Happy National Honey Month! In honor of Honey Month, we wanted to celebrate beekeepers and the humble honey bees. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share their adventures with beekeeping.

Part 1: When Julie Carrick Dalton goes to check on her bees one day, she notices something isn’t right.

Julie Carrick Dalton is the Boston-based author of The Last Beekeeper and Waiting for the Night Song, a CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, and Parade Most Anticipated novel. A former farmer and beekeeper, she is a frequent speaker and teacher on the topic of fiction in the age of climate crisis. When she isn't writing, you can probably find Julie kayaking, skiing, or tending her pollinator garden. Her next novel, The Forest Becomes Her, hits shelves in May of 2025.

This story was shared at the Urban Waggle, a live storytelling event in support of the mission and programs at the Urban Bee Lab, in Somerville, MA in November 2023.

Part 2: Jon Schulz thinks rescuing a neglected apiary is the perfect opportunity to expand his beekeeping business.

Meet Jon Schulz, a data center architect turned beekeeper. In his day job, Jon works to merge high tech subsystems to deliver consistent, reliable and secure solutions for his global customers. As a beekeeper, his fascination lies in the autonomous functions of honeybees that combine collectively to create a thriving colony. Recently, Jon and his wife Amanda launched Blackland Bees, an apiculture business focusing on honeybee rescue, education, conservation and pollination services. Jon and Amanda can be found managing beehives at local community gardens, designing pollinator landscapes for schools and churches, rescuing and rehabilitating bee colonies and supporting Blackland Prairie restoration projects. Jon received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science, while also studying business and Spanish, at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently pursuing his Texas Master Beekeeper certification, through Texas A&M Agrilife Extension. Jon and Amanda both grew up in the Dallas area and returned in 2012, after living in Austin, San Antonio and Houston. They presently reside in East Dallas, along with their two children, and manage an apiary of nearly 2 million honeybees!

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I should have noticed on that perfect August day how deathly still the air was, but I don't notice anything because the sun is shining down from this delicious, flannel blue sky and I'm walking across my yard ready to check on my beehive.

Now, it's August and it is humid and hot, but I'm wearing a turtleneck and I have elastic bands around my wrists and jeans with elastic bands around my ankles, rain boots, and my hair it's pulled up in a baseball cap and I'm ready to go see the bees.

There's this moment when I crack open a beehive, which I don't get to do very often, but this day I was opening the hive. When you crack open a hive, when I break the wax seal and I lift the lid, there's this moment of sensory magic. I'm enveloped by this aroma of warm wax and honey and the bees. The bees.

They rise up out of the hive slowly and they surround me with this gentle but penetrating hum that resonates in these tiny bones in my ears. So after a few seconds, it starts to feel like that sound, that hum, that “Om” is coming from inside my own head, as if I'm participating in this moment with the bees and it feels good.

Julie Carrick Dalton shares her story at the Urban Waggle at Arts at the Armory, Somerville, MA in November 2023. Photo courtesy of Urban Bee Lab.

I don't get to open a hive that often, but the days when I'm not opening a hive, I still go out there and I sit with the bees and watch them as they fly in the hive and out of the hive. And I catch these flashes of this green‑yellow pollen. Bees have these pollen baskets on their rear legs and they stuff them full of pollen when they go foraging. And when they come home and zip into the hive, you can see little flashes of yellow as they go in.

I would sit there and watch them like you would watch a campfire. It's mesmerizing and I would just disappear into the flames of this campfire moment. It was mesmerizing.

I always admired and was kind of envious, I guess, of the clear sense of purpose and order in the beehive, because it was exactly the opposite of what was going on behind me in my house, which at the moment was occupied and home to four children, three chickens, two dogs and one husband.

There was a lot of noise in that house, good noise, but there was also a lot of noise in my head, which wasn't always as good. I always had these thoughts ricocheting around my brain of things I needed to do, things I was forgetting to do, things I had done poorly, people I had let down. And as these thoughts are bouncing around my head and they won't quiet, I could go to the bees and sit and just watch them and fall into that “Om”. You know, quiet mind.

Now, this day, this perfect August day in my turtleneck and my baseball cap, I'm walking out to go see the bees and I'm giddy with anticipation. It is hot. It is humid. It is 90 degrees, but I do not care.

But as I'm getting closer to the hive, I see something that's not supposed to be there. There's a brown lump on the ground in front of the hive. I think my body recognized what was going on before my brain did, because despite this heat and humidity, this chill slithers over my body.

I take a few more steps towards the hive and my brain catches up and I realize that this brown lump is a pile of 40,000 dead honey bees.

I'm numb for a second and then this stew of emotions bubbles up. I'm angry, I'm panicking, I'm feeling grief, and I'm feeling guilt. It's the guilt that sticks because I am the beekeeper. I was supposed to take care of these bees.

I built that hive myself with hammer and nails, and I populated that hive with baby bees and fed them sugar water until they were stable enough to go foraging on their own. I loved those bees.

After the bees died, I kept going out to the hive. They were still now. They were lying on the ground and I could see them. And I could see in close detail the pollen still inside some of the pollen baskets that the bees had foraged on the day they died. And I could see these delicate stained‑glass patterns in their wings. They were beautiful.

I kept going back out day after day, week after week. I think I was searching for something. I was searching for that quiet, for that “Om” and it did not come. I kept going back out and I never moved the bees. I didn't bury them. I did not shovel them into a garbage bag. I didn't even cover them with leaves. I let them decompose back into the earth.

And as I kept going back out to them and they melted back into the ground, I realized it had never been about me taking care of the bees. Those bees had been taking care of me, and they were gone.

It's been several years since I lost those bees and I am still searching. I am still chasing that calm, that “Om” to quiet the noise in my mind.

Thank you.

Part 2

My fascination with bees started about 20 years ago in a feed store in Houston, Texas. I was there picking up some gardening supplies and I noticed some beekeeping equipment in the corner of the store. I was immediately drawn to the wooden boxes and the wax frames and the array of different colors of honey and the flavors of the honey they had on display. I was so taken that, once I left, I started seeing bees everywhere. At that point, I started to see them in my garden.

Jon Schulz shares his story at Wild Detective in Dallas, TX in December 2022. Photo by Jason Hensel.

Now that I was paying attention, I could see that they were collecting different colors of pollen. At that point, I started planting cover crops and host plants to both attract the pollinators and to feed them. I was hooked.

Fast forward to 2018 and I've been talking about beekeeping for about a decade. I've spent hours and days reading and watching YouTube and learning. Meanwhile, my wife Amanda gave me a little nudge and she picked up a beehive kit that had gone on sale at Costco, of all places. That's what kicked it off.

I would admit, it was a little ugly in the beginning. I got that kit and didn't quite get it together right the first time. There were a couple components that I didn't even know what to do with at the time. I set those to the side. So there were bumps early on in my career of beekeeping and there have been bumps kind of all along but that's kind of how I learn.

So after several years of trial and error, I had a number of honeybee removals under my belt. I had removed bees from an old church along the banks of the Trinity River, city trees, country trees, neighborhood houses, all over the place. We had extracted honey many times.

At this point, I had about 15 hives of my own. That's about when your friends and families start to believe you know what you're doing. I still felt like I had a ways to go.

A couple years ago, Amanda served on the Dallas Park Board and she got to know some folks over at the Lake Highlands Community Garden. It's a two‑acre plot of land over behind a Dallas facilities building and it was really nothing until these neighborhood visionaries turned it into a community garden.

They've got a section that's designated as a donation garden where they grow fresh produce to donate to local food banks. They also have an apiary there. Everything was going well with the apiary, until it wasn't. These bees became neglected and the former beekeepers had moved on.

I saw this and I thought, “What a great opportunity. I've been kind of wanting to increase my beekeeping operations, maybe even start my own business. Maybe this was the next stage where I could get involved and maybe help the community.” So I volunteered.

I set a date to go take a look at these hives and that date came. And I've been working with bees for several years, you know, the kind, gentle bees. These bees are bred to be pleasant, produce lots of honey, make beautiful honeycomb, those kind of bees. It's a thing. So I thought this would be a walk in the park.

Well, when I cracked the lid on that first hive in the garden, that all changed. As a beekeeper, you kind of know that when you're in a hive working and you smell bananas, you know you're in for some excitement. It's a pheromone. It's an alarm pheromone that the bees emit when they're alarmed and ready to defend their hive. I was in for some excitement.

It was like a black wave coming out of that first hive. It was intense. Those bees came up and, at that moment, I didn't know what to do. I thought to myself, “Do I continue? How many stings am I going to get? Should I run?” I seriously thought that.

So I started taking a look at these hives. The first hive was three boxes. My goal was to find the queen. I had to find a single bee in this mass of ferocious bees that was flying around me. So, my search began.

I dug in and I started looking carefully through each of the frames in that top box. No queen. I found some small hive beetles. Yeah, that's no queen, but I put the box next to me and continued digging into the next box.

The second box, I was looking through and I told myself, “I hope she's on the next frame.” Well, she wasn't. It was just more of her aggressive brood that, by this point, had gotten extremely alarmed and were attacking my suit and my gloves. At that point, I had gotten about six stings and I was really starting to question what I was doing there. So, no queen in the second box.

I put that box there and I was down to the third box, the last box. I was starting to lose a little hope here at this point. I thought maybe I missed her. Maybe she's somewhere in this buzzing whirlwind that's circling me. So, I kept on going.

I got to the last frame in the final box and I pulled it out and looked at it. No queen. Flipped it over and, on the back, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There she was. Out of 30 frames in this hive in complete chaos, there she bubbled up out of a pile of bees on that last frame in the hive.

And she was trying to make an escape. She was trying to get off that frame, so I quickly grabbed a queen clip and I trapped her in that plastic contraption and got her. And, deep breath, I had two more hives to go.

After quite some time, I was able to work through those other two hives and actually found the queens in there, which, at the time, I felt like was a miracle. After that, I had 12 stings that I ended up with and my nerves were just shot after hours of incessant buzzing and the stress of trying to find that queen.

It was clear to me that these hives needed some attention. I was going to need some time. I was going to need another location because I couldn't leave those hives there, those defensive hives in a community space. They had to go somewhere else.

I have a good buddy that owns a large ranch about an hour south of Dallas. You know, these three hives in one of his secluded pastures probably wouldn't even be noticed.

So I called up my buddy Graham, and he said, “Bring ‘em,” and so I did.

I started a months‑long rehabilitation process and re‑queening of these hives.

A couple of things to know about changing the personality of a colony. There's a queen and she's responsible for laying all the eggs in the colony, up to 1,500 per day. So her genetics, for the most part, dictate what the colony does.

She lives for several years, but the industrious worker bees that we all see, by the way, they're all female, live for a short six to eight weeks. The idea is if you take the existing queen out and replace her with a nice gentle queen, in a couple months, the whole hive will kind of turn over and those new genetics will start to come through.

So, during that rehab process, I spent many hours driving and checking and treating these hives. I wasn't sure if the process was going to work, but I continued on with the transformation. Many days, I battled weather. Many days, I was just tired. A lot of times, I wondered what had I gotten into with this new hobby.

After seven long months, I was ready to try to bring the bees back to the garden. When we did that, there was a lot of excitement from both the bees and the gardeners. The garden community was fascinated with the whole process and they were eager to see these bees fly one more time.

I wasn't sure if they were ready. They had been through a long rehab process and they had gone through a long journey to get back to the garden, but I carefully placed those colonies in this newly renovated apiary and I opened the entrances for the first time. And one by one those, now gentle, little ladies buzzed around that community garden. And after working really diligently, they collected enough nectar that the Lake Highlands Community Garden will now donate about 50 pounds of honey to local Dallas food banks. So great.

During that whole rehabilitation process, that really changed who I was. I went from a hobbyist with a passion to a professional with a mission. I also changed my relationship with the bees, too. I wasn't just bringing three stacked boxes of insects back to a plot of land. I was bringing a whole community of honeybees which had a significant meaning to a community of gardeners. And, now, those two communities are back together again in harmony and I, humbly, had a little something to do with that.

There you go.