Heidi Gibson wears no veil on this cool, spring morning, as she peeks inside two honeybee hives nestled behind several young pine trees at New Earth Farm in Virginia Beach.

One hive is hers, and the other belongs to organic farmer John Wilson. After feeding her own bees a sugar-water mixture from a mason jar, she pulls on the hood of her sweatshirt and looks into the farm’s hive and is pleased to find plenty of honey in the top frames, nourishing the young bees that made it through the winter.

Women are responding to the call of the bees. Perhaps they feel an affinity with these queen-centered insect communities. More likely, they understand the bees’ struggle to survive. In the last twenty years, bees have been battling mites, hive beetles, and the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder, all of which have resulted in a 50 percent decline in the bee population. For gardeners and farmers, it’s another case of “the canary in the coal mine”: a sign that Mother Nature needs our help.

SWEET, GOLDEN BOUNTY

“I have always loved bees,” said Heidi, who moved to Virginia Beach from Kentucky two years ago. Heidi grew up on a 300-acre farm in the 1960s, but there were no beehives on her family’s or neighbors’ farms. Bees lived in the woods, her childhood playground, and in the clover. Heidi recalled, “We couldn’t walk outside barefoot because there were so many bees.”

After raising her family in Louisville, Heidi bought a homestead in Henry County in 1999. By that time, there weren’t so many wild honeybees anymore. She became a beekeeper the next year. “I always respected the bees when everyone else was trying to get away from them,” she said.

As Heidi gained skill as a beekeeper, she entered her honey into Kentucky State Fair competitions. From 2003 to 2007, she won ribbons and cash prizes for her honey and her bees.

Now that Heidi lives locally without a farm of her own, she keeps bees at Wilson’s farm and assists him. Heidi believes that beekeepers are more aware of the problems associated with pesticides, typically used by conventional farmers. So keeping bees on an organic farm is a win-win. The bees pollinate the organic fruits and vegetables grown on the farm, and everyone shares in the sweet, golden bounty.

“The honeybee is the only insect which makes more honey than it needs,” Heidi said. “Because we’re taking care of them, giving them that extra space, we can take some honey.”

Heidi is concerned about how queen bees are being raised in recent years, a topic that draws much discussion among beekeepers.

“They are being raised in the shop, in tubes, you might say,” she explained. “The purpose of that is to establish a queen that is immune to everything. But the last three years in Kentucky, I just let the hives re-queen, and I had more honey and the best hives than I had ever had before.”

Heidi Gibson learned much about beekeeping by paying close attention to her bees and following the example of beekeepers in rural Kentucky. Locally the Tidewater Beekeeper’s Association has shared the joys of beekeeping for more than twenty years. At first, the members were mostly men with a few wives. Now the group has a roster of nearly 200 members and meets monthly in Chesapeake to share information and connect potential beekeepers with mentors.

In recent years, the club has welcomed more females to their membership. But C.E Harris, an elder in the club and one of the most respected beekeepers in Virginia Beach, says that women beekeepers are not a new phenomenon.

“My great-grandmother kept bees and passed her knowledge and equipment down to her daughters,” he recalled. “My grandpa never went into the bee yard. He would stand with a bucket, and Grandma would bring the frames over to him to carry into the honey house.”

When the hives are full of honey, one box—known as a super—can weigh as much as 70 to 90 pounds, and many couples share the work of beekeeping. Carol and Floyd Watkins of Knott’s Island, North Carolina, had a wasp eradication business and helped gather honeybee swarms for many years. They kept hives on their farm for their kiwi crop and tended hives on local farms in Virginia Beach and North Carolina. Last fall, after Floyd died, Carol honored a beekeeping tradition known as “telling the bees.”

“When a beekeeper passes on, it’s said that the new beekeeper should go around to each of the hives and let them know that a new person will be taking care of them,” Carol explained. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll do that.’” She told the “girls” that Floyd had gone on to heaven, and she’d be their new beekeeper.

With the help of TBA members, Carol has made good on her promise. Last month, a group of club members came to her farm and helped Carol get her hives in shape for the spring. Carol is especially pleased because she is experimenting with a new Styrofoam hive, purchased before Floyd died, which she can see from her kitchen window.

TBA member Karen Zablocki and her sister Terry have been keeping bees for more than ten years. The sisters are so buzzed about beekeeping, they convinced their retired parents in New York to start some hives and are working on their cousins in Detroit. Karen says the explosion in women beekeepers is closely related to their growing awareness of what’s healthy for their families, including fresh, local food. The women keep hives on farms owned by Pungo farmers Mike Cullipher and John Cromwell, helping their crops and giving the bees a good place to live. The bees on those farms make lots of honey, which sells out as fast as the jars land on Cullipher’s farm stand.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get a call from someone who wants local honey, mostly people with allergies, and I have to tell them I’m not going to pull any honey until May,” Karen said.

Karen admits that women are simply different as beekeepers than their male counterparts. While men may ponder how to build better hives, she thinks women approach the bees in an almost maternal style.

“When I work my bees, I talk to them, even though that sounds crazy to most people,” she said. But Carol Watkins doesn’t think so, especially when she sees a healthy hive.

“I just tell them: ‘Okay girls, you’re doing fine!’” Carol said.

WORKER BEES

On a radiant Sunday in April, Pam Fisher of the Beekeeper’s Guild of Southeastern Virginia gathers a group around several hives at Virginia Tech’s Agricultural Research Education Center on Diamond Springs Road in Norfolk. Fully suited up in white cotton clothing, gloves, and headgear with mesh covering their faces to prevent stings, they look like astronauts or a religious order, standing calmly around an open hive. Pam removes one rectangular frame, searching for the queen, who is larger than all the other bees and the mother of every one. When Pam finds her, the queen actually lays a few eggs while the group watches. Later Pam described the process.

“She puts her front feet out and sticks her head into each chamber, measuring it to see if it’s the size for a drone (male) or a worker (female),” she explained. “Then she backs in and deposits the egg.”

The bees themselves drew Pam into beekeeping. In the 80s a swarm landed on a dogwood sapling in her Chesapeake yard. She called a beekeeper to collect them, but he groused that his wife didn’t want him to bring home any more bees. Pam offered to buy the bees and their hive. She and husband Rick were newly married with about 50 dollars in the bank. She spent half of it on the beehive. “What was I thinking?” she said. It was the beginning of a passion.

After years of experience, Pam passed a test administered by Virginia Tech and became a Qualified Beekeeper, the highest designation in the state at this time. This winter she spoke at the North American Beekeeping Conference in Texas, sharing the guild’s practice of creating nucleus colonies or “nucs”: groups of bees from local hives. Generous with her knowledge and possessed of great kindness and patience, Pam is the mentor beyond mentors to a number of the Guild members. They meet once a month, also in Chesapeake, and offer a winter beekeeping class; there were 75 eager students this year.

“We chose the word “guild” because that indicated that we wanted to teach, as in the old guilds, where you move up from apprentice to journeyman to a master,” Pam said.

Guild newsletter editor Barbra Hickey, who has kept bees since 2008 and is also a Qualified Beekeeper, gives Pam Fisher a lot of credit. Since Barbra lives in Norfolk, where it’s illegal to keep bees, Pam and others helped Barbra find havens for her hives in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach. She got two hives started, and then her son won another one. In the beginning, Barbra says she didn’t manage swarms very well.

“That first spring, we went from 3 to 7 hives in one day,” she admitted.

Another guild member, Heidi Pocklington, began keeping bees in the late 1980’s, but after about five years, she lost all her bees to mites, which were decimating bee populations all over the country. She stopped keeping bees during a pregnancy, but renewed her interest when a swarm came to her yard, too. She decided to “dig out all her equipment” and start over.

“I had always liked bugs and didn’t want anyone to kill them,” Heidi said. “So one day, my son came home from school and there was a box in the front yard, and I said ‘Guess what?’” Heidi continues to keep bees and is still as fascinated by them as she was almost twenty years ago.

A self-described “lazy beekeeper,” ESL teacher Kate Rogers and her sister, Opal, were looking for a new hobby and took a weekend beekeeping class at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. They loved it.

After six years keeping bees, Kate is now a mentor to a man with four hives and lots of book knowledge, while she has the experience to help him interpret the goings on in a hive. She likes the give and take, working with her new mentee.

“Beekeeping is a science and an art. I think men tend to look closer at the science while we women kind of lean towards the art of it,” Kate said.

Gender issues in beekeeping bring up lots of playful discussion. Women who are learning about the bees’ community structure relate easily to the worker bees.

“In the hive, the women do all the work, while the men, the drones, they just eat and fly off to have fun with the queen and come back and eat some more,” said Heidi.

In the late summer and fall, the female bees drag the drones out the front door of the hives and don’t let them return.

While Pam has sympathy for the male beekeepers, who take a lot of ribbing for that particular hive behavior, Barbra Hickey makes a point of using it at home.

“I’ll often say ‘Come on boys, don’t be a lazy drone. You know what happens at the end of the season!’”

FOR THE GOOD

As they become midwives to the hives, women beekeepers realize a closer connection with the earth itself. Their work is central to the survival of our food system; nearly half the food we eat comes from plants that are pollinated, and beekeepers are trying to offset the loss of nearly 30 percent of hives every year.

The best beekeepers—male and female—are calm, quiet, thoughtful, and have the ability to move slowly. They learn to treat the bees with respect.

“It takes you out of yourself,” Pam Fisher said. “It’s truly an amazing thing, seeing all the bees working together for the good.”

“It calms my spirit,” Barbra Hickey said. Heidi Pocklington agreed, saying, “You get into a state of meditation when you work.”

“Beekeeping gives you such peace of mind,” said Carol Watkins. “Once you are used to the bees, there’s a tranquility you feel, even when several thousand are flying around you. It’s a feeling that’s hard to express.” 

For more information:

• The Beekeeper’s Guild of Southeastern Virginia: beekeepersguild.org

• The Tidewater Beekeeper’s Association: tidewaterbeekeepers.net

• See the documentary “Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us” at The Fellowship of the Inner Light, 620 14th Street in Virginia Beach on May 21, 2011, at 7 p.m. For more information, call

Kathleen Fogarty, a honey fan, writes regularly for Tidewater Women. She lives on a farm in Virginia Beach with her husband, John.