By Nanette Wiser
The arts museum boasts rooftop beehives and their own honey brand. And according to the New York Times, offices dangle beehives and garden plots to lure workers back from remote. In midtown Manhattan, one company devoted the 22nd floor terrace to two beehives and a garden.
Bees have long been a part of fashion and lifestyle history. Consumers’ concern for the declining bee population and climate change has increased the popularity of our buzzy friends. Bee motif jewelry, bee-friendly products and skin care, local honey and bee-friendly pest control are all trending. Food as medicine advocates tout the benefits of organic honey for gut health, immune system boosts and other ailments.
Some say when the bees go, we go. After all, 1/3 of our food source comes from bees pollinating plants. Scientists know that bees are dying from a variety of factors–pesticides, drought, habitat destruction, nutrition deficit, air pollution, global warming and more.
There’s a lot you can do to help bees do their jobs. Plant bee friendly plants including Florida wildflowers (Spanish needle, yellow primrose and spiderwort), citrus and fruit trees, berries and trees like bottlebrush, powderpuff, crape myrtle or golden rain. Bees like ground covers (Mexican clover and shrubby false buttonweed) and flowering plants such as purple porterweed, sweet almond, salvia, and bee balm. You can see many of these in the Florida Botanical Garden’s Butterfly Gardens.
From downtown St. Pete to Gulf Beaches, explore local beekeepers’ sweet treats from Eden’s Nectar Honey, Tarpon Springs’ Bayshore Bees and Queen & Colony (Blush Tea).
At Rolling Oats, we discovered A Bee’s Place LLC with hives in St. Petersburg, Pinellas Park, Seminole, Dunedin and Tierra Verde. An interview with their beekeeper explained how bees make different honey flavors: “All of our honey is all natural from the bees, the nectar that bees go out and gather is what they bring back, and that’s what flavors the honey. So even our spring, summer and fall honey from the same yard, will taste a little different because of the flowers that they’ve actually gone out and gotten the nectar from. To get a single source honey such as orange blossom or blackberry honey beekeepers move their bees to the fields so the bees can forage primarily on their blossoms which produce the lovely varieties. Honey from all different parts of the country is like fine wine, all have wonderful color and taste differences.”
You can find many local honeys and bee products at St. Petersburg Saturday Morning Market, Corey Avenue Sunday Market and other local markets that reopen in the fall including Rebecca’s Bees & Honey (www.rebeccasbees.com).
Enjoy her exquisite honey, lip balm, candles, deodorant, soaps and Propolis healing products from their three apiaries (St. Petersburg, Largo, Redington Shores). The mother-daughter team, Gail and Rebecca are proud of their operation. “Our bees pollinate millions of flowers within a 5-mile radius, connecting us intimately to the ecosystem we live in. We believe in working with the bees naturally and holistically. We manage bee diseases and pests without chemicals, and we don’t feed soy pollen substitute, corn syrup or sugar. We carefully harvest honey by hand and always leave our bees plenty for themselves.”