This story aired on the August 14, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents
20 years ago, if you’d told Jennifer Berry that she’d be holding a wooden frame, covered in bees, with her bare hands, she probably wouldn’t have believed you. But today, she’s a beekeeper and breeds 500 queen bees a year. She is also spreading the culture of beekeeping by teaching the next generation that the taste of local honey is well worth the occasional sting.
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Jennifer Berry is holding a wooden frame crawling in bees with her bare hands, searching for the queen. She’s a professional beekeeper and today, she’s tending to one of her hives at the Crandall family's home in Tiburon.
When Eric and Danielle Crandall bought their property in 2019, it needed some work. Blackberry bushes were growing through the windows and honeybees were living in the walls. They didn't want to exterminate them, instead, they called Jennifer to help. She removed the bees and relocated them to hives in their backyard.
Since then, Jennifer’s been coming here often to care for the bees and harvest their honey. Today, she’s introducing the three Crandall girls — Amelia (10), Cincy (8), and Vera (8) — to the hives.
The family puts on veils to protect their faces. And then Jennifer leads them over to the hives. Everyone follows her except Vera who is a little scared and hangs back. She sits on a small bench, swinging her legs.
Near the hives, Jennifer is pulling out her smoker. It’s a small device that looks like a cross between a teapot and an accordion. She uses it to puff smoke around the hive. The smoke covers up the smell that the bees put out to signal that there’s danger.
"It’s because bees communicate with scent," she explains.
She cracks open the hive. Inside, there are a series of trays that hold the comb together. The outside is coated in propolis — a yellow, sticky resin — that the bees collect from plants and trees and use to seal their hive.
The kids lean in to smell it. 10-year-old Amelia has a rave review: it smells "like eucalyptus leaves and pine leaves. It smells like trees," she says.
Jennifer pulls a tray from the hive. It’s dripping in female worker bees. These are the ones who gather pollen and make honey. There are also male drones whose job is to mate with queen bees. That’s who we’re looking for: the queen of this hive.
Jennifer gives the frame a shake and most of the bees fly off. Then she hands it to Amelia. The family peers over the oldest daughter’s shoulder at the honeycomb’s hexagonal pattern puddled in sunlight. Baby bees break through the waxed capping.
But when Amelia eagerly reaches for the next frame, she gets stung and takes a step back from the hive.
It was just as the fear was beginning to melt away — and a reminder of why so many of us are scared of bees. Jennifer is no exception.
"I had a fear of stinging insects because I had been stung by yellow jackets and had been in the hospital for it," she says.
But back in 2003, when she was doing habitat restoration work, she got asked to help with a beehive. She protested but eventually agreed. “We opened the hives and it was amazing," she says.
"I've always been fascinated by things like butterflies and insects, but they fly away when you chase them. And with a hive, you can get very intimate with them and have this experience that you just can't get with most animals ever."
Her curiosity overtook her fear.
Quickly Jennifer went from being afraid of bees to fearlessly scooping them from pools when they needed saving. She also started keeping bees.
The hobby quickly turned into a job. Today she tends 120 hives in backyards like the Crandall’s. She also breeds queen bees in a lab to make more queens with desirable traits, like being gentle, good at honey production, and resistant to parasites. She raises about 500 of them a year and sells them to Bay Area beekeepers and farmers.
But more people are benefiting from her queens than just those who buy them, because her drones fly off and mate with other local queen bees.
"And so, any backyard beekeeper who has hives within 10 miles of my operations is benefiting from the breeding program that I'm doing," Jennifer explains.
And for her, caring for honeybees isn’t just fascinating, it offers important clues about their environment, and ours.
"We have this canary in the coal mine with our bees," she says. "We can really see how climate, weather, fire impacts our hives. We can see that the hives are not doing well, we can make changes. We can intervene and we can help them do better." This work gives her a sense of purpose.
Back in the hives, Jennifer is still looking for the queen. After searching a few frames, she finds her and holds the frame up for the girls to see her too.
When they see her, she plucks the queen from the frame.
"I haven't marked this one, so I'm going to give her a marking," she says.
"You give them mini tattoos?" asks 8-year-old Cincy.
"No it’s more like a mani-pedi," Jennifer jokes.
She presses a dot of green acrylic paint onto the hard plate of the queen’s thorax.
"So anytime you see a green queen, you know she was born in 2024. And it’s universal. It’s international and everybody knows this," she says.
Once she puts the queen back and closes the hive, it’s the time we’ve all been waiting for: the honey tasting. "We can try it right from the comb," Jennifer says.
The family presses their fingers into the honeycomb, which easily gives way to golden honey. Everyone agrees it's delicious, but was it worth today’s three bee stings?
Jennifer was stung twice today, but never even mentioned it.
"I get stung all the time. It's part of it," she says. "We have this big disconnect between our culture and beekeeping, because people don't ask carpenters, ‘Do you get splinters?’ And they don't ask people who cook, ‘Do you ever get burned?’"
Amelia, the 10-year-old who got stung, pipes up, "I would say a splinter is better than a bee sting!" But she admits, the sting doesn't hurt anymore.
"I thought it was really, really cool how we got to get this close to all the bees," says 8-year-old Vera.
She had been hesitant at first, but by the end of our time together, she was right next to the hives with the rest of us.
"I thought I would be scared and I wouldn't do it," she says. "But I turned out to do it. My parents said that I could get as close as I wanted to and then in a little bit, I got closer and closer."
And maybe that’s the point: to make little changes, to get closer and closer, until curiosity overrides fear.
