Ten Minutes with Detroit Hives: On Bees

Beekeepers Tim Jackson and Nicole Lindsey first discovered Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny’s honeycomb vase through social media. Now on view in Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design, this artwork illustrates how humans and insects can work together. To create his honeycomb vases, Libertíny constructs vase-shaped beehive scaffolds and then lets nature take its course. Over the course of two to 10 days, the bee colony creates a hive around the structure. At the end of the process, Libertíny removes the scaffolding, leaving behind a vase made entirely of honeycomb. “It just really reaffirms how resourceful bees are,” says Jackson. “Whatever you put in front of them, they can turn anything into anything.”

Jackson and Lindsey are passionate about showing how we can coexist with the animal world. In 2016, they founded Detroit Hives, a local organization dedicated to transforming vacant lots into urban bee farms. At these farms, they not only produce honey for their communities but also host educational programs about the crucial role of bees. This month’s Ten Minutes podcast is all about bees—what they do, how they’re organized, and why we need them. Bees do more than just produce honey—they help our ecosystem grow and keep the produce sections of our supermarkets plentiful. Even more importantly, they can teach us about living and thriving in community.

Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny. The Honeycomb Vase “Made by Bees” (prototype). 2006

To hear more about bees and the work of Detroit Hives, click on the SoundCloud audio below.

Beekeeper, Timothy Jackson: Just imagine going to a grocery store and not seeing any blueberries, any strawberries, any watermelon, any peaches. If something were to happen with our bees, we wouldn’t have any of the fresh fruits or vegetables or nuts in our grocery store.

Beekeeper, Nicole Lindsey: Over time, people have built up highways, structures, buildings that have displaced our insects, because they were never a part of the equation when we started developing cities. The lack of habitat is a number one cause of decline in our bees and our insects.

We’re from the city, so when we see an insect, we see it as a pest. But once we start learning about bees, you have a care for them and now you want to have that desire to save them.

TJ: What’s happening, everybody? My name is Timothy Paule Jackson, cofounder, co-executive director for Detroit Hives.

NL: Hi, my name is Nicole Lindsey. I am the cofounder as well as the co-executive director for Detroit Hives.

TJ: We like to say the bees chose us.

Around the summer of 2016, the city of Detroit had well over 90,000 vacant lots. We came across an article—it was a call to action to buy back some of the vacant lots in our city. They were looking for residents like ourselves. They were looking for businesses, block clubs, nonprofit organizations—anybody, anyone, to buy back these vacant lots. They were going for as low as $100.

NL: Before they became vacant lots, they were abandoned homes and got destroyed or were burnt down, and then eventually they were torn down.

TJ: It created, I would say, emptiness in our community. The vacant lots were causing issues around blight, around crime, and we wanted to figure out, how can we change that?

And during this time, I experienced this really bad cough and cold that I could not shake or get rid of. I tried what I thought was home remedies to over-the-counter medication, to even going to a doctor to being placed on antibiotics. I pretty much gave up until I mistakenly—and I do mean mistakenly—came across the power of local raw honey.

There’s a convenience store, located outside Detroit in Ferndale, Michigan. I went into this store, and I had this really bad cough, so bad that the store owner recognized it, and he said, “Young man, you should try some of our honey. It can help with that cough that you have.” As soon as he said that, I laughed. I’m like, “Man, get out of here. That ain’t gonna work. I done tried everything. Honey ain’t gonna do it.”

He said, “Our honey is different. Our honey is local, it’s raw, and we buy it directly from a beekeeper.”

I simply asked him, “What’s so special about local raw honey?” And that’s where he gave me this scientific rundown on how when you consume local raw honey, you’re actually consuming microscopic traces of pollen. And over time, when you consume that, it really works to help rebuild your immune system. When he told me this, he sold me on this concept.

I took it home and I began to consume this honey. I would have three tablespoons in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Over the three week period, my cough and cold had went away.

This led me into learning how honeybees make honey. My fiancée, Nicole, began to see my new interest in learning about honey and honeybees. She made a very simple suggestion. She said, “How about we transform a vacant lot into a honeybee farm?”

As ridiculous as that sounded at the time—mind you, we didn’t have any background to bees or beekeeping—I said, “Let’s do it,” because this is a way we can change the narrative. It’s a way we can reimagine vacant landscapes, but also create communities for both people and pollinators.

NL: I wasn’t the outdoorsy person. I didn’t tap into that until we started Detroit Hives.

We got comfortable with bees by education. Learning how great and important these little creatures are left me open to falling in love with them.

Bees, they are a female-led superorganism. The females inside the hive do all of the work.

TJ: A beehive is a structure or a home. So it’s a wooden box, or sometimes in nature in the wild. Honeybees establish their colony inside an empty tree, an empty cavity of a tree, on top of a tree limb, or on mountain tops as well.

Inside a beehive, you have what’s called a colony. A bee colony is just like a family. You have one queen bee. You have thousands of worker bees, which are all females. You also have hundreds of male bees, which are drones.

NL: A lot of people don’t know about the queen. She doesn’t run the hive. They all work together. The queen, the only thing that she does is she’s an egg layer. She can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day. And she can live up to three to five years, so she lives the longest inside of the colony. The honeybees only live four to six weeks. And the drones will die once they mate with the queen. They testicles actually explode, so they go out with a bang.

With the queen, she always has a court of bees that surround her. Nurse bees take care of the eggs that the queen is laying. And then you have undertaker bees, they’re responsible for cleaning out the dead bees inside of the hive, or anything that doesn’t belong inside of the colony.

You also have the guard bees. They protect the entrance of the hive to make sure no other bee that doesn’t belong to that colony gets in, or any other insect or animal, unless they’re bringing in food.

And then you have forager bees. So she gets to go out and explore many different flavors of nectar and pollen. Before they become forager bees, they have to do all the work inside the hive—it takes them 21 days to reach that stage.

When she’s going out, she’s flying far from the hive. It could be a dangerous job for her. That’s because she has predators. Yellowjackets and wasps and hornets will eat honeybees. Some birds may eat honeybees. You have dragonflies, you have some humans. There could be pollutants or chemicals, too, that could possibly harm them.

Honeybees can fly up to six miles or more, but a sweet spot for them is about a mile and a half.

And then also when we mention honeybees, the native bees are just as important because they do provide a lot of pollination too.

TJ: Michigan is home to over 467 different types of native bee species—things like bumblebees, leafcutter bees, mass bees, mason bees, the list goes on. In the United States, we have well over 5,000 native bee species, and there exists over 20,000 in the world.

It’s really important when we talk about our native bees and our honeybees because they not only provide food for us humans, but also for other insects and other livestock as well.

NL: So our produce section would pretty much be nonexistent if we didn’t have those pollinators.

TJ: A pollinator is anything that can help transport seed from one flower to the next. Pollination can be done by wind, rain, or even gravity. And it’s also supported by beneficial insects and livestock, like bees, bats, flies, ants, beetles, and et cetera. They’re responsible for 90% of our healthy foods.

NL: I think now, with this generation, people are curious to learn, where’s our food coming from? How do we include nature, animals? I think now we’re coming back around to that and having an appreciation for these insects and why they’re so important.

TJ: As a child, we watch our parents or siblings or elders swat at what we thought were bees, or we see a lot of cartoons with misconceptions. When you have that fear of a bee as a child, nine times out of 10, you want nothing to do with it. You’re very reluctant to try to help it or protect it because you’ve been raised—consciously or subconsciously—to fear these insects. The more we become educated on it, that’s how we can help with pollinators.

The number one decline with bees or pollinators or all living things is a lack of habitat, deforestation. One way we can all support our native bees or honey bees or pollinators or other visiting insects is to create an environment for them where they can thrive and flourish.

NL: With us being in Detroit, because we have so many green spaces and so many vacant lots here, we can make sure that we’re creating spaces for our insects.

I feel like we’re voices for those insects. We are beautifying our neighborhoods and engaging more with our people in the community. We’re creating conversations on how we can all get along. We’re helping people have a hive mindset. Inside of a honeybee hive, they all work together for the greater good of that colony. Having that hive mindset is giving back to the bees and giving back into nature.

TJ: Our work here at Detroit Hives, it’s built on collaboration. We create spaces for bees, and they help create food for us as well.

NL: A healthy future for bees reflects a healthy future for humanity.

This episode was produced and edited by Arlette Hernandez, with mixing and sound design by Brandi Howell and music by Chad Crouch.

MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.