By Toni (DC resident, beekeeper, and author of City Bees Blogspot)

Last year, when the Obamas accepted the offer of a beehive for the White House kitchen garden, Mayor Fenty also opened one of DC’s own youth gardens to beekeeping. In June 2009, a happy family of honeybees began zooming around the blooms at and around the Lederer Youth Garden on Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE.  The bees have flourished there, and their presence yielded yet another golden harvest; The Whole Planet Foundation (of Whole Foods Markets) gave DC Parks & Rec a grant of $25,000 for additional gardens at recreation centers around the city, with $5,000 designated for beehives and beekeeping education. Soon, honeybees will be pollinating and supporting the green spaces at 5 additional locations around the city.

Many believe that keeping bees may be the most powerful single contribution an urban dweller can make to the quality and viability of the surrounding environment. Most of us associate bees with crops and farming in rural settings, but every plant that sets a bloom needs pollination, and those plants are the basis for life for the entire spectrum of living things around us. In addition to providing food and habitat, plants which require pollination clean our air and water, and if they do not receive that pollination, they grow with less vigor, shut down for the season sooner, and remove less carbon. DC’s tree cover, green roofs, community gardens, park lands, river basins, window boxes, and herb plots provide more than enough forage for bees, which in turn will provide even more shade, fruits, clean air, and critter companionship for us.

But the DC Parks & Rec beekeeping program does not actually begin with the bees: it starts with the community. DC Parks & Rec is first offering an Urban Beekeeping Seminar, a series of 4 talks from Monday, February 20th through Monday, March 15, for people interested in volunteering in DC’ s public apiaries. This overview will provide just enough background for the would-be(e) beekeepers to work alongside more experienced volunteer beekeepers from around the region, and perhaps to become next year’s mentors.

We also have equipment to assemble and paint, bees from the Virginia Sustainable Honeybee Program due to arrive in late April or May, and sites to set up for the arrival of these colonies. By July, we should have some honey to harvest from the Lederer Bees (and maybe some of the newbees!) and we may be turning some of the beeswax into soap — all with the health and continued survival of the colonies as the primary goal.

This picture is me visiting with a February bee on my roof. She’s a cold blooded creature who nonetheless has to generate heat from working her muscles if she wants to fly, so they often land on me when I am up there in the cold. I think of it as if they are taking a breather, relaxing while scarfing up some mammalian warmth!

I’d like to invite you to contact me (toni@dcbeekeepers.org) if you have questions about beekeeping in DC.

Editor’s note: DC Parks and Rec Beekeeping Class is now full!!!  However, the Bowie-Upper Marlboro Beekeepers Association is offering a short beekeeping course beginning March 4th in Largo, MD.  Find more info about that course here!