Bee hives creating quite a buzz inside the Loop
Bee hives are popping up all over, from gourmet gardens in Oak Forest to residential lots in the Heights.
And local beekeepers couldn’t be more enchanted with their black-and-yellow charges.
The bees earn their keep pollinating plants and producing sweet, golden honey – sometimes even enough to sell.
Rainbow Lodge, a restaurant located in a century-old log cabin at 2011 Ella Boulevard, is abuzz Tuesday through Sunday.
Hungry locals file in for eats designed by chef Mark Schmidt and his team. Many of the fruits, veggies, and herbs that hit their plates are grown right across Ella Boulevard, in a kitchen garden owned and tended by Rainbow Lodge proprietor Donnette Hansen.
In 2015 Hansen decided it was time to make a strategic addition to the garden — a beehive.
“Bees made sense,” she said. “I have a citrus grove needing pollinating and this garden needing pollinating. And wouldn’t it be a plus if the bees loved it here and made a bunch of honey?”
Hansen said the bees have indeed been loving their new home, and they’ve already grown from one beehive box to two bi-level hives.
She and Schmidt are now anxiously awaiting their first honey harvest, which they plan to incorporate into the restaurant offerings.
“I’ll have my morning coffee out in the garden and just watch them,” Hansen said. “It’s magical.”
Another local restaurateur, Rob Cromie, owner of
Picnic Box Lunches, Cottonwood, Liberty Station, Raven Grill and La Grange, is in the throes of building his own bee-aided farm-totable outfit.
He has just finalized a purchase of two acres in Acres Homes, and is eyeing a third adjoining plot, on which he plans to install an aquaponic fish and vegetable garden flanked by multiple beehives.
His vegetables will grow on floating rafts, roots dangling into the pools beneath.
Below the waters surface, tilapia will feed and grow, while the plants clean the water, turning waste to food in a symbiotic relationship.
A one-acre greenhouse will be set nearby, and bees will be set around the property to support pollination of both systems, as well as create honey.
Cromie said the garden will take a sizable bite out of his expenses.
Cromie purchases around 30-gallons of honey every four weeks for his homemade wheat bread at Picnic, and he’s looking forward to slashing that bill as soon as possible.
East of downtown in the Houston Makerspace, an 8,500 square foot warehouse comprised of work shops and multiple community areas, Nicole Buergers tends another area beehive.
She isn’t a successful chef or even a property owner. Still, she’s smitten by her bees, a birthday gift from her boyfriend.
She’s cast aside a cushy corporate marketing job and is now in the process of crowd-funding her own bee-centered business, the Bee2Bee Honey Collective.
With the passage of Senate Bill 1766 in September, small-yield beekeepers can now sell their honey direct to consumers without regulatory middlemen, which means a hyper-local honey market has suddenly been legislated into existence.
“You can bring someone honey from Kingwood, but if they’re in Montrose, that’s not really local, and there are actually beekeepers all over with honey from just about every neighborhood,” Buergers said.
Bee2Bee will offer fullservice beekeeping to local businesses, a niche business blossoming in other large cities, though Buergers said Houston seems to have been overlooked.
“I have called up places, and everybody is going to Austin,” she said.
Buergers said hotels could make up a bulk of business for outfits like Bee2Bee; and Houston has no shortage of hotels.
“They have the bees on premise and then serve the honey at brunch,” she said.
Buergers said she has seen a lot of interest already, as she prepares to launch in the coming months.
When her harvests are abundant, Buergers sells honey at the Third Saturdays’ market at East End’s Houston Makerspace.
Heights-area folk artist Kiki Neumann is best known for her familiar greeting card line found at Buc-cee’s convenience stores, where words and sayings are forged from license-plate characters.
But close friends and neighbors also know her for her bees.
Neumann has four hives on her property off North Shepherd Drive, on her two-acre plot which she purchased 17 years ago.
The property was a vast expanse from her previous home in Garden Oaks.
As a bonus, the new lot came with 1,000-square foot garden, in which Neumann planted flowers and vegetables.
“I had many concerns about lack of bees doing their wonderful pollination in such an urban environment off a cement highway like North Shepherd,” she said.
“When I learned that the bees from one hive can travel five miles or more, I was thrilled that they would be helping my many neighbors who also have gardens.”
In April 2014, with the help of Bellaire bee expert Shelley Rice, Neumann installed her first hives.
They’re useful, but for Neumann the hives are also just plain fun.
“There is an amazing feeling of just watching bees in their natural state,” she said.
“And best of all is honey in my morning coffee harvested right from a few feet away in the backyard.”