A Movement to Transform Coal Miners Into Beekeepers Is Great News for the Planet

Tucked inside an old gymnasium, hundreds of wooden boxes are stacked along a far wall. The space, formerly home base for a summer camp, is now host to labs and classrooms filled with bright, freshly painted blue boxes.
But children won’t be playing here this summer. Instead, among the boxes and stainless steel vats, displaced coal miners and low-income West Virginians will learn a new trade — beekeeping. It’s part of a program run by the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective, a program for low-income West Virginians to make supplemental income through beekeeping.
While beekeeping may seem like an odd choice for former coal miners, it’s a viable and increasingly popular way for people in rural areas to make money. In West Virginia, where poverty is high and jobs are scarce, a large part of the population is struggling to make ends meet.
Coal mining once bolstered the region, but between 2005 and 2015, employment in the coal industry decreased by about 27 percent, according to research by West Virginia University. Across the nation, states like Kentucky, Wyoming and Pennsylvania have to find jobs to fill the employment gap left by the coal industry.
Enter the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective. The collective operates across 17 counties in southern West Virginia and offers classes in subjects like, Is Beekeeping Right for Me?, bee basics and advanced beekeeping. It’s a branch of the Appalachian Headwaters, a nonprofit formed to develop sustainable economic opportunities across the region.
Interested beekeepers can take Beekeeping 101, which is a five-week course where they learn the basics of beekeeping, bee biology and solutions to common problems. Once the new beekeeper has completed this course, he or she can become a partner in the collective. The partnership offers training, mentorship, equipment and bees for free or at a reduced cost.

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Here a honey bee forages on clover.

But the startup cost to becoming a beekeeper can be a barrier of entry.
This was the case for Jason Young, a resident of White Oak, West Virginia.
Young originally started beekeeping as a hobby but quickly realized it could turn into a small business. “We had decided that we wanted to move forward,” he says. “But it was really the money that was holding us back.”
When Young discovered the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective offered training and equipment at low cost, he leapt at the opportunity.
Young and his daughter enrolled in the free Beekeeping 101 course and received 12 hives from the collective for a reduced price. From there, he formed White Oak Bee Co.
Last spring was their first harvest. It produced enough honey for his family and his honey-roasted coffee, which is White Oak Bee Co.’s signature item. This season, however, he has 14 hives ready to harvest and hopes to make a profit that he can reinvest in the business.
“Beekeeping and our relationship with the collective has really made that possible,” Young says.
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Beekeepers examine a frame of mature honey.

The Appalachian Beekeeping Collective successfully trained 35 beekeepers this past year and plans to train another 55 this spring.
When it’s harvest time, the nonprofit will process, market and distribute the honey for its beekeepers for free. That can result in a nice chunk of change. In 2018, the market value for a pound of honey was about $7.33. A single hive can produce 20 to 100 pounds of honey a year, which means a single productive hive could earn its owner over $700 a year. With multiple hives, a beekeeper has the potential to make thousands of dollars every year.
And the bees do more than produce income for their owners. The forests provide nectar for the bees, and in turn, the bees pollinate these key natural habitats and create more plant diversity, says Parry Kietzman, an entomologist and educator at the collective.
Kietzman says she’s noticed people are more aware of the land and plants once they have bees.
“It seems to give people more of a handle on environmental concerns,” she says. “Simply because they’re worried about their bees.”
For others, like Young, it’s a chance to accomplish goals.
“What I feel most thankful for is the opportunity to take some dreams we’ve had for a really long time,” Young said. “And to really see them, kind of, come to be.”

Landing at This Airport: Millions of Bees

The decrease in bee population is something that many people are fighting to fix, and rightfully so: they are vital to the survival of the very plants that provide our food. From the EPA’s recent grant to an app that catalogs bees around the world, there are countless solutions buzzing about.
At Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport, they’re trying a new approach (pun intended): Pairing the bee’s infrastructure — colonies — with our own.
Each day, Sea-Tac facilitates up to 855 take-offs and landings and now, the jets will be in the company of European honeybees, thanks to beekeeper Bob Redmond.
Redmond is the founder and executive director of Common Acre, a local nonprofit that “produces public programs at the intersection of earth and art,” according to its website.
The project, dubbed Flight Path, fits squarely into that mission and plays an important role in helping the bee population, as it aims to transform the open space at the south end of Sea-Tac into an ideal ecosystem for them, as well as educate travelers about the importance of bees. Twenty-five hives were constructed at Sea-Tac, housing up to 1.25 million bees — which is 50,000 bees per hive! With all that bustling activity, the airport is the perfect place to house the bees.
Doing so, however, means creating a habitat that will not only be suitable for pollination, but also breeding bees that are more adaptable. The second part of this plan is what makes Flight Path so unique — instead of just giving bees a home by setting up an apiary, Redmond is giving the whole population a boost and a better chance for survival. By actually breeding the bees to best survive life in the Pacific Northwest, he is effecting permanent change for the species.
Redmond sees a lot of similarities between the buzzing little yellow insects and airplanes, which he pointed out to Grist:
“All of these things humans have figured out — but fairly late in the game, evolutionarily speaking — the bees have been solving for eons,” Redmond said in reference to the bee’s “wiggle dance” navigation system, as well as its complex transportation and storage structure, all of which are unbelievably advanced for something so small.
Redmond’s dedication to these fascinating creatures began with a few hives in his yard, and has since expanded not only to Common Acre but also his business, the Urban Bee Company, which produces local and sustainable honey bee goods and services.
“The thing that we can learn from the bees is the collective spirit of cooperation — and consumption,” Redmond said to Grist. “That’s something that is not as easy to swallow, but vital to understand for our own future.”
A future that we can only hope has more arrivals than departures when it comes to the all-important bees.

This City Has Taken a Very Important Step in Protecting the Honeybee

By now you probably know that honeybees aren’t just pesks that you should swat away. Besides making delicious honey, bees are responsible for pollinating a big portion of foods that we like to put in our mouths, from apples to zucchinis.
We’ve mentioned before that honeybees pollinate approximately $15 billion worth of produce in the country each year — or about a quarter of the food we consume. But to the horror of beekeepers from coast to coast, honeybees have been disappearing in startling rates. The long-suspected culprit? Scientists have linked bee colony collapse disorder to a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, a product that’s chemically similar to nicotine.
Now, in a first for the country, the city of Eugene, Oregon has taken a major step in protecting not just the honeybee but other insects as well, including bumblebees, butterflies and moths, after passing a resolution that bans products containing this highly suspected insect-killer on city properties such as parks and schools.
MORE: Help Save the Bumblebees With Nothing but Your Smartphone
You might think that farms and other rural areas are the only places experiencing bee die-off, but it’s definitely a problem in cities as well. According to TakePart, after trees at a Target in Wilsonville, Oregon were sprayed with neonicotinoid dinotefuran to control aphids, a heartbreaking 25,000 bees (later upped to 50,000) were found dead. Although this may be an isolated report, it seems like a good enough reason to take this specific pesticide away as far as possible.
Encouragingly, the Oregon city might not be the only bee-friendly community. Paul Towers of the Pesticide Action Network told TakePart that other cities like Minneapolis, Berkeley, El Cerrito and Santa Barbara might follow in Eugene’s footsteps. Now that’s bee-ing a part of change.

Help Save the Bumblebees With Nothing but Your Smartphone

It’s a whole lot easier to get involved in the conservation of our precious bumblebees than you might think. The newly launched interactive site BumbleBeeWatch.org allows anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to report sightings of our fuzzy friends from coast to coast. Whether it’s due to pesticides, global warming or urbanization, bumblebee populations have mysteriously plummeted. And although they don’t produce harvestable honey, bumblebees play an important ecological role, pollinating plants that humans eat. Now with this site, experts can track different bumblebee species, locations and populations (check out this bumblebee map that’s starting to fill in). Sheila Colla, a partner in Bumble Bee Watch, told Nature World News, “By locating rare bumble bee populations and collecting information on their ecological requirements, citizen scientists can help conserve these important insects.” Now that’s something we can all buzz about.
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