Across the Triangle in North Carolina, a region that includes Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, at least 55 residents have voluntarily devoted a section of their backyard to bees. These residents aren’t beekeepers themselves, but pay a fee to host the hives for Buddha Bee Apiary, a company that installs the hive, visits monthly to inspect and care for the bees, and harvests the honey.
Before you can host a hive, an expert from Buddha Bee Apiary will assess your yard to see if it’s suitable for bees. The biggest needs, Maness says, are enough space for the two-by-three-foot hive and about an eight-foot low-traffic radius around it to give the bees some calm. Sunlight helps, too, because it can keep away a pest called the small hive beetle (it’s important that you don’t use mosquito sprays on your lawn).
Once a yard is hive-approved, Buddha Bee Apiary makes the installation an event—a “welcoming of the bees,” Maness says—telling the host to invite family and friends. Neighbors or friend groups have gone in on the $150-per-month fee for a hive together, too. Some of the hosts eventually want to take over the beekeeping duties, and Buddha Bee Apiary will help with that transition. Others don’t, but want their kids to be involved in the inspection; for those groups, the beekeeper will bring an extra protective jacket so they can get up close.
Grass lawns aren’t that environmentally friendly, since they’re a monoculture that requires a lot of care (and grass is pollinated by wind, not bees). A side effect of bringing beehives to backyards, Maness says, is that people have been transforming their grass yards into something more impactful for the environment.
The bees pollinate plants within a 3-mile radius from the home. With 55 installations of 60 hives, and each hive home to about 45,000 bees, Maness estimates the company has helped install more than 2 million bees all over the region.
He wanted to bring that directly to people at their homes. Other beekeepers have done the same. Best Bees manages hives for both corporations and residential homes in Boston, Houston, Chicago, and other cities. Hive hosting has also been done across Australia and in the U.K.
Maness hopes this model continues to expand, and that more people are open to keeping bees—not just to help the bee population, but to help bees be better understood.
“People have this understanding that bees are threatened from an article they read or news story they saw, but they don’t have that deeper understanding of what exactly the challenges are that bees are facing,” he says. “When we bring this program to your yard we try to unveil that deeper meaning—those things that are happening in the hive and then what’s going on on the world scale, the U.S. scale. We try to bring some insight and light to that, so that people are more educated advocates.”