Let’s put our heads together to build resilience for our bees

What happens between honey bee colonies is just as important as what happens inside of them. We help beekeepers account for the in-between.

Beekeeping challenges aren’t just complex. They’re collective.

Black and white sketch of a beehive with honey bees pouring out the entrance.

Honey bees are a true free-range species. They forage out on the landscape. They mate in open air. Because our bees interact with the colonies that surround them, the management that one colony receives, the pathogens it contracts, and the traits it passes on can impact outcomes for other colonies, even across great distances.

An illustration with individual honey bee hives representing the nodes in a beekeeping system. Each node is connected by colorful lines to the colonies that surround it.

This means honey bee health isn’t just shaped by our individual beekeeping practices. Our bees are also impacted by the beekeeping systems we belong to. A beekeeping system consists of an extended network of honey bees and beekeepers who are connected to —and impact— each other.

An illustration of the United States overlaid with intersecting circles, lines, and queen bee and semi truck icons, representing a highly interconnected beekeeping system.

In small-scale systems, colony-colony contact occurs mostly at the local level. But when beekeeping systems industrialize, genes and germs don’t just move from colony to colony; they’re transported from coast to coast, and honey bees catch “cooties” from colonies they’ve never even met.

Illustration of two bees flying around in a circle.

Those webs of connection can exacerbate things like pathogen spread. But being connected also has its perks: when beekeepers connect to system-savvy, resilience-building strategies and to each other, we both build the skills we need to keep our own bees healthy and grow our ability to make systems change.

Whether it’s on your own —in your apiary— or together with beekeepers in your area, we help you develop systems-savvy strategies to reduce disease transmission, decrease inputs dependence, and foster local adaptations so that resilience can take root.

Beekeepers Héctor and Maggie take a quick photo from the bee yard. Héctor waits a baseball hat and a plaid shirt. Maggie wears a wide-brimmed hat with a black veil.

Who’s “we?”

Hi there! We’re Héctor and Maggie. Beekeepers, researchers, and WeKeep co-founders.

Our beekeeping experience spans four continents, but we do most of our work in the U.S. and Mexico. In one system, we see bees struggle. In the other, we watch them thrive.

We’ve studied the factors that set some systems up for survival and steer others towards collapse. Here is what we know.

In the honey bee world we are —quite literally— our neighbors’ keepers. This means that if we want to move the needle on honey bee health, we must first take stock of the systems that surround us and then work in concert to tip those systems towards resilience.

We’re part of the “we.” We hope you will be, too.

More about us