Today is the start of Bee Awareness month on YDT in honor of National Honey Month.  Bees are such an intregal part of our environment and lately they’ve become increasingly threatened.  Be sure to check back all month for different articles on different bee issues and be sure to think twice about how you get such sweet honey.

When I met up with Los Angeles beekeeper and bee-rescuer Kirk Anderson, I didn’t know exactly what to expect—I’d never met a beeman before. But between the news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and recently reading Bees: Nature’s Little  Wonders, I was intrigued and wanted to smoke him out.

Immediately, it came as no surprise that Kirk is the facilitator of L.A.’s beekeeping club, a popular guy to call when you’ve got an unwanted hive on your property (he doesn’t kill the bees but removes them live to find a good home), is an active part of Backwards Beekeepers blog, and is helping the who’s who of urban homesteaders add bees to their backyard edens. Not only is he in the know about all things bee, he’s also a genuinely fabulous guy.

Kirk’s mission is to change the world and get as many people keeping bees as possible. His motto? “Backwards is the new forward.” He was once a conventional beekeeper, back when he ordered his first batch from Montgomery Ward in 1970 in an attempt to avoid buying expensive honey he could cultivate himself. But all that changed when he heard about Dee and Ed Lusby, Charles Martin Simon and Michael Bush who all take a backwards approach to what most industrial beekeepers do, one that is much better at working with nature and moving the world forward.

The conventional approach to beekeeping (and agriculture for that matter) over the last few decades has been backwards indeed. The widespread way to tend hives is to treat them with chemicals for mites, use bigger honeycomb to try and get bigger bees and more honey, and feed them corn syrup and artificial pollen (soy flour). All that may add up to bees that can pollinate the 1.5 million monocrop almond orchards in Northern California, but it’s not good for the bees (they’re susceptible to mites and the chemicals are now mite-resistant, not to mention CCD’s spread) and it sure ain’t sustainable.

If you have a space that will hold one of Kirk’s forward-thinking urban hives, you get to provide a place for a whole universe of organisms from bees to bacteria to thrive in. You also get help pollinating your trees, flowers and veggies—just think, each cucumber blossom need to be pollinated six times to produce fruit! Plus, Kirk will harvest the honey and give you some jars for your own cupboard (one backyard hive can yield up 50 fifty pounds of it thanks to those busy bees).

Call Kirk for all you ever wanted to know about bees, to sponsor an L.A. hive or to buy some super fresh, chemical-free honey.

 

Find out more about Kirk’s Urban Bees at www.kirksurbanbees.com. You’ll find contact information there as well.