Tucked away in the shaded corner of a community garden in New Haven, Connecticut, a beehive awaits. 

Seven teenagers are here to check on their beehive’s health, but before they do, they need to prepare themselves for the moment. Gathered beneath a bountiful oak tree, they pull on their bee suits – pink and white and pale green – and don protective gloves and face coverings to avoid any risk of a sting. 

They bathe in the fog that spills out from a handheld smoker filled with burning white pine needles. It will mask any pheromones the bees emit and keep them calm during the inspection. The teens take a breath, steady their nerves, and approach the hive.

These are beekeepers-in-residence with the Huneebee Project, a nonprofit that offers youth beekeeping training in a therapeutic context, focused primarily on those with experience in the foster care system. Since 2018, the organization has graduated 11 cohorts from its 15-week program, which helps teens develop job skills and build community — with humans and insects alike — while tending to a hive. 

Lead beekeeping instructor Tim Dutcher guides the youth as they visit a hive they painted and installed last week, kept in wooden boxes about the size of file cabinets. As their fears subside, they take turns holding frames they built themselves in the program’s first month, now draped in thousands of industrious bees that have begun to fill them with honeycomb. The queen is healthy, the brood – the new eggs, larvae and pupae — are emerging, and all is well.

Ray, 16, perhaps the group’s most gregarious and enthusiastic member, looks down in awe as he picks up a frame. It’s his first time meeting the bees and already, he says, he finds them “calming.”

Huneebee founder and board member Sarah Taylor, a licensed clinical social worker with a background in child and family therapy, says the process helps the young beekeepers navigate and heal from the depression, anxiety and trauma many of them have experienced during often turbulent childhoods. The interconnectedness of the bees seems to strike a chord, she says.

“There’s something hopeful in beekeeping,” Taylor says. “There’s something uniting and wholesome.” 

Taylor says she has seen profound change in those who complete the program, many of whom are referred by therapists who hope that a hands-on practice can support their mental health. For some, like Ray, talk therapy can feel like the wrong tool for the job. 

The youth at Huneebee aren’t alone in finding beekeeping to be a helpful alternative or complement to more traditional therapies. Last fall, an Army veteran turned scientist published early research showing reductions in anxiety and depression and improvements in overall health among military veterans engaged in beekeeping as a recreational therapy. Another study found a positive effect on stress and well-being among college students who took part in beekeeping. 

These findings support longstanding anecdotal evidence that the buzz of a beehive can help people address dislocation and disconnection and have catalyzed the emergence of a new therapeutic model that’s already making a difference for the teens in New Haven and many others.

“They can have all these worries, all these big burdens they’re carrying with them, and then what happens when they go and open up a beehive is that those worries and burdens fade into the background,” Taylor says. “They have this moment of peace and amazement and appreciation.”

Connecting to the Hive Mind

When Adam Ingrao was medically discharged from active military duty, the return home was jarring. He was prescribed a steady diet of opiates to deal with his ankle, knee and back injuries, which he used alongside alcohol to numb the pain of his disability and quiet the survivor’s guilt that followed him everywhere he went. In a bid to reshape his future, he went to college to study plant science. That’s where he met the bees that changed his life. 

The first time Ingrao entered a bee yard, “it was transformative,” he says. “I knew this is what I wanted to do.” Among the bees, he could step away from his daily stressors while developing a reciprocal relationship that taught him the skills to live a more harmonious life. More than a decade later, he has a PhD in entomology and has shared his experience with over 15,000 veterans who have taken part in Heroes to Hives, a nine-month program that combines beekeeping education and training with mindfulness and therapeutic practices. 

Last fall, in collaboration with the Manchester VA of New Hampshire and the University of New Hampshire, Ingrao published the first evidence-based findings on beekeeping’s benefits for veterans in Therapeutic Recreation Journal. The research documented the beneficial effects on mental health of a program run at the VA by recreational therapist Valerie Carter, including reductions in feelings of anxiety and depression, as well as increases in positive feelings regarding overall health. 

The therapeutic program built on other animal therapies that have come before it, such as equine therapy. Over the course of 16 weeks, participants worked with a recreational therapist and volunteer beekeeper to learn the ins and outs of an apiary and engage in a range of mind-body practices, including diaphragmatic breathing, yoga, guided imagery and five-senses mindfulness. 

In Connecticut, Huneebee’s youth conduct grounding exercises before approaching a hive to get in touch with themselves. These practices prepare the beekeepers for the sensory experience of being among the bees, including the sound of a hive in motion, which an apprentice once described to Dutcher as “a choir of bees singing.” In the process, the beekeepers develop the mindfulness required to care for the bees safely.

“If you’re not focused on your bees,” Ingrao says, “they’ll let you know.” 

For individuals dealing with trauma, he suggests, the hive demands a level of presence that can be powerful in overcoming the instinct to hide. Traumatic experiences and other mental health challenges often leave people feeling fragmented and isolated, but beekeeping can serve as an antidote of sorts by encouraging people to connect with the community in their midst, says Amelia Mraz, a former Temple University student.

While studying undergraduate psychology and struggling with mental health challenges including anxiety and depression, Mraz says, she signed up for a semester-long beekeeping course and quickly fell into it. The practice was meditative and therapeutic, she says. 

Five years later, now with a master’s in public health, she opened an apiary in Philadelphia, Half Mad Honey, to help bring therapy out of the clinical setting and into nature. Today, she shares that experience with community members in search of their own healing. (For an interesting take on beekeeping and honey cultivation in a country that really appreciates both, see Greece’s Secret to Perfect Honey in Craftsmanship magazine.)

“It’s amazing to be connected to the hive mind,” she says. 

Last year, Mraz co-authored a paper that described a pilot study that found beekeeping in a therapeutic context helped reduce college students’ stress and improved their well-being. She and Olivia Ciraulo, a graduate student at Saint Joseph’s University, published the research in the journal Occupational Therapy in Mental Health. 

Kinship and community in caring for a hive

For Taylor, the change that occurs in Huneebee’s youth as they move through the program is partly about normalizing feelings of fear that can otherwise be destabilizing and take away a person’s sense of control. When the teens’ fight-or-flight response is activated within a safe context, they can begin regaining that sense of control and translate their resilience into other settings. 

When I visited the garden in New Haven recently, one of the young beekeepers- in-residence had a moment of panic when the first bees emerged from their hive. She calmed when another member of the cohort reminded her that her suit offered all the protection she needed.

For the teens involved with Huneebee, there’s a sense of kinship and community to be found in caring for a hive. Dutcher, the beekeeping instructor, sees it this way: Relationships can be fraught for people who have had complicated experiences with other human beings in the past. But connections with non-human beings can be simpler and set the stage for growth. The organization keeps their cohorts intentionally small, between five and seven members, so everyone has the opportunity to build a relationship with the bees if they’re interested. 

Beekeeping also offers a sense of purpose, which can be empowering for anyone going through transition, Ingrao says, whether that’s returning from military service or navigating a tumultuous experience at home. “Beekeeping is an identity,” he says. “You are a beekeeper. And it’s recognized by the public.”

A model community

New Haven resident Alex Guzman started as a beekeeper-in-residence at 14 and soon found that taking on a new identity had a galvanizing effect. Bullied from a young age, she was socially anxious and struggled to maintain friendships. She had attempted suicide multiple times, and was just beginning to understand trauma and the ways it can reverberate through a life. Then her therapist handed her a flyer for the Huneebee Project. Connecting with the bees offered her an opportunity to decompress and ground herself. Around the hive, she could find her breath and clear her head.  

“Through beekeeping, I started finding more importance in other things, too — the importance of actually going outside, the importance of taking care of what’s around me,” she says.

After completing the program, she stayed involved with Huneebee and is now a junior beekeeping instructor — a role that allows her to work with the hives in addition to visiting schools to educate students about bees. She never could have spoken publicly before becoming a beekeeper, she says. Although she still sees herself as a work in progress, the progress is evident. Now 21, she’s preparing to manage a hive of her own. Beekeeping may be work for her, but it’s also a form of therapy, she says. 

In caring for an entire community, beekeepers are often presented with opportunities to connect over profound life experiences they might not otherwise have, Taylor says. She recalls the first time she and Guzman opened a “deadout” together in early spring — a colony whose members had all died in winter’s cold. It felt crushing, she says, to see the end of all those bees they’d become attached to. 

But the experience opened up conversations about the purpose of the hive and the comb that remained. Within a few weeks, they knew, the hive would be repopulated by new bees that could continue the work of the collapsed colony. Feelings of pain and sadness gave way to a sense of hope and optimism, a sense of healing and renewal.

“Bees are a perfect example of what a community should look like,” Guzman says. “A bunch of people getting together to make something better and bigger than themselves that other people can keep building on.”

This article first appeared on MindSite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. This story was produced in collaboration with Reasons to be Cheerful, a nonprofit publication about solutions. Sign up for Reasons to be Cheerful’s weekly newsletter here.