would never, it probably never would happen, right?

You would never have an AT&T, a Home Depot, an Invesco, these companies would never just even think about it.

And it's a way to bring a cache and a kindness and a warmth to their business in an era where people are looking for that, employees are looking for that.

So I think it's brilliant.

(upbeat music) In this journey now that you've had for four years, what's the biggest lesson you've learned as an entrepreneur?

- I think for me it's to, is that I don't know it all and I never will.

And to not be too prideful to ask for help, because if you dig your heels in and something's not working, and you're not willing to ask for help, or admit defeat and try it a different way, you can ruin your company very quickly.

And I think for me, it's asking, I mean, the amount of people that have helped Bee Downtown along the way, by me just being very honest and open, like, "I need your help, I can't do this.

Can you please help me?"

People want to help.

And they also wanna help an underdog and we're kind of an underdog in the startup world.

And I'm so grateful for all those people that have gone above and beyond to help us, because if I hadn't asked for help when I needed it, I don't think Bee Downtown would still-- - Well, it sounds like you've learned a few things already too, in addition, I mean, you've learned that just because some people say no early on, doesn't mean everybody's gonna say no, you've had some people turn you down but a lot of people have welcomed you.

And then the other thing that it seems like you've learned is how to pitch the idea and how to sell it and how to really like position it, which always takes time to figure that out.

- Sales is an art, I am definitely learning that.

- If you could do something different, what would you do differently?

- There was one time where I should have spoken up and told somebody that was working at Bee Downtown at the time, "You're done, like this is..." And I didn't.

And I realized, by the time they left, the amount of mental capacity that it had drained from me, I should have stood my ground and said, "Like this is done, you're fired."

And I didn't, and I tried to work with them to keep them around and it cost Bee Downtown a lot of money, it cost Bee Downtown a lot of time.

And if I could do that again, I would have a stronger voice.

- I think one of the lessons I learned pretty early at ICE and I think a lot of young companies struggle with is, sometimes you don't wanna let somebody go 'cause you think that they're too valuable or indispensable.

And what I learned is that, "You're gonna be better off."

And a lot of times they'll be better off.

- Right.

- And no one is really that indispensable and you can figure it out.

There are a lot of people who are extremely valuable, but not when it's at the expense of the company culture and the kind of negative impacts that it can bring to a company.

(upbeat music) (car doors bang) - Leigh-Kathryn, it was really great.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- It was really fun riding with you and thanks for being a guest on Techrides.

- Yeah, absolutely.

It was awesome to get to ride in the Jeep and talk "bees-ness" with you.

And I look forward to doing it again.

- Well, I'm looking forward to following you and seeing what happens with your career and what happens with Bee Downtown.

I think it's gonna be really exciting.

- Thank you so much, this was great, thanks.

- You're welcome.

(upbeat music)