#customer stories

Veteran beekeeping programs in the US: a guide to the five major organizations

Hives for Heroes, Heroes to Hives, VA HIVES, UMN Bee Veterans, Bee Heroes America. Five US programs teaching veterans to keep bees, profiled.

Bee Together: how humans and bees actually live together in 2026

A global tour for World Bee Day The 2026 [FAO theme](https://www.fao.org/world-bee-day/en) for World Bee Day is _Bee Together for People and the Planet: a partnership that sustains us all_. It's more specific than it sounds. The agency is asking us to think about the working relationship between humans and bees across cultures and climates and scales: honey hunters in forests, commercial queen breeders, school teachers running classroom hives, floodplain beekeepers in Nepal, traditional knowledge and modern engineering both, women and youth especially. The partnership has never been one thing. So we profiled six versions of it, in six landscapes, doing six wildly different forms of the same work. ## Ryan Sparks Burris: a third-generation queen breeder in Northern California President of the California State Beekeepers Association. Runs [Park Legacy Queens](https://parklegacyqueens.com/) out of Palo Cedro, just east of Redding. Third generation in the family business; his family has been breeding queens in Northern California since the 1940s. On a peak day in April, his crew catches 800 queens, packs them, and has them on a UPS truck by 3 PM. Still builds his own wax cell cups by hand. Ryan Burris went to law school and practiced in Las Vegas before he came home to keep bees. _"It was always in the back of my head. I was just super unhappy not being a beekeeper. This is in my blood. It's what I was meant to do."_ The name on the door is his mother's maiden name, the side of the family he grew up closest to. He compares himself to a winemaker. _"You can be a Gallo and make tons and tons of cheap wine, or you can be a Stag's Leap and focus on quality. My name means a lot to me. My family name means a lot to me."_ That orientation, quality over volume, lineage over shortcut, runs through how he works with the bees themselves. He handles his colonies in jeans and a homemade veil, no full suit, because as long as he's gentle and treats them with some respect, he doesn't ever fret about getting stung. The almond bloom this year was one of the quickest anyone could remember. The California almond pollination season is the largest commercial pollination event on Earth, taking [roughly 2.5 million colonies](https://capitalpress.com/2025/03/06/private-detective-helps-halt-california-bee-hive-thefts/) to cover more than a million acres of orchards every year, with 1.8 to 2 million of those hives trucked in from outside the state. The 2026 version came and went in about two weeks. _"This bloom started, and it was almost done in two weeks. It seemed like all the varieties were blooming at the exact same time. Which was very unique."_ Pollination happened anyway, but bee counts were down again, the way they've been down every year now, and the Pacific Northwest is heading into another season that needs more rain than it's getting. What worries him more than the weather is the price of honey. A single load of syrup runs $20,000 to $27,000, depending on where you are in the country, and the bigger commercial outfits go through one of those every week. Meanwhile the wholesale price US beekeepers get for honey has been stuck near $1.27 to $2.00 a pound for half a decade, often below the cost of production, while foreign honey enters the market for as low as $0.80 a pound and gets blended into product labeled "USA grade." What Ryan wants isn't a subsidy. It's accurate labeling. _"If you put honey in the store, and you say it's USA grade A, it better be a hundred percent USA grade A honey."_ And then there's the theft. California is the worst region in the country for it. CSBA data put 2024 losses at a record 3,492 stolen colonies and an estimated $1.2 million in damages. A stolen hive at almond peak, in Ryan's words, is _"more like losing a pet than losing equipment,"_ because every hive in his yard has been built up across years of feeding and care that no insurance check can replace. This February, 172 hives stolen from a Merced County orchard on February 6 were recovered and returned to their owner, Teresa Breshears of Washington state, within twelve hours of discovery. CSBA Vice President Trevor Tauzer identified the colonies on private property in northeastern Yolo County. Sgt. Matt Wirick of the Yolo County Sheriff's Office coordinated the arrest of a suspect within four hours. [The recovery](https://americanbeejournal.com/120-stolen-beehives-recovered-in-swift-multi-agency-operation-sacramento-man-arrested/) was one of the fastest Ryan has ever seen, but about a thousand hives stolen this season are still gone. When asked what he wished the public actually understood about beekeeping, he didn't say _save the bees_. _"Endure the suck."_ A sting, he says, is nothing. It lasts seconds. What lasts is the blood, sweat, and tears of staying determined enough to keep the operation going, to feed your family, pay your mortgage, and make sure your employees are well compensated. It has only gotten harder in the last twenty years. Nothing has become easier. The people still in it are still in it on purpose. What he is optimistic about isn't the weather or the prices. It's the people. CSBA has partnered with the [American Honey Producers Association](https://www.ahpanet.com/) and the [American Beekeeping Federation](https://www.abfnet.org/), along with a growing number of state organizations, to push together for honest USA honey labeling. This November, the two organizations will host their annual conventions jointly in Reno, November 16 through 19. It's the first time the California state organization and a national organization have met. _"AHPA is a great organization that campaigns for fixes on these honey issues, so we're really excited to work with them as a team. Joining together to fight for the same issues rather than competing with different voices, making sure that we have the same message going forward."_ ## Emily Hartley: bringing bees into a Texas classroom Volunteer beekeeping educator at Marvelously Made School, K-8. Built the school's beekeeping program from the ground up. Wife of a retiring Air Force serviceman. Has completed every certification in the University of Montana's beekeeping program; master's class coming up. Raised in a log cabin in Oregon with cherry orchards and hives. Emily Hartley had never given bees much thought until she sat through an online workshop and realized she didn't recognize half the words. That was five years ago. She enrolled at the University of Montana the next semester, worked through every certification the program offered, and started building a beekeeping curriculum for the children at Marvelously Made School in Texas. Last year, she put together a proposal to switch the school's equipment to Primal Bee. The proposal was accepted. There are now two hives on the school grounds, one for the younger grades and one for the older ones. _"This is not a hobby. It's my career for the rest of my life."_ The program runs across the season. The kids keep bee journals, they make candles when there's wax to render, they harvest honey for themselves and for the staff, and the older students are about to start helping with sugar syrup and hive inspections. The progression is safety-first, building from observation to participation across multiple terms. What surprises her, when she talks about it, is how completely the kids hold still. _"It's amazing how involved they are with the bees and how much they wanna know. When I teach, they're completely absorbed for like an hour, and that's incredible. They're not waiting for me to finish."_ There's a particular pattern she watches for, which is fear flipping into curiosity. Some kids arrive nervous about insects. Some have a beehive at home they've never engaged with. One girl whose family kept hives at the house arrived not liking them at all. By the end she was outside with her parents, working the bees, wanting to be there. _"My goal is to turn that into wonderment. To change that fear for them into really wanting to become engaged with the beekeeping, and own it, and start to learn how to become a beekeeper themselves."_ She also teaches native bees alongside honey bees, which most school programs don't, and a few of the older students have become invested enough that they don't want to break for summer. Some of them are graduating this year. She finds it bittersweet. The next build-out is an observation hive for the youngest students, who can't safely suit up and stand in front of an active colony. The plan is to modify the school's smallest Primal Bee hive, the cottage hive, so the bees enter and exit through a tube running through the classroom wall. The colony will live inside the classroom. The bees will fly free outside. The kindergartners will watch comb-building through the glass, magnifying glasses in hand. What she finds most rewarding about all of it isn't the bees. It's the teaching. _"For me, that is the most rewarding piece of beekeeping. Being able to share that knowledge with the kids, and knowing that if we don't teach them to care, they're not going to care."_ ## Alex and Gianmario: three winters of failure in the Italian Alps Co-founders of [Primal Bee](https://primalbee.com/). Childhood friends who started keeping bees together in the foothills of the Italian Alps in October 2005. Spent the first three years losing every colony. Built the first prototype of what would become the Primal Bee hive in their fourth year. For three years straight, Alex and Gianmario lost everything they put into their bees. _"We never got a drop of honey, and we never survived the winter with our colonies. Three years in a row."_ They were childhood friends who had run a machine tool company together, mountaineers on weekends, hobbyist beekeepers in whatever time was left. In the fourth year, working with what they called the first prototype, a hive Gianmario had begun engineering after concluding that the Langstroth box wasn't actually built for the bees, they overwintered successfully for the first time. From that prototype, eventually, came Primal Bee. What kept Alex going through those first three years wasn't stubbornness. It was a particular kind of attention. He describes a moment in the season more precisely than almost anything else in his life. _"There is a phenomenon that the bees do when they are ready, when they ask you to put some supers on. The top beam of the nest frames, they start building brand new, the very beginning of brand new combs, and that beeswax is pure white. So in Lombardy, we say in Yankaro, which can be translated as painting. When they are painting, you can put two or three supers on. That's the real moment when you can really say, okay, in the last twelve months, I did a good job."_ What he is describing is not a yield. It's a signal from the bees that they have enough room, and enough confidence in the season, to expand. There is one story he tells that he asks people not to leave out. One night in November, during the first prototype era, a strong south wind unusual for the region came through the apiary at 120 kilometers per hour. He had not strapped the hives down properly. Almost every one of his thirty-five hives blew over in the night, with the nest frames moving inside. He worked through the cold trying to recover what he could. _"It was a mistake out of stupidity, my own stupidity. And the worst night."_ He was crying about the bees. Not the work. The bees. There's a strap on every hive now. ## Vanya: beekeeping in the Negev Desert Long-time Primal Bee collaborator. Ukrainian-born; emigrated to Israel in the 1990s. Built his own Primal Bee prototypes from the original specs more than a decade ago. Runs a no-treatment apiary in extreme heat. Vanya's bees are alive in temperatures that should kill them. Air temperatures in the Negev Desert regularly clear 40°C in summer, and cooling a hive costs the colony as much energy as heating one. The same high-density EPS shell that retains heat in winter prevents overheating in summer. It's why a prototype designed to survive an alpine winter also survives a desert summer, and why Vanya's apiary in Be'er Sheva is the test case that says so. What's notable about his colonies isn't only the climate. He doesn't treat for Varroa. For him, in his words, Varroa is not a problem. That sentence will set off alarms for most American beekeepers, and rightly so. Untreated colonies in most North American apiaries collapse within a year or a year and a half. Before Vanya started building Primal Bee prototypes, his colonies in standard Langstroth equipment behaved the same way. A year and a half, maybe two, and then everything down. In the prototypes, in the desert, with no treatment at all, his colonies have been performing at top level for years. How this gets read matters. It's a single beekeeper in one climate. It doesn't generalize cleanly to a beekeeper in Maine or North Dakota, where the pressures are completely different and the southern dry-climate dynamics don't apply. Mites are still the number one killer of US colonies, and anyone making strong claims about no-treatment beekeeping in the continental US is extrapolating beyond what the field will support. What Vanya's apiary does suggest, more carefully framed, is that the housing matters more than American convention assumes. When the colony isn't burning energy fighting the heat or the cold, the resources left over for everything else, comb building, brood rearing, immune response, go further. In the Negev, with Primal Bee equipment, far enough. ## Konrad Borowski: hives that float when the floods come Mechanical and systems designer. Founder of [Beekon](https://beekon.org/), a buoyant modular hive made from recycled plastic. Has run pilots in the Philippines and is preparing a large-scale deployment in Nepal. In 2023, Konrad Borowski was watching a documentary with his mother when a story stopped him. A beekeeper in the Philippines had lost two hundred hives overnight to flooding. The damage rippled out through the community, because the surrounding farms depended on those colonies for pollination. A week later, he had a first computer-aided draft of a prototype. From that draft came Beekon: a buoyant modular hive made from recycled plastic, wrapped around a central mast anchored to the ground. When water rises, the hive floats up. When the water recedes, it settles back down. After installation, no human intervention is required. _"The stationary wooden beehive has been the standard model for more than 200 years,"_ he told [_Earth.Org_](https://earth.org/one-mans-innovative-solution-to-protect-bee-colonies-from-flooding/). _"Unfortunately, that standard is no longer capable of withstanding many of the environmental stressors we see today. Most beekeeping happens near agriculture, and most agriculture happens near open bodies of water. As a result, we are facing the potential loss of pollination services to entire ecosystems in a matter of moments."_ His first large-scale pilot was planned for Malawi and put on hold after USAID was shuttered earlier in 2025. His next is in Nepal, where the September 2024 floods killed 236 people and disrupted entire agricultural regions. The framing of the relationship is what he keeps coming back to. _"There's this predominant idea, maybe misconception, that pollination just sort of happens. But it's ultimately a service. And like any service, water, power, waste management, it depends on reliable infrastructure."_ ## Dr. Peter Kozmus: the diplomat who got the UN to recognize bees Vice President of [Apimondia](https://www.apimondia.org/), the International Federation of Beekeepers' Associations. Beekeeper since 1994. Professional leader of the breeding program for the Carniolan honey bee at the Slovenian Beekeepers' Association. Head of the Council for beekeeping at Slovenia's Ministry of Agriculture. Has presented Slovenian beekeeping initiatives in Austria, Croatia, Serbia, France, India, Ireland, Argentina, Ukraine, and South Korea. World Bee Day exists because of Peter Kozmus. Slovenia is the most beekeeping-saturated country in Europe. Two million inhabitants, more than eleven thousand beekeepers, the highest per-capita rate on the continent. A third of primary schools have beekeeping clubs. The Carniolan honey bee, native to the country, is the second-most-kept honey bee subspecies in the world after the Italian. Beekeeping is woven into the school curriculum, the national identity, the food economy, and the diplomatic posture. Out of that, in 2014, Slovenia began three years of advocacy through the UN General Assembly to formally recognize the role of bees in global food systems. The proposal, drafted by the Slovenian Beekeepers' Association and championed by the Republic of Slovenia, was unanimously adopted in December 2017. May 20 was chosen because it was the birthday of Anton Janša, the eighteenth-century Slovenian who became one of the first formal teachers of apiculture in Europe. Kozmus shepherded the proposal through. What he wanted out of it was practical, not ceremonial. _"Beekeepers have the problem that the environment is changing in ways that aren't friendly to bees and other pollinators,"_ he [told _Transitions_](https://tol.org/client/article/how-a-nation-of-beekeepers-protects-pollinators.html). _"We can solve some of these problems ourselves, but for others we need help, and a World Bee Day seemed like the best opportunity and tool to get that."_ In the years since, he has used the platform to push on the issues most beekeepers don't have the standing to push on alone. Honey fraud, in particular. As Vice President of Apimondia, he has been one of the strongest international voices for stricter authenticity standards on global honey, the same fight Ryan Burris is making at the state level in California. He has helped lead efforts to establish a global certification regime for beekeeping tourism. He has worked, country by country, to bring small-population beekeeping nations into the same conversation as the commercial operations of the US, Argentina, and China. This year's [Third International Forum for Action on Sustainable Beekeeping and Pollination](https://www.fao.org/world-bee-day/en), which the FAO is co-hosting with Slovenia in Maribor on May 20 and 21, is the institutional descendant of his work. The forum's stated theme, _Science, innovation and policy actions for a more sustainable future_, is, broadly speaking, his sentence. If you are following along with World Bee Day from anywhere in the world today, the broadcast is happening because of him. ## More partnerships, in our own backyard Six profiles can't carry the whole picture. In Georgia, Julia Mahood has been teaching beekeeping at Arrendale State Prison for over a decade, and her students, mostly women, are passing journeyman and master beekeeper exams that have an 80% fail rate on the outside. We profiled her, along with six other women shaping beekeeping today, in our [International Women's Day roundup](#) earlier this year, alongside Eva Crane, Marla Spivak, Jasmine Joy, Raylynn White, Nichole Danova, and Katie Metzger. In northern Poland, Gosia has been keeping bees for eighteen years across sixty colonies and five locations with her husband, running traditional Wielkopolski hives and practicing _uloterapia_, an Eastern European tradition in which people breathe the bioactive air from inside a colony for its therapeutic properties. This spring she added a Primal Bee hive to the operation, and in one of the worst seasons her region has seen, cold and rainy, her colony was flying at 8 to 9°C while neighboring colonies stayed clustered, consuming roughly a third less feed than her traditional hives, and superseding their own queen successfully without losing population strength. We [published her story](https://primalbee.com/blogs/news/customer-story-one-beekeepers-first-season-with-primal-bee) earlier this fall. A few hours from Lansing, Michigan, Dr. Adam Ingrao runs [Heroes to Hives](https://miffs.org/heroes-to-hives/), the largest agricultural training program for veterans in the United States. The program began in his living room in 2014 with five veterans. It is now in its eleventh year and has cumulatively served nearly twenty thousand veterans. In 2024, the _Therapeutic Recreation Journal_ published the first peer-reviewed research showing that beekeeping, paired with brief mindfulness practices, produced a 31% session-over-session improvement in anxiety and depression scores among veterans at the Manchester VA Medical Center. We wrote about Heroes to Hives, Hives for Heroes, VA HIVES, UMN Bee Veterans, and Bee Heroes America in [our full guide to US veteran beekeeping programs](#). ## How to mark World Bee Day this year The FAO's central event is in Maribor, Slovenia, on May 20 and 21, where the Third International Forum for Action on Sustainable Beekeeping and Pollination will be webcast in English at [fao.org/world-bee-day](https://www.fao.org/world-bee-day/en). A second in-person celebration runs at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on May 27. Anyone organizing a bee-related event can submit it to the official World Bee Day website to be featured on a global interactive map. Dr. Jason Graham, our senior beekeeping advisor, will be speaking at [Patch of Heaven Sanctuary](https://patchofheaven.org/) in Florida on May 17 as part of their World Bee Day programming. If you're a beekeeper, the most useful thing you can do today is the work you were already going to do: inspect a hive, check stores, talk to a neighbor who's getting started, send this piece to a teacher you know. If you're not a beekeeper, the FAO's standing guidance on how to support pollinators without owning a hive is at [fao.org/world-bee-day](https://www.fao.org/world-bee-day/en).

The women shaping the future of beekeeping

The Swiss Ambassador's first hive

Twenty years of treatment-free beekeeping in the Negev Desert

When the heat wave hit, one hive stayed cool