The women shaping the future of beekeeping

The official story leaves a lot out

Beekeeping is usually told as a story about men. The Langstroth hive. The Dadant. The founding of national associations and state extension programs and the long institutional history of apiculture.

Which is ironic, because the hive itself is almost entirely female. The queen runs it. The workers, all female, build the comb, forage, nurse the brood, guard the entrance, and regulate the temperature. The drones, the only males, do none of this. For most of beekeeping history, people didn’t even know the queen was female. Aristotle called it the “king-bee.” It wasn’t until 1609, when Charles Butler published The Feminine Monarchie, that anyone put the obvious into print: the hive is a matriarchy.

Walk into any regional bee club meeting, though, and you can see the disconnect. Most of the faces are still male. Most of the hands that have shaped the industry, or at least gotten credit for shaping it, belong to men.

But there’s another story. One that’s been running alongside the official version for a long time.

This International Women’s Day, we want to tell part of it. Not the whole thing. That would take a book. But seven chapters. Seven women who are shaping beekeeping through research, education, advocacy, and sheer stubbornness. Some are scientists. Some are educators. Some built communities from scratch because the communities that existed didn’t have room for them.

All of them took the bees seriously.

Eva Crane (1912–2007): she mapped what everyone else missed

Before Eva Crane, nobody had really looked. Not systematically.

There were centuries of beekeeping knowledge accumulated across cultures and continents. But nobody had catalogued how bees build nests in different climates, in different materials, in different shapes and orientations, and asked what that variation actually means for colony survival.

Eva Crane did.

A British nuclear physicist who came to beekeeping through a wedding gift (she and her husband received a hive in 1942), Crane ended up becoming one of the most significant bee researchers of the twentieth century. She founded the International Bee Research Association, published over 300 scientific papers, and travelled to more than 60 countries documenting the relationship between nest design and colony outcomes: cavity shapes, wall materials, insulation properties, orientation.

Her work was fundamentally about the nest as an environmental system, not just a container for bees. She asked questions about vertical cavities and overwinter survival. About what low-intervention success looked like across diverse climates. About the biology the bees were working with, not just the management techniques humans imposed on top of it.

That framing is exactly the premise Primal Bee was built on. Crane was asking thermodynamic questions decades before anyone called them that.

She was 71 when she published The Archaeology of Beekeeping, 78 when she released Bees and Beekeeping, and 87 when her 700-page World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting came out. She died in 2007 at 95.

Marla Spivak: breeding for survival

The problem wasn’t that bees were dying. The problem was that nobody had figured out how to breed bees that could survive what was killing them.

Marla Spivak figured it out.

Spivak fell in love with bees at 18, after reading a library book about beekeeping and going to work for a commercial beekeeper. She never looked back. Over the decades that followed, at the University of Minnesota, she focused on a single question: could you breed disease resistance directly into the bees?

Her answer was the Minnesota Hygienic line, honeybees genetically selected for their ability to detect and remove diseased larvae and pupae before infection spreads through a colony. The bees sniff out sickness and remove it from the nest before it becomes an epidemic. It sounds simple. It wasn’t. It required decades of careful selection, documentation, and refinement, and convincing a skeptical beekeeping community that genetics mattered as much as management.

In 2010, she received a MacArthur Fellowship for this work. She used the platform to found the University of Minnesota Bee Squad, a program that has trained thousands of urban beekeepers. After more than 30 years, Spivak retired at the end of 2024. The university raised $5 million to endow her position.

Her legacy is in the bees themselves. Colonies descended from her hygienic lines are alive today that might not otherwise be.

Julia Mahood: what you learn when there are no distractions

Every week, Julia Mahood surrenders her phone at the prison checkpoint. Steel doors bolt shut behind her. She’s been making this drive to Arrendale State Prison in Georgia for over a decade, and she’s also the current president of the Georgia Beekeepers Association. But when you talk to her, she keeps coming back to the people inside those walls.

“One of the ladies told me that prison is boring, that’s why they get these jobs. But it’s all just menial labor. She said beekeeping was the first and only opportunity she’d had to engage her brain.”

The program is one of the few available to incarcerated women that’s free, intellectually challenging, and doesn’t require outside funds. Those who continue through the ranks can earn journeyman and master beekeeper certifications, exams that have roughly an 80% fail rate on the outside.

After her first class, all five students passed the journeyman test. One of them explained why:

“Well, you know, Ms. Mahood, we don’t have anything else to do in here but study. On the outside, people are distracted by their lives.”

For Julia, the program is something more than education. Many incarcerated women have histories of sexual abuse and trauma. The combination of nature, caretaking, and cooperative work fills a need that most prison programming doesn’t touch.

“For women especially, they’re naturally nurturers. They have these creatures to take care of. They worry about them. All this nurturing energy, where’s it going to go?”

The work also crosses social boundaries that prison typically reinforces. Julia has watched it bring together people of different races, ages, and backgrounds around a shared task. She recalls testing at a men’s facility where one man was struggling to lift a heavy box filled with honey. The others, who weren’t being tested, ran up to help. “That guy looked at me and goes, ‘This is how we do it here. We help each other out.’”

“This has been the most rewarding thing I’ve done besides being a parent. They constantly give back more than they realize. It’s just really hard for me to feel sorry for myself after spending a day there.”

Jasmine Joy: rescue, relocate, rehabilitate, educate

Jasmine Joy grew up watching her grandfather put on a bee suit that looked like an astronaut’s gear and climb a grassy hill. She was four years old. Before he walked up, he told her one thing:

“No matter what happens, don’t be afraid.”

She wasn’t. That seems to have set the trajectory.

Joy is the founder of Beelieve Hawaii, which she launched in 2012 as a humane alternative to extermination. She’s also a Reiki practitioner, a former professional skimboarder, a poet, and the creator of VBU, an online ethical beekeeping course now in its sixth cohort. Her path into bees was unconventional: she started by making organic skincare products from the hive at Honey Girl Organics on O‘ahu before she ever kept bees herself.

“I did it backwards,” she says. And she thinks that changed how she sees the whole enterprise.

“Anything I touch, whether it be my bees, the products I make, even just touching the lives of my students, they all have that healing Reiki energy.”

In August 2020, she rescued bees from all four towers of ‘Iolani Palace, the only royal palace in the United States. In five cohorts of her school, only two men have graduated. She has never marketed it as a women’s program. The women just show up. Joy has her own framework for why, rooted in ancient symbolism and the interior world of the hive.

“The hive is like a womb. Honeybees are solar animals. They have five eyes. They see in ultraviolet. But inside that hive, it’s completely dark. People don’t think about it that way.”

She draws a connection between bees and snakes: both live in the dark, both carry venom, both are deeply medicinal, and both terrify people. “These are ancient creatures. Ancient practice. Ancient ritual. I think men over time have become more and more separated from that connection.”

Joy also runs a pollinator outreach program for kids, what she calls POP talks, and has been teaching third graders at Hoa ‘Āina O Mākaha, a farm on the west side of O‘ahu that shares a fence line with an elementary school. She’s been there for eleven years. Her slogan: rescue, relocate, rehabilitate, and educate. The full hexagon, she says.

Her students don’t just buy bees from her at the end of the program. They earn them, after sixteen weeks of instruction built from fifteen years of her own experience.

“When I bring the bees to schools, I tell the kids: I rescued these bees from somewhere. And it just opens their minds and their hearts to possibilities they wouldn’t otherwise know.”

 

Raylynn White: science-based, zero tolerance

Raylynn White’s day job is clinical social work. She has spent twenty-six years in the profession, working across some of the most intense areas of healthcare: ICU, Psychiatry, Surgery, Forensic services, Palliative care, and now Women’s Health .

But after hours, Raylynn becomes something else entirely.

She runs Bee Haven, a global Facebook-based beekeeping community with nearly 60,000 followers, known for its friendly atmosphere and science-based discussions about honey bees. She is also known locally as “The Bee Lady” at the provincial maximum-security penitentiary, where she teaches beekeeping to male inmates, introducing them to the structure, discipline, and wonder of the honey bee colony.

Her journey into beekeeping happened almost by accident.

One day, while working in the ICU, a physiotherapist began talking to Raylynn about honey bees. The conversation sparked her curiosity immediately.

She needed to see this world for herself.

Raylynn tracked down a local beekeeper and arranged to visit a hive. When the lid came off for the first time, something clicked instantly.

“I just lifted the lid and I was like… holy shit, I love this. And I never stopped since.”

What started as curiosity quickly became a serious pursuit of knowledge. Raylynn later completed the University of Montana’s Master Beekeeper Program, where she excelled academically. Her capstone research paper, “Propolis and Wound Care Management,” was published in Bee Culture Magazine, bringing attention to the medicinal properties of propolis and its potential applications in healing.

The founders of the University of Montana’s program later endorsed Bee Haven, encouraging their students to use the community as a science-based learning resource.

“What’s there is science-based. It’s backed by research, and it’s real,” Raylynn explains. “I’m the sole administrator on Bee Haven. You really don’t know who’s posting what on most of these sites. I don’t allow any nonsense. If someone’s rude, sarcastic, or mean — they’re blocked. Zero tolerance.”

Raylynn has also been candid about the challenges of being a woman in beekeeping in Newfoundland, a small province with roughly 130 registered beekeepers, most of whom are men.

When she first joined the local beekeeping club, she was told she was “too excitable” and “too much of a whirlwind.”

When she began sharing educational content online, some asked her bluntly: “Who do you think you are?”

When Raylynn placed two honey bee hives at the provincial prison as part of her educational program with inmates, one man from the local beekeeping community reportedly went to the prison and banged on the steel doors demanding the bees be removed.

She has also faced dismissive behavior, comments about her appearance, and flirtatious or uncomfortable interactions from male beekeepers.

“I felt like I was never taken seriously.”

Even now, after years of building Bee Haven into a thriving international community, she still receives negative comments on many of her posts.

“And sadly,” she says, “most of it comes from men.”

Raylynn has walked into numerous beekeeping meetings and conferences where she was the only woman in the room. At the American Beekeeping Federation conference in Reno, she opened the door to attend a commercial beekeeping educational session and realized she was the only woman present.

“I took a deep breath, walked in, and took a seat. I didn’t care.”

Her message to other women considering entering the field of beekeeping — or any male-dominated space — is simple:

“Don’t back down. Walk into that room and sit down. You have every right to be there. Be brave.”

Nichole Danova: evidence first, everything else second

Nichole Danova came to beekeeping the way she came to everything else: through evidence.

Danova spent years as a veterinary surgeon leading a referral and emergency center before retiring from medicine. She grew up in England around farming, had exposure to apiaries early, and eventually channeled her scientific background into Modern Beekeeper, a company focused on science-based equipment and education.

“This just doesn’t make sense. It’s 2025. Why are we still using these wooden hives that haven’t changed since the seventeen hundreds?”

She walked into a corner of the North American Bee Expo, saw the Primal Bee hive, and stopped. The language the founders were using, the thermodynamic framing, the biology-first design, was, in her words, music to her ears. She’s been a Primal Bee retailer since the company’s earliest days.

“I think that they’ve done that just tenfold above everybody else, using data and science and creating better environments that are more productive.”

Danova has noticed a pattern in how men and women approach equipment adoption differently. She thinks it comes down to motivation.

“I sometimes feel like we embrace the modernization of beekeeping because it’s coming from us being caretakers. We want to take care of the bees the best way we can. Whereas guys might be coming at it to say, we want the biggest production of honey, so I can be like the big beekeeper on the block.”

She cares about supporting women in business, not through formal programs, but through the kind of quiet networking she wishes she’d had access to earlier.

“When you’re a young boy, you go out with your uncle to go golfing, and you listen to somebody talking about stocks and bonds. For women, we don’t do those same things. We don’t get that same foundation.”

Different why. Same bees.

Katie Metzger: you don’t need a backyard to keep bees

Not everyone who wants to keep bees can keep them. That’s the problem Katie Metzger set out to solve.

As the founder of Hānai Hives on the North Shore of Oahu, Metzger runs a hive adoption and mentoring service for people who can’t keep bees on their own property, whether because of space, zoning, landlords, or simply life. Her model: the hive lives at one of her apiaries, but you’re still the beekeeper. You still learn. You still visit. You still do the inspections. You still harvest the honey.

The name says it all. “Hānai” is a Hawaiian word meaning to adopt and to nurture, to raise something as your own without biological relation.

Metzger’s beekeeping journey started at her children’s elementary school garden program in Ojai, California, where a documentary about bee decline moved a group of parents to take action. She eventually moved to Oahu and launched Hānai Hives in 2021, building a community-driven venture that blends education, agritourism, and mentorship. She now partners with the Kōkua Hawaiʻi Foundation as the resident beekeeper at the Kōkua Learning Farm and offers immersive bee farm tours on the North Shore.

Her model is part of a broader shift in who beekeeping is for. The idea that you need land, a yard, a rural address, that you need a particular kind of life to access the bees, is slowly being dismantled. Programs like Hānai Hives prove that the connection between keeper and colony doesn’t require ownership in the traditional sense.

What the bees already know

There’s a version of this story that ends with a neat thesis: women are natural beekeepers because of something essential about how they relate to living systems. It’s tidy. It’s also a little too tidy.

The real story is messier and more interesting.

Eva Crane was doing foundational research while the industry built its institutions around other people. Marla Spivak was breeding disease resistance into bees for thirty years. Julia Mahood has been going to a prison every week for over a decade. Jasmine Joy has been teaching third graders about pollinators on the west side of Oahu for eleven years. Raylynn White built a 60,000-member science-based community from Newfoundland. Nichole Danova has been arguing for evidence-based equipment since before most beekeepers were asking those questions. Katie Metzger made it possible to keep bees without a backyard.

What they share isn’t a single approach. Some are technical. Some are spiritual. Some are clinical. Some are deeply community-oriented. What they share is a relationship with the bees that takes the bees seriously.

The hive isn’t a box. The bees aren’t just an insect. They’re a superorganism that has been doing its work for millions of years, in the dark, without management plans or inspection schedules. They know what they need. They regulate their own temperature. They build their own architecture. They raise their own young and fight their own wars and make their own medicine from tree resin.

What we get to do is steward that. And the women featured here have built their practice around a deep respect for the miracle they’re working with.

Happy International Women’s Day from everyone at Primal Bee. If you know a woman beekeeper who deserves a spotlight, tag her in the comments.