By
Malcolm T. Sanford
There’s a quiet revolution going on in the beekeeping community. Over the last decade or so beekeeping regulatory, extension and research has transformed from a cadre of almost all human males to a current population, which is significantly female. This “feminisation” is continuing and it will be intriguing to see how present programs in beekeeping might transform in the future due to this shift. To see this in action, one only need glance at the makeup of several professional associations in the beekeeping field. It is perhaps most clearly apparent in the regulatory area by looking at the current membership list of the Apiary Inspectors of America.
Sarah Red-Laird is one of these growing number of females who are becoming more prominent in all aspects of the beekeeping trade. The “Bee Girl” was born in Ashland, Oregon and raised there, as well as in Southeast Alaska. With a teacher as a mother and father as hunting and fishing guide, Sarah looks to have had a perfect environment to grow up in, culminating in an interest in leadership, resource management, and wilderness study. She majored in these fields as part of her academic training, which focused on outdoor recreation leadership at Central Oregon Community College and community collaboration and environmental policy at the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation.
She’s one of the Oregon Trail Generation, named after a popular game at the time she was growing up. Born between 1977 and 1985, her micro-generation is sometimes labeled “Xennials.” This is a group that generally was raised in a house with a computer and Internet access.
Sarah’s first experienced beekeeping at the age of four while watching beekeepers work their bees and harvest honey in an off-the-grid community her aunt lived in in Southern Oregon. She loved watching the bees, and was transfixed by the honey harvest. She carried an affinity for all-things-bees with her all the way to college in Montana. For her honors college thesis topic, she chose bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. This was 2008/09, peak CCD years.
Sarah’s first sting (as an adult) was up the nose while working bees as a student volunteer. Her face painfully morphed from Cindy Lou Who (The Grinch Who Stole Christmas) to mid-90’s era Julia Roberts (those famous lips), and finally back to normal in about a week. Nevertheless, she showed up at the lab with the ability to smile through the pain and laugh at herself.
This was when bee lab employee Scott Denham taught her one of the most important lessons in beekeeping, “If you get stung, it’s because of something you did. You are never to blame the bee. Think back as to what you can do different next time.” Her second sting was in the hand, the day before graduation, leading to one of the most embarrassing moments of her college career, offering the Dean of the College of Forestry and Conservation, Jim Birchfield, her comically-swollen club of a hand to shake during the diploma hand-off.
On graduation day, Debnam informed Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk that “he would be remiss if he did not offer Sarah a full-time seasonal position in the bee lab,” and her career in beekeeping officially began. Professor Bromenshenk is a bee researcher at the University of Montana, known for original research with honey bees in the fields of pollution monitoring and employing the insects to find plastic land mines, his infamous insect “bomb sniffing bee” project. In retirement, he is leading an effort using smartphones to examine the role of sound in honey bee health, known as honeybeehealth.guru.
Honey bee research wasn’t exactly Sarah’s vision of a career path. Hoping to gain employment at a water-conservation nonprofit, aligned with her past work experience and college degree, she accepted the position in the bee lab only as a stop-gap measure until an opening with Trout Unlimited or the Montana Water Trust would become available. The Great Recession intervened, however, and Sarah would never return to the water world after becoming embedded in the beekeeping community. Looking back, she feels she was destined for a life with bees, looking at the honey bee hive as, “always making sense when almost nothing else did.” during her decade-long career in the bee lab at the University of Montana.
Scott Debnam received his undergraduate degree in Wildlife Biology at the University of Montana, and is unique in that he is a student, staff member, as well as an instructor. Beginning in honey bee research when he first became a student, he also never planned to make a career out of it. Researching bees for well over a decade at the University, however, has transformed him into what he currently is today, head bee field researcher at the University of Montana. Significantly, he is now a member of the Bee Girl Organization’s Board of Directors.
Striking out on her own after leaving Montana, Sarah picked up two experienced commercial beekeepers as mentors:
Zac Browning is a 4th generation commercial beekeeper and honey producer. He is a co-owner of Browning Honey Co. Inc. With his brothers, he operates over 20,000 hives for honey production and pollination in Idaho, North Dakota, and California. He has served the beekeeping industry as Chairman of The Honey Voluntary Quality Assurance Committee, as Trustee for the Foundation for the Preservation of Honey Bees, and as a current board member of the National Honey Board, True Source Honey, Project Apis M. (PAM), and the National Pollinator Defense Fund.
Sarah and Zac teamed up to develop a program (webinar) for up-and-coming beekeepers, called the “Next Generation Beekeeper,” to discuss issues, solutions, and consequences of inaction they saw in the beekeeping industry. In the preamble they state: “We are the next generation in our family of beekeepers, we are the drivers of the next stage of development in the products, services, expertise, and knowledge our industry provides. Whether a beekeeper is a commercial or small scale operator, or works as an educator or researcher, they are passionate about bees, and want to be involved in future beekeeping innovation, research, policy, technology, advocacy, or community leadership. In the near future, we need a functional model of collaboration and diversification. You tell us what that needs to be done, we’ll listen and help to develop a positive action plan.”
John Miller is a great grandson of one of the pioneer migratory beekeepers in the U.S., Nephi Ephraim Miller, who started in 1894 with seven boxes of bees (the better end of a swap), figured out that he could winter his Utah bees in California, and ended up with the nation’s first million-pound crop of honey. John continues in his footsteps as one of the premier almond pollinators that has truly developed commercial pollination into something that is the current basis for modern beekeeping as a career.
Finally, Sarah has been influenced by perhaps the best-known current female pioneering researcher, Dr. Marla Spivak at the University of Minnesota. She’s the only honey bee investigator to win the MacArthur “Genius” Award , and is current Fellow and McKnight Distinguished Professor in Entomology at the University of Minnesota. Other awards include the 2015 Minnesota AgriGrowth Distinguished Service Award, the 2016 Siehl Prize laureate for excellence in agriculture, and the 2016 Wings World Quest Women of Discovery Earth Award.
In summary, here’s what Sarah says she received from the above bevy of mentors:
§ From Scott Denham I learned to love bees like I was married to them.
§ From Prof. Bromenshenk I learned the scientific method.
§ From Zac Browning I learned how to be a great beekeeper by getting my hands in hundreds of his hives, alongside him and his crew. I also learned that in order to make change you have to show up and speak from the heart.
§ From John Miller I learned to see things as they really are, and then laugh about it.
§ From Marla Spivak I learned to always show up in integrity and never let myself be affected by how others judge me.
Returning to Ashland, after her seasonal position at the UM bee lab had ended, Sarah found herself out of a job during the worst of the recession (2010 – 2011). This “curse of the Xennials” meant only one thing, creating her own path to a meaningful career. Thus, she “organically” ended up developing something she calls “Bee Girl.” Employing her generation’s familiarity with the Internet and social media, Bee Girl has become a growing enterprise, complete with its own website that features employment opportunities, a cadre of volunteers and a Board of Directors made up specialists, all focusing on the Bee Girl philosophy.
Finding staff to support the Bee Girl enterprise has been Sarah’s biggest challenge. As a consequence, she and the Board decided to move the organizational model away from programs that require a large amount of staff hours, toward more collaborations and partnerships with organizations headed up by people whose passions and drive match their own.
Though coming from a family of educators, Sarah’s true love has always been conservation, as her formal education attests. While analyzing some bee pollen collected from the Midwest for a study in Dr. Bromenshenk’s lab, she concluded that there was a serious bee habitat issue. It took a decade, she says, to finally work herself into a place to be able to focus on primarily on habitat research and conservation.
Partly in preparation, Sarah, as President, chose the venue for the recent 2019 Western Apicultural Society conference specifically based on the hotel’s openness to work with local farmers and ranchers. She was meticulous about menus and worked for weeks to ensure that WAS beekeepers would be supporting local, sustainable, bee friendly operations with their conference registration dollars. Her blog post on the event is worth a read: “Our conference theme was ‘Hive Mind for the Greater Good.’ My vision was for people to come together in an inclusive space to meet, listen, share, laugh, and be inspired to go home and carry on their good work for bees, with a fresh view as to what that could look like. The comments that have been rolling in from our post-conference survey, and on social media, have shown that we were able to do just that!
“This conference was no small feat. I’ve attended (as a speaker or attendee) almost 70 beekeeping and farming conferences over the last decade. I started dreaming of hosting my own about five years ago, and stepped into the role to do just that two years ago. I’ve been muddling over every detail, and asking for direction from beekeepers, for quite some time. I’ve been considering everything from where the food would be produced, to where the tee-shirts would be made (and how the cotton in the tee-shirts is farmed); to how to create the most diverse schedule to include a variety of interests (beekeeping, native bees, research, art, health, policy and pesticide issues, the business of bees, etc.); to the length of time given between keynotes and workshops for networking and processing; to also how to create an experience for conference-goers where they get to take the microphone, and tell their stories, too!”
In keeping with the beginning theme of this interview, a post on social media sums up what appears to have been overshadowed at the WAS event, but is no less significant, “Today as I fly home from the Western Apiculture Society Conference I’ve been processing just how special this gathering was. Not only was it my first beekeeping conference to attend but also my first invitation to speak and teach at one. However, that isn’t even what was so unique. What was really special is that every single expert on stage was a female. We had women scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs, community leaders and activists all gathering around our shared love and passion for raising healthy bees.”
Sarah now is now turning her attention to larger issues, believing that “beekeepers are in very good hands.” She has taken on the role as President of the Northwest Farmers Union, an entity of the National Farmers Union (NFU). “…to help breathe life back into the organization.”
She’s looking forward to meeting the new NFU board, and staff from Washington DC, who will be coming out to Southern Oregon this fall for a strategic planning session. After that she says, “We’ll officially announce our goals. I can tell you that it will be along the lines of forming collaborations with strategic partners to support farmers and ranchers in the northwest to conserve soil, increase diversity, forge solutions to climate change, halt overproduction by using supply chain management, and build community health.”
This appears to fit in nicely with other projects listed on the Bee Girl website. Each has a unique set of collaborators:
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) project manages 196 acres of vernal pool habitat for the purposes of wetland and listed species mitigation in Central Point, Oregon. Vernal pools are a locally significant wetland type that supports unique plants and macro-invertebrate communities, including three state and federal protected species: vernal pool fairy shrimp (Branchinecta lynchi), Cook’s desert parsley (Lomatium cookii) and large-flowered wooly meadowfoam (Limnanthes pumila spp. grandiflora). Starting in 2016 ODOT partnered with the Bee Girl organization to monitor pollinators at the restoration site as an indicator for restoration success. The other partners in the project are The Nature Conservancy and Oregon Institute of Technology.
The Regenerative Bee Pasture project came out of discussion with the Northwest Farmers Union Conference in an effort to find the best possible “win-win-win” solutions for farmers and ranchers, bees and beekeepers. It employs regenerative agriculture, understanding that rebuilding soil is the first step to healthy bees, livestock, and people. The Bee Girl Organization is managing and testing two pasture test plots, with the guidance of collaborators at Eastern Washington University, Washington State University, Oregon State University (honey bee lab, and local extension), and the Jackson Soil and Water Conservation District.
Other projects on the table include developing seeds for pollinators and designing bee-friendly vineyards. Two educational efforts are in full swing, Kids and Bees, a collaboration with the American Beekeeping Federation, and The Bee Girl Center for Education and Research; a physical hub at the Sampson Creek Preserve where she will have a permanent classroom, apiaries, a honey house, and research pasture.
Where will the Bee Girl go from here? Stay tuned. Some things are certain. She will no doubt be part of the potential revolution of farmers and beekeepers working together to increase bee pasture, as well as continuing the now-apparent gender shift in beekeeping’s regulatory, research and educational endeavors.
