For the Love of the Bees: Promoting Bee Conservation & Beekeeping
Volume: #1 Issue #3 June 2024
My fascination with the bees, notably the honeybee, walks hand to hand with my love for honey—go figure! Several months ago, I was looking for a service project for my scout units to do & I stumbled upon an article in Scout’s Life magazine titled How to Build a Bee House for Solitary Bees.
I was intrigued by the article and the somewhat easy to do project that did involve some construction the kids would love. Solitary Bees are native to North America unlike the European Honeybee who are famous for producing honey and living in hives. Solitary bees are responsible for one third of our food supply, but their habitats are increasingly coming under threat.
The directions provided by Scout’s Life explains the dimensions of the wood needed is an untreated 4x4 or 6x6 piece of lumber. Naturally, it makes sense that you don’t want wood treated with chemicals if your intention is for bees to live in the wood. The problem is an untreated 4x4 or 6x6 is a unicorn piece of lumber. You can find them online—they do exist! However, I called three lumber stores & they quietly laughed at me when I asked them for the lumber. Typically, those pieces of lumber are used as posts for ground contact, so they are nearly all treated for that type of use with the ground to prevent rot.
So, what did we do? I was explaining the project to my boss at work who suggested, “Why don’t you just screw two 2x4s together?” Duh! And, that’s what we did as you can see by the picture above. If you reference the above picture to see that we elected to have the holes drilled on the outside edge of the piece of lumber, so the bee would have the full depth of the piece of wood.
The project was a success, the scouts made 12 total bee houses for the day & gave them to anyone who requested them in our local community.
What about the Honey Bees?
Again, I have an intense love for honey, so part of me has always wanted to eventually try to be a beekeeper. Did you know the Boy Scouts of America use to have a Beekeeping Merit Badge? The book & physical merit badge are difficult to find, I know as a collector & Scouting Heritage merit badge counselor, but there is a scan pdf of the old Beekeeping pamphlet online.
I was a scout from 1997-2004. I can tell you during that time anecdotally there wasn’t a lot of interest locally with beekeeping. So, it’s not surprising to me when Bryan Wendell writes regarding the Beekeeping merit badge, “No, a swarm of killer bees isn’t to blame for the Beekeeping merit badge’s 1995 demise. The real culprit carries a similarly painful sting, though: a lack of interest and too few merit badge counselors, “ in a Scout’s Life article titled: Gone but not forgotten: Beekeeping and 9 other discontinued merit badges.
However, as the article explains, interests has picked up around 2010 & by the date of the article in 2014 Scout’s Life was still getting emails on interest with reviving the old merit badge? Why? In my opinion, interests has picked up because of the push for care of the environment with the media pushing topics like climate change & the fact that supplies are vastly easier to purchase because of the boom of e-commerce.
I recently shared my thoughts of reviving the Beekeeping merit badge with an online Facebook group called Scouts BSA. And, it was overwhelmingly positive with over a combined 200 positive reactions of likes & comments. The want for the restoration of the merit badge is so overwhelming, the negative replies numbered under ten—those comments tended to suggest it wasn’t needed since the BSA tried to incorporate Beekeeping into “Bird Study, Forestry, Gardening, Nature, Plant Science, Pulp and Paper, Environmental Science, and Insect Study.”
Sounds like to me, there’s enough there to make its own merit badge…
I’d first point out for my argument for the revival of the Beekeeping Merit Badge is look how foundational bees are to all these other subjects that tend to give them one requirement lost in their entirety of all those merit badges. One comment said, “You can do bees in gardening…” Sure, but you can also do something else & without pollinators there’s no garden.
Beekeeping is an art & a science unto itself. The popularity of Beekeeping is growing with the easier access to the equipment in the 21st century. The hobby, or business, has a variety of tools which required knowledge how to use them. There are several different types of hives a beekeeper can use to start their colony. A beekeeper needs to know how to clean & when to clean the hive for mites which, if left undone, typically leads to colony collapse for new beekeepers. It’s important to be able to identify types of bees in the colony from the most important—the queen— to the female workers and the male drones.
Where do you put your hive on your property? What type of food sources do the bees need? Did you know bees need a water source & will be attracted to a neighbors pool if you do not provide one? Does the gardening merit badge teach a lot of these ins & outs of beekeeping—no, it doesn’t.
BSA needs recognize the changes because it has always led in the forefront of conservation. After WWII, Scouts planted over 2 million trees to replace ones harvested fo the war. BSA led the way for the recycling movement in the 70s, adopted Leave No Trace guidelines in the 90s, donated $5 million worth of service to the U.S. Forest Service.1
If Scouting groups want to take being conservation-minded serious then they need to give official recognition to the bees, It’s time.
Boy Scouts of America, Scouting Heritage, (Irving TX: Boy Scouts of America, 2022)