Kit Smith spent nearly 40 years in the Navy, including time on a nuclear weapons security alert team. After he left, he struggled with PTSD, depression, and the particular loneliness that comes from leaving a tight-knit military family.
"Before, I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean and in a rowboat by myself," he told University of Missouri Extension.
Julia Mahood surrenders her phone at the prison checkpoint every Tuesday morning. Steel doors bolt shut behind her. She's been making this drive to teach beekeeping at Lee Arrendale State Prison for nine years.
Maria Roman, a teenager in the foster care system in New Haven, was drifting away from things she once loved when someone suggested she spend 15 weeks surrounded by bees.
Different circumstances. Different populations. Same intervention.
They all found something in the hive.
Stories like these have been circulating for years. Veterans saying beekeeping calms them. Incarcerated women describing it as the first thing that engaged their brains. Foster youth finding stability in the rhythms of the hive.
But until recently, it was all anecdote.
In Fall 2024, researchers published the first peer-reviewed study on beekeeping as therapy for veterans. The results confirmed what participants had been saying: statistically significant reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements in mobility and overall health.
The science is finally catching up to what the bees already knew.
Beekeeping for veterans with PTSD: "idle time is bad time"
Kit Smith served in the U.S. Navy on a nuclear weapons security alert team. After nearly 40 years in the military, including tours that left him legally blind and struggling with PTSD, he joined the Heroes to Hives program through University of Missouri Extension.
"Being with others showed me that I was not alone," Smith told MU Extension. "Before, I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean and in a rowboat by myself."
He found something in the bees. Not just distraction, but purpose.
"With PTSD, idle time is bad time," Smith said. "That's when stinkin' thinkin' creeps in. That's when suicidal ideas creep in."
Heroes to Hives, founded in 2015 by veteran and entomologist Dr. Adam Ingrao at Michigan State University, has now trained over 15,000 veterans through its nine-month program. Seventy-seven percent of surveyed participants say beekeeping benefits their mental health.
The VA's own HIVES program, which began at the Manchester VA Medical Center in 2019, has expanded to facilities in Kansas City, Palo Alto, Cleveland, Oklahoma City, and others. Veterans learn beekeeping alongside mindfulness practices: diaphragmatic breathing, yoga, guided imagery, five-senses grounding exercises.
"The anecdotes we have heard are fantastic," said Alicia Semiatin, who heads the mental health program in Manchester. "Folks find that it is really something that they benefit from at the time they are doing the beekeeping, and the benefits seem to be carrying over not only for days but weeks afterward."
Why beekeeping works as therapy
Army veteran Wendi Zimmermann, who participated in the Manchester program, described what happens in her head when she's around the hives.
"The buzzing fills that void in my head where clutter can go," she said. "Instead of thinking of the things that clutter my brain or the experiences that clutter my brain, I think of the bees."
Dr. Ingrao, who founded Heroes to Hives after his own struggles with opioids, depression, and guilt following a career-ending injury in 2004, puts it simply: "If you're not focused on your bees, they'll let you know."
The hive demands presence. You can't be somewhere else mentally when you're standing in front of 60,000 stinging insects.
"You're not thinking about what happened in Afghanistan or Iraq," Ingrao explained. "You're thinking about what's happening right here, right now."
This forced mindfulness is part of what makes beekeeping different from other animal-assisted therapies. Dogs and horses respond to emotional cues. Bees don't care about your trauma. They respond to movement, to smoke, to the temperature of the hive. You have to meet them on their terms.
Prison beekeeping programs: rehabilitation through the hive
Julia Mahood drives north on I-985 every Tuesday morning, toward Alto, Georgia. At check-in, she surrenders her phone and driver's license. Steel doors bolt shut behind her.
She's been teaching beekeeping at Lee Arrendale State Prison, the largest women's facility in Georgia, for nine years.
"One of the ladies told me that prison is boring," Julia says. "That's why they get jobs. But it's all menial labor. She said beekeeping was the first and only opportunity she'd had to engage her brain."
The Georgia Prison Beekeeping Program now operates in eight facilities across the state. More than 200 incarcerated people have earned beekeeping certifications. Some have achieved master beekeeper status behind bars, passing exams with an 80% fail rate on the outside.
"For women especially, they're naturally nurturers," Julia explains. "They have these creatures to take care of. They worry about them. All this nurturing energy, where's it going to go?"
In prison, there isn't much to care for. Pets aren't allowed. Gardens are limited. Children and grandchildren exist only in photographs and carefully rationed phone calls.
The bees become something else entirely.
One student, asked how she passed the difficult journeyman exam, gave Julia an answer that stuck: "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."
Julia has watched women work together across racial lines, across factional divides, united by the shared task of keeping bees alive. At one facility she visited, inmates were using toilet paper tubes as smoker fuel and walking to the welding shed to light propane because they had no proper equipment. They made it work.
During a testing session, one man was lifting a heavy box of honey when his makeshift equipment started to give way. Men from different backgrounds ran up to help him, even though it wasn't their test.
"That guy looked at me and said, 'This is how we do it here, Ms. Mahood. We help each other out.'"
Beekeeping therapy for at-risk youth
In New Haven, Connecticut, Sarah Taylor runs the Huneebee Project, a 15-week therapeutic job skills program for youth ages 15 to 23, most with past or present involvement in the foster care system.
Taylor is a licensed clinical social worker who burned out working within systems she felt were failing kids. She found beekeeping as a personal refuge and realized it could be more.
"One hundred percent of the youth we engage have a pre-existing mental health diagnosis," Taylor told Dwight Hall at Yale. "At least 70% have child protective services or foster care involvement. We're building job skills in a trauma-informed context."
The program has graduated multiple cohorts since 2018 and now maintains around 40 honey bee colonies across nine sites in New Haven and Bridgeport.
What Taylor observes goes beyond job training.
"There's something that happens when you are in a bee yard, and you are activating a very natural flight response, but in a controlled environment," she explained. "For someone who has had a history of trauma, who has not had control over that frayed response, to be in a place where we're giving them the tools and support to be in charge, that is healing."
The youth conduct grounding exercises before approaching the hives. They learn to regulate their own nervous systems in the presence of something that could sting them. And then they translate that regulation into other settings.
Corporate beekeeping programs: wellness beyond clinical settings
The therapeutic applications of beekeeping aren't limited to clinical populations.
Planet Bee Foundation, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has brought beekeeping to corporate campuses at Google, Stanford, Genentech, Cisco, and others. Their work demonstrates how the same principles that help veterans with PTSD and incarcerated women can benefit anyone looking for connection, presence, and purpose.
Dr. Jason Graham, now Senior Beekeeping Advisor at Primal Bee, spent years working with Planet Bee on corporate programs. He recalls one session with the Google School for Leaders, where top executives from headquarters around the world came to Sunnyvale for a hive dive.
"We gave them bee suits and we actually had to buy brand new bee suits for them because, you know, it's Google top execs," Jason said. "We didn't want to give them a dingy old bee suit that's been used several times."
Those suits were later donated to school programs. Kids from the local community wore the same gear that Google executives had used the week before.
Google maintained blue, red, yellow, and green teams, each managing a hive while competing for strongest colony and highest honey production. The program became a way for engineers to work together on problems outside their direct job responsibilities, to see strengths in each other they might not notice in a conference room.
"There's a place for beekeeping in corporate environments too," Jason said. "It was exciting for me to see and be part of."
Research on beekeeping and mental health
For years, the therapeutic beekeeping movement ran on stories. Veterans saying they felt better. Incarcerated people describing purpose. Youth finding calm.
Now the research is starting to accumulate.
The 2024 study in Therapeutic Recreation Journal documented significant changes in veterans' quality of life using standardized assessments. A pilot study at Saint Joseph's University found beekeeping helped reduce stress and improve well-being among college students. The VA is now measuring outcomes with GAD-7 (anxiety), PHQ-2 (depression), and PROMIS-10 (quality of life) instruments.
The hypothesis emerging from this research: beekeeping combines multiple therapeutic elements that are difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Mindfulness. Bees demand presence. You cannot be distracted.
Connection to nature. The hive exists outside human concerns. It operates on its own rhythms.
Responsibility for something fragile. The bees need care. They respond to attention.
Community. Beekeeping is often done in groups. Veterans with veterans. Inmates with inmates. Youth with mentors.
Skill building. There's always more to learn. The hive is endlessly complex.
Purpose. The bees produce something. Honey, wax, pollination. The work matters.
Julia Mahood, who has spent nine years teaching in Georgia prisons, puts it simply: "I know that 98% of incarcerated women have had some history of sexual abuse. This is a population that really needs healing. And beekeeping is incredibly meditative. You have to be right there with your head in the hive."
Therapeutic beekeeping programs across the U.S.
High school beekeeping programs are emerging across the country. The South Portland High School Bee Club in Maine has been operating since 2016. Bangor High School launched a program in 2025 with support from Maine Bee Wellness. 4-H offers beekeeping curriculum nationwide.
University programs are expanding. The University of Minnesota runs a Bee Veterans program at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Bees4Vets in Nevada partners with the University of Nevada, Reno to research whether beekeeping helps veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries.
Prison programs are spreading. Washington State runs beekeeping in nine of its ten facilities. Massachusetts launched a pilot at Pondville Correctional Center in 2025 with Best Bees Company.
The VA's HIVES program continues to add facilities. Hives for Heroes has grown to over 10,000 members managing more than 100,000 hives across all 50 states.
What started as scattered experiments is becoming a recognized therapeutic modality.
The healing power of beekeeping
One of the most humbling things about volunteering in a prison, Julia says, is that it reminds you of what you take for granted.
Her younger son went to college during her first year of teaching at Arrendale. His birthday fell on a class day. She brought birthday cake cookies from the grocery store and mentioned she was sad she couldn't be with him.
The room sang Happy Birthday together. Women talked about their children and grandchildren. They missed birthdays too.
She keeps driving north on Tuesdays.
"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."
The bees don't care about your history. They don't care about your diagnosis, your sentence, your trauma, your rank. They care about whether you're present, whether you're calm, whether you're paying attention.
Maybe that's why they help.
