The Sebastopol Energy Garden recently introduced a
hive of Western Honey bees to our suburban food system. Bees play a vital role
in sustainable food production; not only do they provide beeswax and calorie
rich honey (64 cal/21 g), bees play an important role in pollinating flowering
plants, and are the major type of pollinator in ecosystems that contain
flowering plants (80% of all insect pollination). It is estimated that one
third of the human food supply depends on insect pollination, most of which is
accomplished by bees, especially the domesticated Western honey bee. The value
added by honeybee pollination to American agriculture is estimated to range
from $5 billion to $20 billion a year.

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In determining where to purchase our bees and what
materials to use for our hives there were many factors that were taken into
consideration. We wanted to use a hive constructed from locally harvested and
manufactured wood upon which chemical treatments had not been used. Rather than
the commercially available assembled frames which use plastics as the
foundation for honeycomb, we wanted to use a natural bee’s wax product that was
chemical free. We also wanted the bees
to come from a reliable beekeeper that didn’t use any chemical treatments for
mites and hadn’t experienced Colony Collapse Disorder amongst their hives. Our overall goal was to obtain responsibly kept, healthy bees and chemical free hives in a way that had the smallest energy footprint linked to it. 

A local beekeeper, Eric Rocher assisted us in
acquiring the bees and the hive materials. It is his goal to develop a network
of decentralized hives so as to encourage pollination and avoid the health
risks that threaten large scale beekeeping. Bees often gather the majority of their
food within 2.5km of the hive, but a bee will also visit familiar flowers up to
10km away. By distancing hives from one another, the area pollinated increases
and competition among the bees decreases; this improves the health of the food
system as well as the hives.