It started with a Craigslist ad: “If you have bees you want to get rid of, I’ll come get them.”
Hilary Kearney barely had a beehive ready when she got an answer to her post. She was called to rescue a bee colony hanging from the ceiling of an outdoor laundry room. Armed with only her research and a hive her father built out of scrap wood from the yard, using construction plans she’d found online, she headed out to face her first ever colony.
“My dad came with me even though he knew even less than I did,” Kearney recalled. “We didn’t have bee suits, so we wore three layers of clothing and my dad had a welding mask on with a towel wrapped around his head. When we knocked on the door and the couple who lived there answered, we all laughed because we looked so ridiculous.”
An Unexpected Career Pivot
Growing up in Southern California, Kearney had never thought much about honeybees until college, when she met her future husband. On his wall, he had a bucket list that included goals like “be a firefighter,” “ride a bike across the country,” and “get bees.” That caught her attention.She bought him a book about backyard beekeeping, but read it before she gave it to him. The section about the honey bees’ behavior and intelligence, and the intricacies of their hives, caught her eye.
“They have really good memories and can recognize patterns,” Kearney said. Bees fly up to three miles away from their hive to find flowers, so they’ll memorize the shapes of flowers to aid their search.
“If [they know] a sunflower is a great place to get nectar, and they see other flowers with a similar shape, they know there’s a good chance those other flowers will be a source of nectar too,” she explained.
Kearney was fascinated. She started working honey bees into her college assignments whenever she could, whether it was for an English or a fine arts class.
After college, she moved back in with her dad in San Diego.
“It was 2010, and there was a recession, so it was hard to get a job,” she said. “I got stuck in an office job and I hated it, so I started researching beekeeping to distract myself.”
She rescued that first Craigslist colony—only getting stung once in the process—and was hooked. She decided to dive into beekeeping.
“Right away it snowballed into a word-of-mouth business,” she said. “I was volunteering with some gardening groups and I’d tell them I did beekeeping, and people started getting excited and asking questions.”
The questions she was asked inspired new revenue streams for her fledgling business. When she was asked to talk to a gardening group about bees, she turned that into an educational course that she still uses today. She now offers online and in-person classes to both kids and adults, about beginner and intermediate beekeeping, hive inspections, honey harvesting, and bee rescuing. She even gives classroom bee lessons at schools.
People asked her if she could put a hive in their gardens, too. Others said they had a swarm of wild bees in their house and asked her if she could remove them.
Lessons Learned
As part of her service, Kearney does hive inspections and honey harvesting, but she also mentors people who want to take care of the hives themselves.“It takes a long time to learn to be confident in your beekeeping,” she said. “A lot of people think it’s like setting up a birdhouse, but actually you have to learn a lot and do a lot.” Kearney learned through her own research and by making mistakes.
One of the big mistakes she made in her first year was not recognizing that her first hive had lost its queen.
“I don’t know when she died,” Kearney said, “but after a month or two I realized that the colony was starting to shrink.” By that time, however, it was too late. A queen bee continuously lays eggs to replace the bees that die naturally of old age. Most bees in a hive are worker bees who live for six weeks. If they die and aren’t replaced, the population of the hive shrinks.
“There are a lot of subtle signs that you have to be able to understand in order to know what’s going on in your colony,” Kearney said. Looking back, she believes she would have greatly benefited from having a mentor. She now tries to save new beekeepers from making the same mistakes.
Another mistake she cautions against is not making an investment upfront.
“I didn’t want to spend any money, so I didn’t get a bee suit,” she said. She now knows that having a suit, or at least in the headpiece with the veil, is necessary.
“I got stung a lot and probably put myself at risk without realizing it,” she said. “I always tell beginners that before you know what you’re doing, you should really have a suit on.” She still wears the full suit today.
“I think of it like a seatbelt,” she said. “You don’t need it until you need it, and then it’s too late.”
Rescue Missions
Kearney’s favorite part of the business is doing bee rescues.“I’m always surprised and delighted by the places they choose to try to live,” she said. From a retired aircraft carrier now used as a museum, to the koala exhibit at the San Diego Zoo, to the set for an outdoor Shakespeare production, Kearney goes behind the scenes to get the bees out.
“When it’s a swarm, it’s literally just a ball of bees,” she said. “If I get them early, I can just scoop them with my hands and put them into a miniature hive and leave them in there. Later I transfer them to a bigger hive.”
If the bees have been swarming somewhere for a while, such as in a compost bin, chances are high that they’ve already begun building their comb. In those situations, Kearney figures out how to get to the bees without destroying what they’ve built. Then she removes the comb one piece at a time.
“If they’re nice bees, they’re usually pretty easy going,” Kearney said. However, every now and then she encounters defensive bees that attack as soon as they’re disturbed. “With those kinds of colonies, they usually calm down once you get them transferred, but if they remain aggressive, I replace their queen [with a new one],” she said. “Since she’s the one laying the eggs, their defensiveness is genetic, so if you replace her with a nice queen, she’s going to lay nice eggs.”
While she’s protected by her suit, her main concern is making sure no one nearby is harmed.
The Beauty of Honey
Honey needs to be harvested regularly to prevent a hive from getting too full, which could cause a colony to swarm. Even though Kearney owns hives, honey sales aren’t her business’s main revenue.“I only sell it directly to people who are attending my classes or educational events,” she said. “I always tell people they have to earn the right to eat the honey: They have to know how valuable it is before they can have some.”
Honey is known for its antimicrobial properties. It can be used effectively as a cough suppressant, soothes a sore throat, and accelerates the healing process when applied to cuts and burns.
In fact, said Kearney, “Virtually everything the bees make has some kind of beneficial health property.” That includes the beeswax, which, if eaten, can lower bad cholesterol; and the propolis, the sticky resin the bees use to coat their hives, seal cracks, and kill mold. “Propolis is currently being researched to fight cancer,” Kearney said. Bee venom has long been used to ease arthritis pain, and it’s being researched for various autoimmune diseases.
She always aims to understand things from the bees’ point of view, and never stops learning from them. Armed with her bee suit and her curiosity, she sets out to meet the yet-to-be explained mysteries of the world of bees.
