What We Do
Honeybeeteacher LLC is a small business located in Flagstaff, Arizona. I am the sole proprietor, but I have many people who assist me with my work, including the honeybees themselves! As I learned from Les Crowder, one of my early beekeeping mentors, the honeybees themselves are the best teachers. We need to listen to the bees. By doing that, we can learn from the bees about what they need, and then we can take skilled and thoughtful actions to support their health and well-being.
Thus the purpose of Honeybeeteacher LLC goes beyond mere profits. We see nothing inherently wrong with “obtaining a yield,” whether that harvest is in the form of honey or money. However, because we are a small-scale and local business, any profits we earn go directly back to the honeybees. We use these funds to maintain hives and equipment, and to process honey, beeswax, and propolis.
This endeavor is about learning from and teaching about the honeybees, about other threatened pollinators (like the endangered Monarch Butterfly), and about the flowering plants that nurture all pollinators. The cliché says that “you are what you eat,” and that’s especially true for the honeybees. They are florivores; they eat only nectar and pollen from plants. Therefore, I relate to the honeybees as social insects who are also animals and plants. Honeybees are also “vegans” who do not kill either plants or animals in order to live.
As Christian environmentalist Wendell Berry has written in The Gift of Good Land: “ To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”