San Diego Beekeeper’s New Books Are All The Buzz

Speaker 1: 00:00 I don't know what kind of a year it's been for you, but it's been a pretty good year for bees in San Diego. The winter and spring rains brought a bounty of blooms around the County and that led to a bumper crop of bees and it's about time. Nature brought bees a little good luck. They've been dealing with declining populations and mysterious hive collapses for years. Even so despite what they've been through, many people still think of bees as well. Bugs Johnny me is a San Diego woman who's using her bee expertise to enlighten the world about these remarkable creatures. Hilary Kearney is the founder of girl next door, honey and educational beekeeping business in San Diego. She's just out with two new books, the little book of bees and illustrated guide to the extraordinary lives of bees and queen spotting. Meet the remarkable queen bee and discover the drama at the heart of the hive. Speaker 1: 00:56 And Hilary, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Did the weather conditions this year really make it good, a good B season? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's huge. You get, you know when you're keeping these, you get way more honey on a year at when there, when there's rain and the bees are a lot healthier. Is San Diego's bee population bouncing back? You know, it's not really about the populations being low. It's about their death rates. So losing 40% of the highs every year. So at any given point we might have a high or low population but it doesn't change the fact that there are these things happening to the bees that are weakening them and making them vulnerable to collapse. So that hasn't changed. But you know, obviously when we have good nutrition that makes a big difference for their health and you know, temporarily at least if we can keep having good rain than it, it will be good for the bees. Speaker 1: 01:44 Now we spoke several years ago about your business girl next door honey and about the proper way to deal with bees. How did your business inspire you to write these two new books? Well, one of the cool things about my businesses that I get to meet a lot of people in the community because I'm going out and I'm interacting and doing bee removals. I'm doing community talks, I'm visiting classrooms. And so I get to see firsthand, you know, people's fears and anxieties and misunderstandings about bees. And so I really took that and put that into the book to try to alleviate some of that and to try to, I saw that people, when they learned about bees and how fascinating they are, a lot of those anxieties went away. A lot of that fear went away and it actually changed to Revere really an excitement. So sometimes I think of it as like, I'm rebranding bees. Speaker 1: 02:30 So I, I tried to make it look interesting and pretty and be accessible and easy to read. And so I took all that and put that into the books. Let's talk first about Queens spotting. There's a bit of a where's Waldo concept to tell us about that. Yeah. So on my social media, I had started playing this game, which I called queen spotting where it basically it put them in an image of a lot of bees and you have to try and find the queen bee who looks slightly different. So it's kinda like playing where's Waldo. But with bees, and I had the idea of turning this into a book because I could use this as a kind of segue into teaching people more about B. So the game kind of gets you interested if people really love it. A lot of non beekeepers really love playing the game and it brings a fun element for kids too. Speaker 1: 03:13 So it's something that parents can do with their kids. You know, every night before they go to sleep they do a queen spotting challenge. They read a little bit about the book and they learn about the fascinating lives of bees. So yeah, it was just kind of like a hook I guess. But it's also, it is really fun and it's useful if you're a beekeeper because you do have to be able to find the queen. And building that skill by practicing in the book is really helping people find their Queens in real life. Why do you have to find the queen if you're a beekeeper? Well sometimes you just want to show off, but also because sometimes we do something called re queening where we have to replace the queen that's in the hive. And this is really especially true of San Diego because we have the Africanized bees here. Speaker 1: 03:51 So what can happen is your colony can turn a little defensive and you have to replace the queen in order to change them docile again. So you have to be able to find her to replace her. The common assumption about the queen bee is that she rules the hive. What she says goes is that really the way it works? Not really. Um, the colony is a super organism. So even though there are these individual bees in there, they're kind of living as one big collective animal. And that's also how they make decisions. So the Queen's not ordering the other bees around. She's, she's helping to organize the colony with sense and, and pheromones really. And they're kind of making these collective decisions together and is a true, there can be only one queen. Um, no, there are actually circumstances when there can be more than one. Speaker 1: 04:39 But the common thing that people say is that there's only one. But I write about this in the book. There's some really fascinating times when you might end up with more than one queen in the hive, especially when they make a new queen. Um, they'll make multiple Queens in those Queens will battle to the death. Um, so, um, there's certain situations where you'll end up with more than one queen in the high, but typically just one. Hillary, can you read us the dedication to the second book we're talking about here? The little book of BS? Sure. Yeah. This book is dedicated to anyone who has rescued a B from their pool given sugar water. Two attired be planted flowers in their garden or told a friend not to SWAT. Thanks for caring. I hope this book inspires you to do even more for our be friends. Speaker 1: 05:24 I think that dedication is really remarkably sweet. I, but I'm wondering, what do you find that there is to admire and care for about bees? Well, they're just really important to our ecosystem because they are pollinating. And that essentially means that they're helping plants to reproduce. And for us, it also means that they're playing a role in our agriculture. Someone who we're growing food. The food has to be pollinated first. So an Apple starts out as a flower. It has to be pollinated before it turns into an Apple. But other than that, they're just very cute. I think they're fuzzy. They have these beautiful eyes, especially some of the native species have these gorgeous marble, the eyes that are bright blue or green. We're lucky enough to have a species here called a metallic green sweat bee that is this beautiful metallic green. Um, if you want to see those in your garden, you can plant sunflowers or cosmos. Speaker 1: 06:18 And so, yeah, I think they're beautiful. And I also think they have some fascinating behaviors, especially the social bees. Like honeybees and bumblebees, just the way they live is so incredible. Speaking about the way bees look, you have some beautiful illustrations in the little book of bees. How did they come about? Um, we got to work with this really talented illustrator named Amy holiday who's in the UK and she does watercolor. And so it was really fun making the book for me because I was, um, I got to work directly with her and kind of tell her exactly what I wanted her to do. So I was sending her reference images and telling her, you know, I want, I want this color B and I want this one. And um, so it was really fun working with her and seeing, you know, these incredible, um, illustrations come out. Speaker 1: 07:02 And I actually have an art background. I studied art at UC Santa Cruz, but I have a hard time illustrating these because I want to make them so technically accurate and then the cuteness just doesn't come through all the time. But she was able to really capture that. And my favorite thing is she illustrated actually some pupa, um, which is developing bees. And they kind of look like aliens. Like they're a little creepy looking, but somehow she made them look cute. So even the pupa look cute. Are your two books geared towards kids? I think so. I mean we didn't officially gear them towards kids. The writing is not at kid level, but to me I wanted to make them something that kids could read, um, with parents present, you know, and, and that something they could do together and the illustrations in the little book of bees and the game element and queen spotting was meant to be inviting to both kids and parents. Speaker 1: 07:54 But definitely older kids can read it. What can people do to help be survive? Okay. So there's a couple of things that you can do at home that are really simple. The first thing is to plant for them. So planting flowers, sunflowers, anything in the sunflower family is an easy to grow flower, especially in San Diego. We can grow this kind of things all year. But also planting trees. A lot of people don't realize that trees are one of the biggest providers of nectar and pollen for bees. And they also help combat climate change, which is another problem that bees are facing. So planting a tree, even if you don't have space to do it, if you're an apartment or something like that, there's some wonderful programs in San Diego that plant trees. Um, so you can volunteer with groups. Um, you can do citizen science work, um, you know, volunteering with different or conservation organizations, but in your own yard, just really planting and not using pesticides is the two best things that you could do. Hillary Kearney of girl next door, honey, we'll be speaking about her two new books, the little book of bees and queen spotting tonight at catapult books in South park. Hillary, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.