A 1919 federal recommendation, still standing today
The story of veteran beekeeping in America is usually told as a recent phenomenon, but the federal government actually wrote it down for the first time over a hundred years ago.
In April 1919, as soldiers returned from the First World War, the United States Federal Board for Vocational Education published a small vocational guide called Opportunity Monograph, Vocational Rehabilitation Series No. 37: Bee Keeping. It recommended beekeeping as a vocation for disabled veterans coming home from the war, framing it as a way for men with bodies that had been broken in service to make a living, stay outdoors, and reconnect to the country they had just fought for. The bar to entry was low. A few hives could produce a real income. For a generation of soldiers returning to find their old career paths closed off by injury, the federal government decided beekeeping might be a way back.
That recommendation went mostly nowhere as a federal initiative. And then, quietly, in pieces, over the next century, it found its way into being anyway.
Today there are at least five major programs in the United States that exist to teach American veterans how to keep bees. Almost all of them are run by veterans themselves. A few have measured outcomes. One has produced the first peer-reviewed study of beekeeping as a clinical intervention for veterans, published in 2024. Most of them are free.
The story starts with the largest of them, in a kitchen in Lansing.
Heroes to Hives: a free 9-month beekeeping curriculum for veterans
Adam Ingrao came home from the Army in the early 2000s after a training injury cut a six-year enlistment short. He came home into the opioid epidemic.
"Vicodin was just being handed out like candy," he told us. "I started to really rely on that as a source of being able to even work."
He went back to school on the GI Bill, enrolled at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to study plant science, and signed up for a beekeeping elective. He had no particular reason to. There was just a slot in his schedule.
"It just completely changed my life. It was the first time, since I was in the military, where I was like, wow, this is the first time I actually feel like I could serve my country again, by protecting pollinators. The time in the apiary was time where I wasn't thinking about my battle buddies that never came home. I wasn't thinking about the survivor's guilt of not deploying with them in Afghanistan or Iraq. I was being present."
His wife, who was finishing a graduate degree in transpersonal psychology, named what he was describing.
"She was like, this is mindfulness."
In 2014, after Ingrao moved to Michigan State for a PhD in entomology, the two of them sat in their Lansing kitchen and asked a question that would eventually reach almost twenty thousand American veterans. Could other people have this experience too?
That winter, Heroes to Hives ran its first cohort: five veterans. Lectures in Ingrao's living room. The wood shop was the lab. The two-acre urban farm was the teaching apiary. At the end of the season, they extracted honey at a local food co-op, and the spouse of one of the veterans pulled Adam's wife aside.
"I don't know where he would be without this."
"It's been 11 years," Adam told us. "And that one still chokes me up."
Today Heroes to Hives is the largest agricultural training program for veterans in the United States. The program was a nine-month curriculum until this year, but due to federal funding cuts, it is now an on-demand program with over 50 hours of beginning beekeeping curriculum, available free online through their YouTube channel, to any seeking a beginning beekeeping education. About four to five thousand people enroll each year, and in total, they’ve served over 20,000 veterans. The program runs through the Michigan Food and Farming Systems and partners with Universities, like the University of Missouri to offer hands-on education to complement the online program.
The therapeutic side of the work was, for the first decade, mostly anecdotal. Heroes to Hives evaluations consistently surfaced reduced stress, reduced PTSD symptoms, less loneliness, less depression, and less suicidal ideation, all attributed by veterans themselves to time with their bees. None of it had been measured in a peer-reviewed study.
In 2024, that changed.
A study published in the Therapeutic Recreation Journal, co-authored by Ingrao with Valerie Carter (Manchester VA Medical Center), Jessie Bennett (University of New Hampshire), and Christine Gould (Manchester VAMC), became the first peer-reviewed research in any English-language journal to measure beekeeping as a therapeutic intervention for veterans. Nine veterans at the Manchester VA participated in fifteen 120-minute sessions over a 16-week period in the summer of 2022. Each session paired hive work with a brief mindfulness practice facilitated by a recreational therapist. Diaphragmatic breathing. Bhramari Pranayama, where the exhale resembles the sound of a bee. Guided imagery. A five-senses grounding exercise.
Veterans went through one of those for five to ten minutes outside the apiary. Then they suited up.
The results, measured using the standardized EQ-5D-5L quality-of-life assessment:
- Anxiety and depression scores improved by roughly 31% session over session (p < 0.001).
- Self-reported overall health on the visual analog scale improved by about 10% (p < 0.001).
- Self-care was approaching significant positive change.
The one finding that pushed in the other direction was mobility. The authors traced it to the physical demands of working a Langstroth hive, which can require lifting forty-pound boxes and bending repeatedly. They recommended adaptations like hive lifters and chairs, and noted that alternative hive styles such as Slovenian AZ hives or top-bar hives could mitigate the issue in future research.
"In that two-hour segment of just being with bees, we saw this massive reduction in something that, you know, people are taking pills for to get results like that. It was the first study of its kind."
We asked Adam what he thinks the actual mechanism is.
"I think nature is our ultimate teacher. A lot of the mental health conditions that we're seeing in society today have to do with the disconnect from nature. Beekeeping is an entryway into a connection with nature that's an activity you can do, while opening a gateway. With agriculture in general, you have to have land, you have to have equipment. With bees, you literally could put a couple hives in your backyard and be able to get that connection on demand."
There's a second layer to it that's specific to veterans. Heroes to Hives has a name for it: Continued national service.
"We're always trying to serve something greater than ourselves. That's a thing that really connects with vets. You've served to protect our national security. Now you're serving to protect our food security. It fills this role of fulfillment."
The third layer is harder to put into a study.
"You go and talk to your bees. Tell your bees the stuff you can't tell anybody else. The stuff that weighs on your soul. The moral injury of war. They'll be just getting it out and feeling like someone's listening. It's an amazing conduit for healing."
Hives for Heroes: the largest veteran beekeeping mentor network in the US
Steve Jimenez is a US Marine Corps veteran from Houston. Texas A&M, Rice MBA, deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. By the time he got home, he had a Fortune 50 consulting career and was still battling depression, isolation, and severe PTSD when a friend invited him to a beekeeping event he had no interest in attending.
He went anyway.
"He came home with everything and felt like he had nothing," reads the line at the top of the Hives for Heroes site. It's written in the third person about Jimenez himself. "The bees gave me what nothing else could: chaos to calmness."
In 2018, Jimenez founded Hives for Heroes with a single hive in Houston. The model is built around one-on-one relationships. One mentor. One new beekeeper, called a "NewBEE." One hive. Mentors commit to a three-year arc, and by the end of it, the NewBEE is positioned to mentor someone else.
The organization grew quickly. Hives for Heroes is now the largest beekeeping network in the United States, active in every state, with more than ten thousand veterans and first responders served.
Jimenez talks about hives the way he'd talk about military units. Hierarchical, disciplined, built around belonging to something larger than yourself.
"We allow the bees to be the conduit for healing. Veterans can get out of themselves and into bigger things, like nature, faith, all through caring for the bees. They begin to understand what healthy relationships look like outside of addiction or depression. They become stronger and closer to their families, all because of bees."
The organization has its own product line, Heroes Honey, harvested by the network. They've collaborated with the Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University to install memorial hives, including one for a Vietnam veteran whose family had asked for a place where his spirit could keep going after he died. They partnered with Texan by Nature, the conservation organization founded by former First Lady Laura Bush, and won a 2022 Conservation Wrangler award.
Jimenez is clear about what the work is really about.
"We are an organization that plays with bees."
VA HIVES: a clinical beekeeping program for veterans with PTSD, anxiety, and depression
Valerie Carter is a recreational therapist at VA Manchester in New Hampshire, and a beekeeper in her own right, hired in 2018 to help start an outpatient recreation therapy program. She came in with a specific idea about what one of those modalities should look like.
"I was a beekeeper before that, so I thought beekeeping would be a great tool to teach veterans how to keep bees as a hobby, something that they might not have had the opportunity to get into."
The early going wasn't simple. Valerie had to work with the team’s roads-and-grounds department to address concerns about bee stings and the risks of having an apiary on-site, and by the time the program got the green light, it was already March, late in the year to be lining up bees and equipment. The Red Cross and the American Legion donated supplies. The New Hampshire Beekeepers Association donated the bees. A veteran's wife who had been keeping bees for years volunteered to help teach the class. By the end of that first season, eight veterans were in the program, and they had a little honey to show for it.
What Valerie heard from the veterans, though, was about more than beekeeping.
"The veterans were expressing a sense of camaraderie, reduction in their mental health appointments and pain symptoms and symptoms of depression and anxiety, and also just an increase in knowledge of beekeeping and the enjoyment of learning something new with a group of like-minded people. I was like, wait a minute. There's something going on here."
That observation became the seed of the quality-improvement project that became the 2024 Therapeutic Recreation Journal study, and the data confirmed what the veterans had been telling her all along: significant changes in anxiety and depression, significant changes in overall health scales.
Since then, the program has been replicated at multiple VA locations across the country, with virtual programming reaching veterans in rural areas. Different sites are running different models depending on their local VA's needs. Palo Alto runs the program through their HUD-VASH homeless program. The Northern California VA is led by a pharmacist and a psychologist. Some sites are starting programs inside residential treatment programs this year. VA Manchester remains outpatient, and Valerie is now working on bringing observation hives into the inpatient programs that can't physically get to an apiary.
The mindfulness practice at the heart of the program is structured but adaptable. Each session opens outside the apiary with a grounding exercise, a deep-breathing practice, or a guided imagery walk-through of what's about to happen in the hive. Valerie says the grounding pieces are most useful before veterans suit up, because newer beekeepers are often carrying both apiary anxiety and whatever they brought with them that day.
"You need to be calm when you're working bees. It helps you to be a better beekeeper. It keeps the bees calm."
The mindfulness also gets pulled inside the hive when things don't go to plan.
"Sometimes things happen. The bees get worked up, we drop equipment, and things don't go as planned, because the bees didn't read the book and they don't follow the rules. [In that moment], it's important for us to be able to stop, take a deep breath, recenter ourselves, take in everything that the bees are telling us with all of our senses. What are we seeing? What are we hearing? What are we smelling? What are we feeling? That helps us make our best decisions. And afterwards we talk about what we can learn from our session in the hives and take into our daily lives."
Valerie tells a story about a participant who came in carrying a lot, and who was unsure whether the program would work for them at all. The first sessions were cautious. The participant was given the option to step away whenever they needed to, including to their service animal. After a few sessions, something shifted.
"Beekeeping had become such a mindfulness practice that when they were with the bees, they were with the bees. There was nothing else going on. They weren't being drawn into other things, or stepping away to be with their service companion. They were able to be with the bees, and the bees were able to support them in that way."
We asked Valerie what she thinks is so specific about beekeeping as a modality. She prefaced her answer by pointing out that different treatments work for different people, and that, "there's something about nature that calms our stress systems, our cortisol levels. There's something about connecting with bees. But also beekeeping is a fully mindfulness practice. If you are not mindful when you're in the beehive, when you're working with the colony, you are going to find out. The bees are going to let you know. So it's totally immersive. It's hard to be distracted and be elsewhere."
The other piece, she said, is the community.
"The beekeeping community is a really wonderful, supportive community. Every beekeeper wants every other beekeeper to succeed. It's not a competitive hobby. It's one of those, how can I help you to succeed? Because your success impacts my success."
UMN Bee Veterans: free beekeeping education for Minnesota veterans
The University of Minnesota Bee Lab has been doing apiculture research for over a century. In 1912, the Minnesota Legislature established a division of bee culture at University Farm, and Father Francis Jager taught the first beekeeping outreach courses offered by any school in the United States, with other states sending representatives to Minnesota to learn how to set up extension programs of their own. In the decades since, the Bee Lab has produced some of the most important honey bee research in the field, including Dr. Marla Spivak's Minnesota Hygienic line, bees bred to detect and remove diseased larvae before infection spreads through a colony, which earned her a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 and changed how American beekeepers think about breeding for survival.
In 2016, that lab decided to give some of its work back to the people who had served the country.
The Bee Veterans program was founded by Becky Masterman, then the Bee Squad director, in honor of Lt. Col. Michael Roche, a Vietnam veteran and US Marine Corps officer who loved beekeeping. Roche and his wife Diane provided the initial funding. He died before seeing the program fully take shape. More than a hundred Minnesota veterans have come through it since.
Today the program is run by Jessica Helgen, the Bee Squad's program director, with two veteran instructors: Joshua Muñoz, a Marine Corps veteran who works as an agricultural teacher at Como Park Senior High in St. Paul, and Ben Ziegler, an Air Force veteran (2002–2012) who came up through Marla Spivak's lab and now works on bee breeding for the lab while teaching Bee Vets on the side. Jessica isn't a veteran herself, and she's the first to point that out.
But, the combination of civilian instructor with the deep technical apiculture background and veteran instructors with the lived experience is, as Ben said, one of the reasons the program works the way it does.
(Participants doing a hands-on lotion making demonstration)
"At Bee Veterans, everyone gets in there and shoots the breeze at the beginning and end of class. It's a lot easier for veterans to mix with each other when they have an opportunity like that. Another aspect of being in the military: a lot of the time, the military says, ‘guess what, you're doing this now.’ We can kind of do that in class. I'll say, ‘alright, you haven't held a frame before? Here you go’. And they're like, ‘okay. I have been thrust into many situations before where I don't know what I'm doing. But here I am.’"
A typical Sunday at the Bee Vets apiary located near MSP International Airport starts with the instructors arriving early to set up a gathering area with tents, tables, and beekeeping gear outside the hives. Veterans trickle in over the half hour before class. There's a safety briefing for first-timers, and then Ben walks the group around the yard for five or ten minutes before anyone breaks into a colony.
(Ben doing a safety briefing before going into the apiary)
"Just go walk around in the yard and pay attention to what is going on in the bee yard. That's their opportunity to drop whatever they were thinking about previously, things that may be bothering them, things that are on their mind. I want their heads clear and paying attention to what's going on. What's blooming? What do you smell? What do you hear?"
(Participants touring the Farm at the Arb, near the Tashijian Bee and Pollinator Discovery Center)
Then they suit up. The programming changes with the season (splits in spring, varroa management mid-summer, honey harvest in late summer), and the instructors split the group into smaller pods, with one of them taking the newest beekeepers through basic biology while the others work through the day's actual hive tasks. Afterward, the group gathers outside to chitchat and ask questions. The community is the part that's hardest to design and the part that seems to do the most. Veterans who started the program four or five years ago keep coming back, not necessarily because they're learning new technical material, but because they're showing up for the ritual and for the people. As new beekeepers join, the experienced ones gather around them at the hives, point out what they're seeing, and share what's worked in their own apiaries.
"Every year, the community of people keeps growing and changing and evolving and just gets better and better," Jessica said. "They're all awesome."
The signal that someone has gone from participant to beekeeper, for Ben, is a specific one.
"They come and show us a bottle of honey with their brand new label on it. They're like, ‘oh, look at my label!’ And that's the thing where I'm like, oh, this is really their thing now."
The other defining philosophy at Bee Vets is the same one they hold at the rest of the Bee Lab: gloveless beekeeping. Jessica is one of the country's strongest advocates for it, and her case is practical.
(Joshua Munoz doing a hive demo at Bee Vets)
"We're not commercial beekeepers, so we don't have the same time constraints. And in my opinion, it's a lot more pleasant of a hobby if you don't have to be all suited up. You can really feel that texture of the comb and really feel like you're getting in there with the colony."
She added something about mixed-group dynamics that explains why gloveless beekeeping is a teaching choice as much as a personal preference. When one person in a group is suited up and immune to consequence, everyone else around them tends to get stung more often, because the gloved person isn't being as careful with their hands. Teaching everyone gloveless puts the whole group on the same level: all paying attention, all being gentle. Ben took the point further.
"On the breeding side, when we're doing 54 colonies in a day, we're going faster, we're sweating, it's not necessarily fun. Then I go to that Sunday class. I've only got three colonies to go and I can slowly do it. With no gloves on. It is so much more pleasant. Especially with the mental benefits of beekeeping, slowly going through this and enjoying the process. That's really the point of not having gloves on."
For 2026, the program is in early conversations with the Minneapolis VA on a new track. The Bee Squad has run a class or two with VA recreational therapists before, but this year there will be a larger cohort of VA staff coming through. The program has also added a weekday class for veterans who can't make Sundays, and one of this summer's sessions will include training on native bee identification, because beekeepers, Jessica said, tend to become ambassadors for everything that buzzes.
Bee Heroes America: rehabilitative beekeeping for veterans in Oregon
Dr. Sharon Schmidt is a retired psychiatric nurse practitioner who holds a PsyD in clinical psychology. She runs Cascade Girl, the 501(c)(3) that operates Bee Heroes America out of Phoenix, Oregon.
Schmidt's program partners with the VA Domiciliary Recreation Therapy department in White City, Oregon. The domiciliary context matters - the veterans Schmidt works with aren't coming in for outpatient care. They're working through recovery, in residence, often with histories that involve substance use and treatment-resistant trauma. The program runs hands-on, May through October. Graduates receive equipment and a starter hive.
Schmidt has also written one of the only published academic papers tracing the historical roots of beekeeping as a therapeutic intervention. It's where you find out, in citation, that the 1919 Federal Board for Vocational Education actually recommended beekeeping. The official document framed it as a way for disabled veterans to cope with disability, health, and return to vocation after returning from World War I.
A century later, Schmidt's framing of why the practice works has not really changed.
"We know that veterans want to connect, ideally, to the environment," she writes. "The kinds of benefits that arise from being outside and participating in something like this are connection to community, being involved in something that is life-giving, being involved in something with other veterans without any particular pressures, life skills, and a sweet treat at the end."
Why beekeeping works for veterans
What's worth noting is that none of these programs claim beekeeping replaces therapy. Adam was direct about it.
"Some people, four walls and a therapist works, and that's great. It's not for everybody. With veterans in particular, or even survivors of all sorts of different types of trauma, when you're talking to somebody that doesn't, hasn't experienced it, sometimes that's a hard barrier to get over. If I can sit down with my bees and just open up, it's an amazing conduit for healing."
Valerie said something similar from the clinical side. Different treatment modalities work for different people. Talk therapy works for some. Exposure therapy works for some. What beekeeping happens to be very good at, she said, is being so completely immersive that the rest of life can't follow you into the hive.
"If you are not mindful when you're in the beehive, you are going to find out. The bees are going to let you know."
The bees have been doing their work for millions of years, in the dark, without management plans or inspection schedules. They regulate their own temperature. They build their own architecture. They raise their own young. What these five programs have built, in their different ways, is a way for the people who served to spend time with that.
How to find a veteran beekeeping program near you
A 1919 federal recommendation has, for a hundred years, made its way through the country in pieces: through extension programs, through the VA, through nonprofits started by veterans who had to figure it out themselves. Each of the programs profiled here is built on that quiet inheritance.
If you're a veteran and any of these programs sound like something you'd want to try, every one of them named here is taking applications, and most are free. Heroes to Hives is open to anyone with a service connection, including reservists, active duty, National Guard, and dependents. Hives for Heroes will match you with a mentor in your state. VA HIVES can be accessed by veterans receiving care at participating VA locations. UMN Bee Veterans is open to Minnesota veterans, and Bee Heroes America runs out of White City, Oregon, in partnership with the local VA Domiciliary.
Our thanks goes to the people who built these programs, the veterans who walk through them, and the bees that have, for a hundred years now, been doing some of the quietest and most consequential rehabilitation work in the country.
