08.16.18

HOW TO LOVE A BEE
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They thought that bees brought human souls back to the earth. These are ancient
mysteries that have been going on for thousands of years. I started delving into it a little
bit more; I practice meditation and I chant, so something resonated with me … like a
soul connection with this animal. I didn’t even know that there were all sorts of rituals
and temples and priestesses called the Melissae in Greece that would do ceremonies to
honor the bee. I found that fascinating. Why wouldn’t we honor a creature that feeds our
population?”
Jordana, who grew up on his grandfather’s farm in the Philippines, conducts breathing
exercises with jittery guests and other visitors (including the Zooey Deschanelhosted
web series “Your Food’s Roots,” which recently shot a still-unaired episode in
his backyard). He doesn’t want anyone to be stung, nor does he want to “stress out” his
bees, about which he’s quite protective.
“You have to move slow around them,” he says. “You can’t be afraid. This goes back
again to the spiritual practice. You have to be very present. All these are tenets of meditation
and mindfulness. You’re kind of forced to do it [laughs] when you’re around bees.”
Jordana maintains 10 hives within a five- to eight-mile radius at his home, a community
garden and friends’ backyards. He trades honey for pomegranates and figs, and
habitat.
“I’ve never done it for sale — I’m not pimping out my girls like that,” he says with a
laugh. “If I do take some honey, I take very little — just enough for me, my friends and
family. It’s cool because there’s a sense of community in it. I trade to be able to put my
beehives in people’s backyard for honey. There’s something very ancient about it; it’s a
commodity that’s shared that’s not monetary.”
The beekeepers who spoke (on and off the record) for this article are mindful of
not taking too much honey. As Brewster points out, the more you take, the harder and
longer bees need to work. That’s particularly problematic if they’re dealing with other
environmental stressors. But the conscientious bartering that occurs around urban
farming fosters deeper ties of community as well as greater awareness of food’s production
and provenance.
HONEY IN THE HIVE
In May the nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership (beeinformed.org), which conducts
annual surveys of US honeybee colony loss, released its preliminary analysis of that
loss between April 2017 and April 2018. With 69 percent of backyard, sideline and commercial
beekeepers declaring that they “lost more of their colonies than deemed to
be acceptable,” Bee Informed estimated that US beekeepers lost 40.1 percent of their
managed honeybee colonies — more than the previous year (33 percent). Such continuing
high percentages of lost colonies are, according to beekeepers as well as a June 2014
Obama administration Fact Sheet, unsustainable.
That same Fact Sheet called insect pollination “integral to food security in the
United States,” and credited pollinators with contributing upwards of $24 billion to the
US economy; honeybees accounted for more than $15 billion of that, and the contributions
of “native wild pollinators, such as bumble bees and alfalfa leafcutter bees”
reached more than $9 billion.
The chief threats confronting domestic and wild bees are climate change, habitat
loss, and pesticides — particularly the neuro-active class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids,
which make bees vulnerable to their primary predator, the parasitic varroa
mite. Yet earlier this summer, the Trump administration reversed a two-year-old ban on
neonicotinoid usage on wildlife refuges instituted during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Against that backdrop, commercial beekeepers find their bees more in demand
than ever as they rotate “hives for hire” from berry farms to cantaloupe fields. There
are strong anecdotal signs that bees are being stressed and consequently weakened
by such moves. According to July’s National Honey Report from the US Department
of Agriculture, bees were being fed protein patties and sugar syrup as nectar sources
remained scarce in June (“another disappointing month” due to winter drought). The
overall honey crop was improving, but keepers voiced hope that pesticide exposure will
be minimal so their bees can survive winter.
Meanwhile, two percent of wild bee species are responsible for pollinating approximately
80 percent of the world’s bee-pollinated crops, per a 2015 study published in the
Nature Communications journal. The value of wild pollinators transcends economics;
they are crucial to biodiversity. And according to both Brian Brown and horticulturalist
Carol Bornstein, director of the Nature Gardens at the Natural History Museum in Los
Angeles, native bees are in more trouble than honeybees, due to habitat loss and indiscriminate
pesticide usage. (A survey is being conducted now, at the height of the bee
season, of all the native bee species the Nature Garden is attracting via its native plants.
Sampling is still taking place but Brown anticipates results within a couple of weeks.)
While logic (if not scientific data) dictates that backyard beekeeping boosts bee
population numbers, those are honeybees, which are great for pollinating fruit trees
and other edible plants.
“I think it’s important to mention that native bees are excellent pollinators as well, in
some cases far more efficient than European honeybees,” Bornstein says. “And I think
it’s preferable to plant native plants because those are some of their food sources from
an evolutionary standpoint; that helps local populations of bees whose historically used
plants have definitely shrunk in population size and numbers. You don’t need to create
a hive, you just need to plant the plants — in the sunflower family, the mint family, the
carrot family, native buckwheats.”
TO HIVE OR NOT TO HIVE
Brewster credits a friend with helping his family start their hives. Jordana says he
10 PASADENA WEEKLY | 08.16.18
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