Interview with the bee collective Founder, Luke Howard
By Ella Hackworth
All images sourced from The Bee Collective and Rachel Meiring
Luke Howard is the Founder of educational, avocational, and communal platform, the bee collective. The bee collective has a mission to support native bees, build local habitats and enthusiastically educate the Columbus, OH community. Read along to learn more pollination, steps that we can take to help support pollinators and why it’s important.
What drew you to bees?
Really the first time I was drawn to bees was when I was studying environmental economics at Ohio State. As I began to take sustainable agriculture classes I learned how important pollination is to the planet, and it just clicked that it seemed worth trying to be a part of that process. So I would say that I started caring pretty late in my early life about bees, but I have been focused for the past 7 years.
The easiest way to begin to connect with pollination is through keeping honey bees, so I got my first hives the year after I graduated from Ohio State, and I have been caring about bees ever since. Starting to care at age 20 I knew I needed to dive in head first, I was also dying to stop learning from textbooks and lectures, and start learning from doing and failing.
As I began to learn about pollination, it was so obvious how important this process is not only to our survival, but also just the makeup of our planet. Yet at 20 years old it was just something I had mostly overlooked, and I felt that most people generally overlook it on a day to day basis.
This interest in pollination is why I don’t just care about honey bees, but I spend a lot of time focusing on other types of bees and other pollinators as well.
Why are bees important for us and how does that connect to sustainability?
Everything is about pollination and what I love most about pollination is the beauty it creates.
Flowers + pollinators = food.
That simple equation brings so much beauty.
Flowers are all different colors, shapes, smells and sizes so that they can attract different types of pollinators. They also bloom after different times of the year, and different times of the day. They create beauty to attract pollinators, and yet we are so utterly drawn to them.
Pollinators can be bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, hummingbirds, bats, ants, mice, lizards, etc… While many people have an aversion to insects, most of us save a little soft spot in our hearts for some type of pollinator. Whether it is the honey bee, the bumble bee, the monarch butterfly, a hummingbird moth, etc… There are so many different types, all with different features that endear us to them in specific ways. There are roughly 4000 different species of bees in the United States, and 20,000 species worldwide, so if you love the list I mentioned above, just think about all of the cool, weirdo pollinators out there that you don’t yet know about!
Food is something that we all are biologically programmed to need. Yet most of us are also seemingly programmed to also absolutely LOVE at least some type of food. Not only are most of us obsessed with some kind of food, we also form so many of our strongest memories when food is involved. Community and culture is rooted in food, and meals, and coming together to feast as a ritual. Eating, and enjoying food is one of the things that we do most in our lives, and the beauty in that is really powerful.
I like to come at this topic with that approach, because caring because we love something is much more sustainable than caring because we feel that we have to care.
The staple phrases people say now are: 1 out of every 3 bites of food that we eat can be contributed to pollination. 70% of all fruits and vegetables in grocery stores comes from insect pollination. “If the bees go, so will we.” While these are perfectly fine points to make, to me it is a lot more beautiful than that. Focusing on the more beautiful parts seems a lot more worthwhile to myself, and the goal of becoming sustainable.
What role does the bee collective play in your community?
The role of the bee collective in the community is to help bring a child-like curiosity to the ecology in our backyard. We, as a society, have considered cities to be concrete jungles for decades, yet if we look in our backyards, our neighborhood, our alley ways, and our vacant lots; we can see abundance and ecosystems. We can see beauty that we have either put there, or has seemingly just magically appeared. We generally don’t have to go far to find some of our favorite places and nooks, if we just know how to look.
So our continuously evolving goal of the bee collective is to be a source of education, and encouragement in the city to go looking for those places, and then to know what you are seeing when you find it.
So we plant pollinator gardens throughout the city to do our part to turn Columbus into a pollinator sanctuary. We list those places publicly and call them “Wild Spots” to raise awareness. We sell native bee boxes to spread awareness about native bees, to encourage people to know how to properly support their native bees, and to encourage learning. We host events, classes and concerts to provide a larger opportunity for education and learning. All for that simple goal of spreading a childlike sense of wonder about our surrounding ecology.
If you notice, all of our branded content is written in lowercase writing. This is so you know to never take us too serious, and to not take caring about the environment too serious either. There is a lot of doom and gloom when we talk about helping the environment, but what we are betting on is that we can create more change by reminding ourselves to see what we are looking at with a childlike vision, and a youthful sense of wonder. If we do that, then we just might all care a little bit more, and get a lot more excited the next time we see a bee.
What are a few actionable things we can do to support pollinators?
This is a great question, and one with really simple answers. Plant more native flowers, don’t use as many pesticides, and re-learn what a “weed” can be.
ALSO support our researchers that are studying entomology. This is an underfunded field in large part due to the public’s lack of interest in this information, so it is grossly undervalued.
Our urban spaces are becoming increasingly more important for the survival of our native pollinators due to habitat loss and pesticide treatments in our rural areas. It is amazing how we can turn our cities into pollinator havens, if more of us just selfishly planted more native flowers. What I mean by selfishly, is that there is no need to do it for the greater good. Gardeners planting native flowers for the sake of planting flowers is all that is needed. Flowers like coneflower, butterfly weed, aster, blackeyed susan, hyssop, goldenrod, etc… are just gorgeous flowers to have around, and then there just happens to be the perk of these flowers benefitting our native pollinators.
Planting flowers creates ecology. It is that simple.
If you like pollinators, then not spraying pesticides is important. Pollinators are insects, pesticides affect insects, therefore, pesticides affect pollinators. It is that simple, so the more spraying you do, the more sterile your backyard will be, and the less pollinators you will have. If you want pollinators, but want to spray for every other bug in your garden, it just won't work. This doesn’t mean giving up on every pesticide treatment, it just means that we need to be smarter about it, and more specific in our approach.
The word “weed” is essentially a made up term that we use to classify any plant that we don’t like. So I always ask the question, what about that “weed” do you not like. I remove tons of plants that I do not want in my gardens, but I have a good reason why I want them removed. Mostly because it will out compete a plant that I do want growing. Manipulating our environment is what gardeners do best, so don’t be afraid to remove and change your backyard. But removing a “weed” just because it is a weed, or because you didn’t plant it, doesn’t seem to be a strong enough reason for me. I love planting natives and working with natives, because they can oftentimes be a lot easier to work with than exotic plants. Why? Because they learned to live here without any of our help! So be a lazy (or smart) gardener, and plant natives, and don't be afraid to leave some weeds!
My official takeaway message here is to just be intentional, and know that your little or big garden can make a big difference!
To learn more about bee collective and to get involved head to beethecollective.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ella Hackworth is a Brand Account Manager and Contributing Writer for SISTAIN and has a background in design, dance, and visual arts. She celebrates her love of nature, beauty, and connection through her passion for living mindfully and sustainably.
