Let's Make It Happen!

Honeybees are amazing! These lovely, gentle, and industrious creatures account for upwards of 80% of the pollination required for human food crop production. Happy and healthy bees are essential to our own survival.

Bees have also had a very difficult time in recent years. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has resulted in a decrease of up to 40% of the bee population. Many experts agree that CCD is probably not caused by a single factor, but more likely by a combination of increasing pressures on honeybees including radical inbreeding for commercial purpose, use of pesticides, over-harvesting of honey, and too frequent relocation of hives.

Though no hard statistics exist, many non-commercial beekeepers report substantially better fortunes with their hives in recent years than do commercial keepers. Keeping a beehive as part of your garden can offer bees a more bee-centric place to live, one less subject to the pressures associated with commercial beekeeping.

By creating a Bee Co-Op for the Amazon Neighborhood, we can play a small role in supporting our own local bee population by directly increasing the number of colonies in the neighborhood. A co-op approach has a number of benefits:

• It’s more fun. Bees are a lot of fun. Sharing fun with others is always better than having fun alone.
• It’s easier to support a healthy network of hives. Hive losses do occur. When a small individual beekeeper loses a hive, sometimes it’s necessary to wait an entire year to restart. Working with others makes it easier to share bees as a means of supporting weak hives or even to build new colonies from existing ones.
• Work is easier. Though bees are really simple to keep (you mostly leave them alone!), it’s nice to have an extra pair of hands around when you do work with them. Some beekeeping activities like harvesting honey and swarm management tend to happen all at once, making more help a welcome thing.
• We can share expertise. We all learn by doing. Different hives present different challenges and hence learning opportunities. Sharing experience means more success and happier bees.
• Costs of keeping bees go down. We can share effort and expertise required to build hives for the cost of materials and can share hive supers (the ‘stories’ or ‘levels’ which make up hives) as well as other equipment such as gloves, veils, smokers, honey harvesting gear, etc.
• We can help more people enjoy bees. A co-op approach will enable more people to keep bees themselves and will help some people to simply host hives kept by others.