Amalia also got involved with a pastured poultry business; she teamed up with an investor and some Amish farmers in the area and ran the business for a few years. She believes the business could have been quite successful — all the early indications were positive — but she had to withdraw unexpectedly due to not one, but two imminent blessed events. Amalia learned she was expecting twins, due the night of the Seder, and realized running a business at the same time would stretch her limits too far.

A Sweet New Direction

That spring, while staying home nursing (“and nursing and nursing!”) two babies, Amalia decided to start a beehive. It’s been six years since, and she’s never looked back. “In the end, beekeeping was more suited to my day-to-day life than a poultry business,” she acknowledges. “I fell in love with it!”

At first, Amalia turned to a local beekeeping association for advice and support, but she was disappointed to learn that they advocated artificial methods, like giving the bees high fructose corn syrup or soy to replace nectar from flowers, or using chemical pesticides to deal with hive pests and diseases. “I believe there’s no substitute for nature’s own food,” she says. She was also disturbed that some beekeepers exploit their hives, taking out too much honey at a time, especially before the cold season when bees need extra honey for insulation and food.

Asking the locals about employing more organic methods just drew blank looks. So Amalia turned to the internet and discovered Dee Lusby, a beekeeper in Arizona who, along with her now-deceased husband, founded the organic beekeeping movement.

Amalia trained with Lusby, who keeps a whopping 700 hives in remote areas near the Mexican border. These days, Amalia maintains hives both at home and in a more rural setting; she harvests honey and performs hive removals for clients. Although there are many beekeepers in Ohio, few operate organically, so Amalia’s services are in demand. She relishes her work. “Working in beehives is like a form of meditation,” Amalia says. “It requires a higher level of focus; the complexity of the hive is magnificent.”

Hive removal is one of Amalia’s favorite bee-related activities. It’s disruptive to the bees, but inevitable if they can no longer stay in their old habitat. Amalia tries to be a gentle as possible, maintaining plenty of focus and calm and taking breaks if necessary. “If you can find the queen and move her to the new hive, the process goes much more smoothly,” she says.

Does she ever get stung? “At the beginning, when I was less experienced and more klutzy, I got stung a few times,” she admits. “Like all animals, bees sense your mood and will be more relaxed if you’re coming from a place of love and appreciation. In our culture, there is a lot of fear around bees, but it’s 98 percent misplaced. Bees aren’t interested in you unless you make nectar or pollen. And as long as you don’t directly menace their hive, their home, by looking, smelling, or acting like a bear, they won’t go on the defensive!”

Hives are a constant source of wonder, Amalia explains. Sometimes she’ll open a hive to find the bees “chaining,” connecting to each other, end to end, to measure the hive to create the comb, working together with a seamless collective intelligence.

Another time she shook a comb too hard when taking it out (fresh combs are very delicate until the bees reinforce them), and it collapsed, spilling into a mess of comb and nectar. “I usually see worker bees as singles, but at times like this they work as one body,” Amalia says. “Here they spread out together like I’d spread out my arms, and sponged up the whole thing en masse! In minutes the nectar was cleaned away.”

Holy Bees

Amalia describes bees as a physical manifestation of the way Hashem brings life to the world. These small creatures take the beauty and fragrance of flowers and plants, and transform them into a life-giving substance. In the process, they perpetuate life among the plants that provide the nectar and pollen, since their flitting between blossoms creates all-important pollination. “It takes 200,000 flowers to produce one pound of honey,” Amalia says. A worker bee may devote its lifetime to producing 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.

When speaking about bees and Torah, Amalia often draws parallels between bee communities and Jewish communities. “Bees are the only animal in Torah that are referred to as a eidah, a term for community usually used for people,” she says. “Similarly, Torah isn’t meant to be practiced only by single Jews, but within an interdependent, harmonious, sophisticated community for which bees are a kind of model.” Jewish communities should ideally follow the example of bees: when bees do their work, the only outcome is to benefit plants and other animals; they build and give life without causing harm. As they help their community, they help the wider world.

Beehives produce six products, which Amalia likes to display as the six points of a Magen David. There’s honey and pollen, as well as beeswax for candles. Propolis, a compound made from tree sap and used to reinforce the comb, is valued as a vitamin supplement, healing agent for wounds, and an analgesic. The venom from bee stingers is believed to help with inflammation and autoimmune diseases, and is especially popular in Asia as a treatment for arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Royal jelly, which is fed to baby bees during their first three days of life, and to the queen during her developmental period, has been used for a wide variety of medicinal purposes. “But while some raabbanut hechsherim give a hechsher for royal jelly, others, such as the OU, won’t,” Amalia cautions. “That’s because it’s produced from a gland in the bees’ heads, rather than from nectar.”

Doctors have found honey useful in wound care and as a cough suppressant, and research supports its antibacterial properties. In her own family, Amalia administers honey and tea with honey as soon as someone has a sore throat.

Save the Bees, Save the Planet

Beekeepers across the world have become increasingly concerned about bee colony collapse, a phenomenon in which large numbers of hives have failed. Colony collapse doesn’t just mean we’ll have less honey, or that honey prices will rise. The lack of bees to pollinate crops means that farmers will experience lower yields on their fields and orchards as well.

While no one has identified a single factor causing colonies to collapse, it’s clear we’ve endangered bees by taking away many of their natural foraging opportunities. “Most suburban developments used to be forests and fields,” Amalia explains. “Not only did we take them away, but we put this elevated value on Kentucky bluegrass lawns — a double whammy! They’re not just costly to maintain; they’re a food desert for bees.”

Amalia sometimes goes to conferences on sustainable food or the environment to speak about how people can help (her “Bee Awesome” presentation). She’ll show audiences bird’s-eye views of their neighborhoods before and after they were developed, illustrating how a quarter to a third of the square footage is now taken up by lawn space. Even in farms, the trend toward monoculture (single-crop) farming has destroyed a lot of bee forage.

Amalia encourages people to landscape their yards in ways that will benefit “People, Pollinators, and the Planet.” She filled her yard with perennial flowers that require much less maintenance than grass and are so striking, visitors often stop to compliment her. “It’s not a free-form meadow; it’s esthetically designed,” she says.

The surrounding foraging environment also impacts the flavor of honey the bees produce. Different types of flowers produce different flavors of honey, and Amalia observes which flowers her bees feed on and labels the honeys accordingly. Her honey comes in flavors that include buckwheat, apple blossom, Japanese cane, clover, and blueberry.

In one of her presentations, which she’s entitled “The Land of Milk and Honey,” she enacts a kind of “Seder” in which she puts six or seven different varieties of honey into shot glasses and leads tastings. Her accompanying narrative will depend on which Yom Tov is coming up (or the religion of her audience — not always Jewish). The tastings include pairing different honeys with the foods that complement them, as well as inspiring people to act on behalf of pollinators and a healthier environment.

Buckwheat honey, for example, is dark and has a strong, distinctive, earthy taste that not everyone enjoys. But paired with dark chocolate, Amalia says, it takes on a whole new dimension. Those tastings are her favorite way to eat honey, but a close runner-up is simply to slather butter and honey on a piece of whole wheat toast for breakfast.

The Business of Bee-ing Educated

Beekeeping turned Amalia into an entrepreneur. She sells her honey in many forms: honeycomb, varietal honey, honey straws, raw honey, and propolis. She makes artistic specialty packages for new couples (“honey”moon gifts), creates party favors, and sells honey to nonprofits like schools at a wholesale rate, allowing them to resell at a markup as a fundraiser. (“It’s healthier than cookies!” she quips.)

But Amalia’s also managed to combine her talents as a performer and educator into a unique bee education business. “In any business, you have to decide what makes you distinct, and how to focus,” she says. “In my case, I’m a trained performer, with an educator’s ability to articulate concepts, and I have a lot of background in Judaism and environmental studies.”

With her “Hands-on Honey” program, groups visit her apiary or she comes to them, toting around her observation hive. In these sessions, which she leads for all sorts of groups, she invites participants to join her in extracting honey from the comb, bottling honey, planting a pollinator garden, and making natural cosmetics from hive products. She’s done presentations in public libraries, schools, businesses, and the Jewish Federation.

The meticulous, coordinated efforts of bees working in the hive inspired Amalia’s “Beehive Your Classroom” and “Beehive Your Business” programs. In classrooms, Amalia works with pupils by having them play out the roles bees play in the hive. “That’s really fun!” she says. “I designate workers, drones, and a queen, and I bring costumes and props, like construction helmets for hive-building workers and spoons and plates for the workers who feed the queen.” Other kids act out roles like guards, foragers, food preparers, “doctors,” and baby raisers.

They even imitate the “dance” of the forager bees, a series of shimmying movements that communicate the location of food sources as far as ten miles away to other bees. She’s done the program with Boy and Girl Scouts, homeschoolers, camps, and synagogue groups, too. Sometimes she’ll bring her guitar or dulcimer and sing nature-themed songs with the children.

For corporate events, Amalia runs a similar program. Like a business, beehives have limited resources, she points out, and have to create strategies based on their internal resources and the wider environment to be successful and attain multiple goals. She even convinces grownups to dress up as bees! “People talk more freely when dressed up as a bee,” she says. “It becomes a great team building exercise, and sometimes help shift the workplace dynamics. We simulate beehive processes with the employees, stopping every so often to relate them back to the workplace.”

It certainly would be wonderful if every human community could attain the same industry, harmonious coordination, and shared focus of a beehive. As our Jewish community approaches the New Year, with its emphasis on forgiveness and restoring peace, perhaps we can take our cue from the bees. When we all pursue our diverse roles with the single purpose of avodas Hashem, the result is sure to be sweet as honey.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 511)