A.B.C's Bees Knees!

Midway through my conversation with Eliese Watson, she explains how bees survive the winter, passing honey from one bee to the next, huddling together in a cluster and rotating bee duties. Her face lights up as she tells me how her furry friends work together to stay alive, and it’s right then that I understand the buzz about Eliese Watson.

The 25-year old has been featured in local and national media for her work, which is ironic since she didn’t exactly plan on becoming the “bee lady.” Watson was studying history, specializing in American agriculture, at Mount Royal University. She thought she’d become a teacher when a local publication ran a story about her building her own beehive. Soon after, the phone calls began.

Watson had requests from Fort Calgary, the Calgary Horticultural Society, SAIT’s culinary program and several others wanting bees. Her studies soon became history and Watson immersed herself in the business of bees.

She now runs beekeeping courses, organizes collaborative purchases of honeybees, helps residents set up beehives, is bringing the Resonating Bodies educational installation to the Calgary Zoo, educates others at local events, will be running a bumble bee research project, rescue and foster care program with Mount Royal University, presents to elementary school children, is developing a curriculum package for schools, and is fast becoming a sought-after public speaker.

Watson hasn’t done it all by herself.  Feeling overwhelmed by the demand for what she was doing, she took off to plant trees — she needed some space. Meeting Farouk Jiwa, co-founder and director of Honey Care Africa empowered her to see she was capable of moving forward. “You don’t have to be an expert,” he told her at the IMPACT! Youth Conference for Sustainability Leadership that Watson attended in 2009. “You just need to know how to tap into the experts and bring them to the city.”

And that’s what Watson has done. She brought John Gibeau from Surrey’s Honeybee Centre to speak at the Calgary Zoo. She found a beekeeper, Patty Milligan of Lola Canola Honey, to teach a two-day intensive beekeeping course. She located another sustainable beekeeper to purchase hives from in Sorrento BC, As well she has brought up Sam Comfort of Anarchy Apiaries to teach a Queen Rearing Workshop just outside the city. She has also found the time to travel all over the North American continent mentoring, speaking, and conferencing about bees! She’s started an online forum for local beekeepers to learn from each other. She’s collaborating with a broad range of professionals and community members to educate Calgarians about bees.

Watson is not just passionate about teaching others about bees, but also about continually educating herself. She reads books on the subject, makes contact with other professionals, goes to conferences, attended a beekeeping course in Arizona and went to Colorado to be mentored by an organic beekeeper. She’s also keen to improve her business and has a board of advisors that she meets with bimonthly.

Just recently, Watson and three like-minded local businesses decided to form the Earth Repair Collective to make better use of their resources. She speaks about the collaborations and networking opportunities she’s been setting up as allowing for a crosspollination of ideas within the community, teaching others the skills to allow for community resiliency and cooperation to share community resources.

Long-term, Watson’s goal isn’t so much about bees as it is about community. “It’s about creating the hive mentality, using bees as a conduit for community engagement and development,” she tells me. She wants to see Calgarians engaging in their urban environment, growing food, supporting local ecosystems and working together.

Her enthusiasm for her work is infectious, and it makes her uniquely qualified to reach her community-focused goals. Our conversation at a coffee shop close to her apartment is interrupted several times by friends stopping by to say hello. It’s quite obvious people want to be around Watson. There’s just something about her.

She tells me she hopes that as more people start interacting with their urban environments, they’ll be more likely to start making connections.

“It’s about getting people to become more aware of their urban habitat and becoming more engaged in biodiversity. You don’t have to go to Banff to engage in nature.”

She believes this kind of engagement will help people make connections between pesticide use, threatened bee populations and our food supplies, and even bigger connections too. Watson thinks that as people become more conscious of how they interact with their urban environments, they’ll become more conscious of other ways in which they interact with the world and the resulting impacts, whether it’s thinking about the vehicles they drive or the employers they work for.

Indeed, Watson appears to be attempting to model community based on that of honeybees, and building a successful business in the meantime.

Written By Adrienne Beattie