We recently connected with Julia McGuire and have shared our conversation below.

Julia, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

Anyone producing an agricultural crop is taking a risk. Urban and suburban beekeepers especially take risks because most of our bee yards, also called apiaries, are someone else’s residential back yard and we can’t control where the bees go to get their food, called foraging.

Even if we could corral the bees and limit them to one residential property, it’s best for them to visit other sites as a way to have a diverse diet. Just like humans getting all the food groups, diverse forage is healthier for bees according to an overwhelming number of academic studies.

We also have no control over the weather, which impacts their forage in amount and quality. For example, rain is necessary for plants to grow, but when rain falls on open flowers, the pollen used to feed larval bees and the nectar used to make honey gets washed away. Plants need time to recover and replenish the pollen and nectar that washed away. A more extreme weather example is untimely drought and freezing events that cause all forage to disappear. In all these cases, beekeepers tend to feed their bees to get the colony through a time of dearth to keep them from dying off — no bees means no honey and no honey means no money.

Regardless of their level of understanding, property owners frequently believe that honey bees will thrive on their land. While hives might be welcomed and located on their property, the bees inside will forage on plants that might be at the neighbor’s property where the bees are extremely attracted yet not very welcome. One way to decrease this risk is to establish a large biodiverse habitat for a year-round supply of honey bee forage near the hive, from late winter to early fall, and asking a property owner for such an investment can be a big ask.

So we sub/urban bee farmers make the best of what we are given. In addition to checking for overall colony health every ten days or so, we’re also holding serious relational conversations with neighbors about why the bees are visiting their flower beds and how they will only make the garden more beautiful rather than more dangerous, with city staff to ensure we’re complying with regulations, with our hive hosts about yard rent, all while trying to do what is best for our bees to produce the most honey that season.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My oldest child won a youth scholarship from our state’s honey producer association as a junior high student. She was awarded a class, equipment and gear, a mentor, and a package of bees, which were all set up in our suburban backyard. She tended the bees for years until it was time to think about college. So I inherited her two bee hives and after realizing that I had to quit calling her at college and calling her mentor, I resurrected the area’s bee club. I also began teaching beekeeping as a way to learn more about beekeeping.

Growing up next door to my nature-loving grandmother in the country, I learned to identify flowers and birds at a young age. When I would mention cues in nature that related to beekeeping, I could see that most of my students were not connecting the dots because they didn’t know the difference between an oak and a locust tree or a native and a non-native flower. Because of this, I began a crowd-sourced statewide project to gather as much data on bloom times as possible, and created a Phenology Planner for Beekeepers and A Beekeepers Year (prairie edition) calendar.

Beekeeping has helped me appreciate nature more than I already do. Bees keep me in tune with the weather, microclimates, abundance of native trees and forbs, teaching, community organizing, and civic engagement in ways that I never imagined as a youth.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

March 5, 2022. A friend and I ran a 5k in Austin, TX. On the way back to our hotel room afterward, my phone blows up. A tornado demolished the flower farm in Iowa where I keep most of my bees. The farmers had a story on the local television news, and my friends know my bees must be gone.

My generous Iowa Farmers Union friends and beekeeper community help me cobble together a few colonies with spare equipment. The bees arrived later than usual but still produced honey for the season while I waited for relief from the federal government’s Emergency Livestock Assistance Program (ELAP). Relief was delayed over a year by an unexpected staff retirement and misinterpretation of the program rules. Using my beekeeper network and emailing my elect finally resulted in shiny new equipment in 2023. I pivot to research and education grants to fill community needs and make up for lost honey sales.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

One resource that has significantly impacted my management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy is the SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) Program. SARE is a program with a long history of funding -individual- farmers and their ideas. By using their North Central Region database, I can find regionally relevant theories that have been tested in real world scenarios, not in a lab or non-production apiary. I also use the SARE database to see what theories have NOT been tested. When an untested idea overlaps with the complaints (or wishes!) that I hear in my beekeeping club and classes, I see an opportunity to try something new.

For me, the wish was for urban beekeepers to identify the flowering trees, bushes, and forbs in their bee yards and to correlate the bloom times with beekeeping chores. If only there was a regional or local book to help, then beekeeping might be easier. Knowing that SARE might have an answer, I took a quick look through the database.

My philosophy of converting residential yards from turf grass to native plantings for multiple benefits (nostalgia for my childhood country home place, soil health, water quality, clean air) was affirmed through a database search. I also knew that having habitat for year round forage supports healthy honey bees. I wrote a proposal to SARE about combining beekeeping chores with cues from native habitat, got a grant award, and now my Phenology Planner for Beekeepers and A Beekeeper’s Year (prairie edition) calendar are both widely used resources. The SARE award let me be entrepreneurial, help the community of land owners and beekeepers, and affirmed my desire to get rid of monoculture lawns.

Contact Info:

• Website: juliecache.com
• Instagram: @juliecache_
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcammcguire/

Image Credits
Julia McGuire