As Beekeeping Grows in Popularity and Importance, So Do Opportunities for a Sweet Small Venture

Photos by Michael Piazza

Stephen Burney, owner of Hudson Hives, spent his childhood summers with his mother’s family in Ireland. He’d bale hay on his uncle’s farm in County Kerry, shear sheep and carry bricks of peat to dry on a riverbank. But his favorite part of the farm was watching his cousin Patrick taking care of his bees, working hives in the fields where late-summer heather purpled the grasses.

Over the years Burney thought about keeping bees himself, but assumed you needed a large piece of property. When he and his wife moved to a house with a bit more elbow room from the neighbors, he got his first two hives. Seven years later, he owns 30 and Hudson Hives sells honey at 25 regional shops and farmers markets. He also manages a hive on a local restaurant’s roof, harvesting honey for the chef’s recipes and cocktails.

“It started as a hobby, and turned into a nice side business that keeps getting busier all the time,” Burney says. “If I knew you don’t actually need a big property, I would have started 20 years ago.”

Ask an experienced beekeeper how they got started, and you’ll hear variations on the same story: Watching a friend or relative with bees sparked curiosity and, at some point, the time felt right to try it themselves. Last year honeybees were declared the most important species on the planet by the Earthwatch Institute, as Apis mellifera pollinates a third of all the food we eat. But beekeepers’ hives are dying at an all-time-high rate of 40% a year due to colony collapse, a combination of environmental and manmade factors we’re struggling to understand. Caring for the complex yet fragile society contained in a small tower of wooden boxes is a heady and humbling responsibility for the beekeepers who host them. And in this way a hobby becomes a mission, a passion and sometimes a small business.

An estimated 125,000 people keep bees in the U.S., about 4,500 of them in Massachusetts. As COVID-quarantined folks embrace homesteading hobbies like growing chickens and gardens and sourdough starter, the number of first-time beekeepers is on the rise. Some, like Burney, find that it’s a small step from having a hobby to creating a side gig that pays for it. At most farmers markets you’ll find vendors selling honey, and that’s because there really aren’t food licensing hurdles: As long as your honey is pure with no additives, most municipalities only require labeling that identifies the location. From there, honey is the gateway drug for many beekeepers smitten with the fruits of the hive.

“I sell honey, and make beeswax candles, soap, skin lotion, lip balm, beeswax food wraps and mead,” says Tony Lulek, owner of Little Beehive Farm in Holliston, where he keeps 13 hives while working for a small publisher. He’s a regular at several local farmers markets and an active educator for new beekeepers and local schools. In 2004 he learned beekeeping through the Norfolk County Beekeepers Association, and is now in his third rotation as the club’s president. He is so comfortable with bees, and so calm working with them, that on hot days he doesn’t even wear the iconic elbow-length goatskin gloves. “I love the bees, and that’s the core for me. It’s my life’s mission to teach people the difference between wasps and bees.”

At a low warehouse in Boston’s South End, tucked in an unlikely spot between an auto body shop and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, a haze of honeybees hangs in the air. People coming in and out are of no interest to the bees, and the bees zipping inside are of no concern to the people. In fact, they are MVPs here. This is the headquarters of Best Bees, a full-service beekeeping company that cares for 975 hives across the U.S.

Founder Noah Wilson-Rich has a bee mission, too. In school, he studied health across social species, and customized a PhD at Tufts that he named socio-eco-immunology. The core research was studying Apis mellifera colony collapse, and what it means for the direction of our ecosystem and food supply. When he graduated into a recession in 2010, there weren’t exactly an excess of jobs for honeybee immunologists. So he started with what he knew how to do: build hives and take care of bees. He sold his management services to clients one at a time, with his own landlord among the first, and used data from the hives to feed his ongoing research. Ten years later, his company’s hives are placed in and around 12 cities across the U.S., cared for by a network of about 75 beekeepers. Best Bees’ clients—75% residential, 25% corporate—keep the honey, and the company contributes hive data points to environmental research at MIT and NASA.

“When I started Best Bees, I didn’t realize there were so many people who wanted to have bees and honey but couldn’t, or preferred not to, do the beekeeping,” he said. “So we do full-service beekeeping, installation and inspections and maintenance, harvesting and research.” Among Best Bees’ corporate clients are hotels like Four Seasons, Fairmont and Marriott—which use honey in their recipes, dressings and cocktails—and companies like Federal Realty Investment Trust, which hosts hives in Wellesley and provides honey to local restaurants Door Number 7 and The Cottage. Best Bees has artists paint the hives, if the clients want colors or patterns or a logo. But they don’t sell hives, parts or other equipment to the public.

“We used to, but we don’t want to compete with other local companies that do,” says Wilson-Rich. “We want to take care of hives and create jobs for beekeepers.”

Building hives is Todd Barker’s terrain. As owner of Barker’s Beehives and Supplies, based in Oxford, he’s one of the premier local builders of handmade hives. While he might manage hives for a few local clients, like Treehouse Brewery, and drive truckloads of bee packages up from Georgia in the spring, those services are secondary. His forte is building classic wooden Langstroth hives, box by box, frame by frame, in the sizes and styles beekeepers need.

“I’m a contractor and a craftsman. Everything’s handmade. It’s like a piece of fine furniture,” he said. “Boxes from other places might be stapled, might not be squared, the joints are off. Not mine.” Barker’s word-of-mouth following includes people who not only want a high-quality product, but appreciate the relationship that comes with it. “I’m doing almost double the number of customers every year. Once you’re in my network, I’m there for you for questions and advice.”

The relationship aspect of beekeeping is more important than you might imagine for a fairly solitary practice.

Learning how to keep bees is part science, part trade and part art—and the only way to really learn it is to learn at someone else’s knee. The role of mentoring is tremendously important. After all, a poorly managed hive that contracts diseases risks its occupants infecting neighboring hives for miles in every direction. It’s in everyone’s best interest to share best practices.

Which Nancy Mangion has been doing for friends, customers and proteges for 40 years. She started keeping bees as a “young hippie” after reading an article in Mother Earth magazine that said all you need to get off the grid is a goat, a beehive, a garden and some chickens. She went to gear up at the Beekeeper’s Warehouse in Woburn, and was befriended by the owner, who took her under his wing while she began keeping hives. After five years, she recalls, the owner decided to throw in the goatskin glove.

“‘I’m going to Florida,’” he told her. “‘The mites are coming, the killer bees are coming, I’m going to sell. But who’s gonna buy it?” Mangion says he asked rhetorically. “And I raised my hand and said, ‘Me.’”

A teacher by nature (Mangion spent her career teaching music in the Stoneham school system), she made the business about much more than selling tools and wooden parts for Langstroth hives. Though technically, that’s the bricks-and-mortar of her work.

“My mission was to educate new beekeepers. I’ll teach you how to build boxes and frames here at the store, or I’ll come to your house and help you inspect your hives. I’m like Best Bees, but they’re a service and I’m an educator,” she says. In fact, she taught Noah Wilson-Rich how to build a hive. “You go to them to do it for you. I’m like a home school.”

Most beekeeping businesses tend to find a forte. Selling honey products. Selling equipment. Servicing hives. Rearing queens. Transporting thousands of packages of bees—three-pound wood and wire boxes, containing up to 10,000 bees each—from Georgia each spring. Rick Reault, owner of New England Beekeeping & Carlisle Honey, is the exception. His foray into bees started much like others: His uncle kept bees on his father’s property and would dress young Reault up in a bee suit and let him watch. When Reault was 35, he asked his uncle if he would put hives on his property.

“He said he didn’t keep bees any more, but gave me a book to learn how to do it,” says Reault.

In the 15 years since then, he’s gone from one hive to 1,000 spread out over 75 locations, pollinating apples, blueberries and cranberries in eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. He bought an old four-acre farm, razed the abandoned 1750 farmhouse and used its beams to build hives. In its place, he built a 7,000-square-foot warehouse that serves as a storage and harvesting facility, a kitchen and a storefront selling gear and equipment.

“We’re the only ones I know of doing exactly this. I didn’t see any model for it,” he said. “Most people concentrate on supplies, or selling bees and queens, or servicing residential hives, or producing and selling honey. But we have everything under one roof, plus a meadery.”

He produces 50,000 pounds of honey a year, and sells to over 200 farm stands, stores and restaurants. His business, like Wilson-Rich’s, is full-time work. But at the end of the day, he says, it’s dependent upon—and supportive of—the welfare of honeybees. As Tony Lulek says, none of this exists—these beekeeping businesses, and the pollination of so much of our ecosystem—without sustainable practices that keep the bees in sharp focus.

“You need to be responsible about how and how much you harvest, so they have enough to eat over the winter. You have to do careful inspections and stay on top of mite counts and viruses,” says Lulek. “And be respectful with the packaging. Whether you’re bottling honey or making candles, remember the bees did a lot of work to make those products.”

barkersbeehives.com
beekeeperswarehouse.com
bestbees.com
carlislehoney.com
hudsonmahives.com
nebees.com
norfolkbees.org