The best teacher isn't a book

Forty-plus years in, Scott's first lesson is a humbling one: the bees are the teachers. Pay attention, and they'll tell you what they need.

That's the spirit of how we teach, too. Less lecture, more noticing. When you understand why a honeybee passes over your apple tree but a native bee seeks it out, or why the "weed" you were about to pull is feeding something you can't see, the world gets more interesting, and your choices start to change on their own.

How we share it

Education at Scott's Bees happens wherever people are ready to learn: at our Coffee With A Beekeeper drop-in sessions (1st & 3rd Saturdays), out in the bee yards, in conversations with neighbors and gardeners, and through the stories we share online. It's rarely formal. It's almost always a conversation.

Because the goal isn't to turn everyone into a beekeeper. It's to help everyone see that they already hold something useful in their own toolbox, and that their choices matter more than they think.

Scott's Bookshelf

The bees come first. But on the long winter nights, when the hives are quiet and there's finally time to read, these are the books Scott recommends.

Honeybee Democracy, by Thomas D. Seeley. The book behind one of Scott's favorite truths: the queen isn't in charge. A honeybee colony makes its decisions collectively, democratically, in service of the whole. Seeley spent years uncovering how a swarm chooses its new home, and what he found will change how you see not just bees, but how any group makes a good decision together.

Keeping Bees in Horizontal Hives, by Dr. Leo Sharashkin. The practical companion to how Scott actually keeps bees. A guide to the deep, low-intervention horizontal hives at the heart of our Propagate work, written for people who want healthier, more self-sufficient bees and a gentler way to tend them.

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Why genetics, not production

There's a tree in one of our bee yards that held a wild colony for fifteen to twenty years, as long as anyone could remember. The bees lived there without medication, without management, without a single intervention from a human being, reproducing and taking care of themselves season after season. Then the tree came down.

Bees like that are exactly what we want to save. Not because they'll make the most honey, but because they've proven they can survive. A colony that has made it on its own for two decades is carrying genetics and instincts and skills that work, and we want those passed to the next generations. After they are relocated to our yards, the bees are managed for health first, the way nature already manages them.

This is the opposite of how bees are usually bought and sold. Most beekeepers who struggle and give up do so because they're buying farm-bred bees raised in warm southern climates with no real winter. Those bees do fine through a Colorado summer but then winter arrives and they don't make it, so the beekeeper buys replacements every spring. Worse, they often arrive medicated and dependent on chemicals just to stay alive. We'd rather have bees that don't need any of that.

Locally adapted means exactly that

Colorado may have more microclimates than almost anywhere. A bee yard by the river behaves differently than one in full sun all day, or one in constant shade, and the bees adapt to wherever they are. When a healthy hive swarms, it usually settles just a mile or two away, where the climate barely changes. That's how bees naturally spread across a continent after arriving from Europe: incrementally, a mile or two at a time, adapting as they went.

Hauling bees two thousand miles from Texas to California, or Georgia to Colorado, skips all of that. Many don't survive the jump at all, and the ones that do pay a high cost. So when we rescue a local colony, we're protecting genetics that are already tuned to our winters, our drought, our exact corner of Northern Colorado. Move them too far, and you throw that advantage away.

What we do

When bees take up residence somewhere they can't stay, a tree slated for removal, a wall, or a structure where they're unwelcome, the usual answer is extermination. Ours isn't. We collect swarms and relocate established colonies humanely, then place them where pollinators are actually needed and where their strong, locally adapted genetics can carry forward, generation after generation.

It's brutal out there; nature culls the weak, and we don't fight that. But the survivors? Those we save. The generation after generation after generation of bees that can come from those survivors will help us survive too. Their future is our future, let's make it strong!

Why habitat is disappearing

Pollinators are running out of room. Not because anyone set out to harm them, but because of the ordinary way we build and tend our world. Rooftops, sidewalks, roads, and driveways cover the ground. Tidy lawns and weed barriers seal off the bare soil underneath. Each choice makes sense on its own, and together they erase the food and nesting sites pollinators depend on.

The losses are easy to miss because they're invisible. Most people don't realize that the majority of our native bees nest in the ground, and that a sheet of landscape fabric or a slab of pavement is, to them, the same as concrete: a door closed on their life cycle. They can't burrow through a rooftop to survive the winter. They need the dirt that's still around them.

We're not going to un-build the world, and we don't want to. But we can be far more thoughtful about the spaces we do control, and we can put back some of what's been paved over.

Regenerating habitat

We create habitat opportunities and plant forage gardens. Pollinators need a steady supply of resources across the whole season, and a well-planned garden gives them exactly that: food when they need it, and the surrounding ground left intact for the ones who nest there. Every garden we plant is a small act of regeneration, putting back resources that human activity has drawn down, and a living example of what's possible in any yard, school, business, or park.

Get involved

Habitat is the program where almost anyone can make a difference, through informed action and a little intention. A few ways to help:

Sponsor a garden. Fund a forage garden that feeds pollinators for years to come. This is the most direct way to put more habitat on the ground. Donate. Support the soil, seeds, plants, and labor that every garden requires. Volunteer. Lend a hand planting and tending. Many hands make a garden. Plant for pollinators in your own yard. Choose plants that bloom across the season, and skip the pesticides. Your yard is habitat whether you intend it to be or not. Leave some dirt exposed. One of the simplest, most overlooked acts of help: leave a patch of bare, undisturbed ground so native bees have somewhere to burrow. No weed barrier, no mulch, just soil.

Measuring our impact

We track Habitat's progress in concrete terms: the number of gardens planted and the total square footage of pollinator plantings established. As those numbers grow, so does the food and shelter available to pollinators across Northern Colorado.

Why it matters

Pollinators aren't a nice-to-have. They're woven into our food supply. About one in three bites of food we eat depends on pollinators, and in the United States more than a third of all crop production requires them. When pollinator populations weaken, that's not just a loss for nature. It's a quiet threat to everyone's dinner plate.

So propagating strong, healthy bees isn't only about bees. It's about us. Their future and our future are the same future, and we'd rather make it a strong one.

Manage like nature, breed for survivors

Nature is a demanding teacher. In the wild, the bees that survive do so because they're genuinely fit for where they live, and the ones that aren't don't pass their genes along. It sounds harsh, but that constant filtering is exactly what produces tough, locally adapted, self-sufficient bees.

We mimic that. We manage our bees for health first, not output, and we let nature do its sorting. Strong colonies thrive and reproduce. Weak ones, we don't artificially prop up. Over time, what's left is a population of bees that can take care of themselves, the way they did for millions of years before we started intervening.

A gentler way to keep bees

How you house bees says a lot about who they're being kept for. The standard American hive, the Langstroth, was invented in the 1850s and became the commercial default for good practical reasons: it's cheap, light, and portable. But every time you inspect one, you're effectively taking the colony's home apart. Most of our bees instead live in horizontal Layens hives, a deep, insulated design from 1860s France that's still common across Spain, Eastern Europe, and the Slavic countries. Not a new gimmick, just a better house for the bees: deep enough to winter in, insulated against the cold, and built so a colony can live much closer to the way it would in the wild.

The difference shows the moment Scott lifts the lid. The bees don't even know he's there. They keep working, gentle and undisturbed, while he checks on them.

That matters more than it sounds. With a conventional hive, inspecting the colony means pulling its home apart, and it kills far more bees than most beekeepers realize. With these hives, a careful visit barely registers. The bees serve no schedule. Scott is present when he's needed and out of the way when he's not, letting the colony do what it already knows how to do.

He even reads the colony's health without disturbing it. Watch the entrance and you'll see young bees flying in loops and figure eights instead of straight in and out. Those are orientation flights, new bees learning the neighborhood, and they're a quiet signal that everything inside is right. It's a gentler relationship, and a more honest one. We're not managing bees for everything we can extract from them. We're stewarding them, and in return they show us what healthy, self-sufficient bees actually look like.

Why we don't feed

This is where we part ways with a lot of conventional beekeeping, and it surprises people, so it's worth explaining.

Much of the industry keeps weak bees alive through constant intervention: feeding them sugar year round, medicating them, hauling them to warm climates or climate-controlled buildings for the winter. Because bees can be monetized, there's every incentive to keep even fragile colonies going. But all that effort masks the real problem. A bee that only survives because we're feeding and medicating it is a bee whose weakness gets passed to the next generation.

We'd rather know the truth. When we let our bees stand on their own, the strong ones reveal themselves, and those are the bees worth breeding from. Not feeding isn't neglect. It's how we find and multiply the survivors. The result is healthier bees that need less from us, cost less to keep, and grow stronger with each generation.

Sources: U.S. FDA, "Helping Agriculture's Helpful Honey Bees"; USDA; U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. (Roughly one in three bites of food; more than a third of U.S. crop production requires pollinators.)

Advocate in your own yard

You don't need a title or a hive to make a difference. Some of the most powerful advocacy is simply how you tend the patch of world you already control.

Host a bee house. Think of it like a birdhouse for bees: a safe, inviting home where a wild swarm can settle. Host one in your yard or at your business and you give rescued and roaming survivor colonies a place to land, instead of ending up inside a wall where they're unwelcome. You don't have to become a beekeeper. You can simply enjoy watching them pollinate your garden, or pass the colony on to someone who wants it.

It's one of the simplest, most welcoming things you can do for pollinators: offer them a home.

Advocate where the rules get made

Pollinators also need a voice in the rooms where decisions get made, so we lend our expertise at the local and state level. Colorado is actively shaping pollinator policy right now, from recent state action to support native-plant habitat on public lands, to local pollinator resolutions already adopted here in Loveland and Larimer County.

We don't do this work alone. Scott's Bees works closely with the People and Pollinators Action Network (PPAN), the organization leading much of the pollinator-protection effort across Colorado, and we collaborate with the Northern Colorado Beekeepers Association (NCBA) and other like-minded groups in our region. Lending our on-the-ground expertise to that larger movement is how a small local nonprofit helps move big things forward.

As these guidelines take shape, someone has to help turn good intentions into good practice. That's a role we're built for. We provide practical, real-world expertise on pollinator-friendly practices, and we help builders, developers, and property managers actually implement them: where to leave nesting ground, what to plant, how to design spaces that work for people and pollinators alike.

A lesson from the hive

There's a reason this program comes from watching bees. A honeybee colony makes its decisions together, democratically, in service of the whole rather than any single bee. Every bee works for the good of the colony. They are, in the truest sense, selfless, and it's something we humans could stand to emulate.

When Scott first started this work, he had no idea how many like-minded people were already out there doing the same thing in their own corners of the world. He was amazed, and encouraged, to discover he was far from alone. That's the spirit of Connect. We're all in this together, and we're stronger for it.

Pollinator partners

Local businesses are some of our most important allies, and we want to celebrate them. Our ongoing Pollinator Partner showcase highlights businesses supporting pollinator health in our community, featured in our newsletter so our growing audience can find and support the companies giving back. It's a simple idea: when a business stands up for pollinators, we help their community know about it.

Becoming a Pollinator Partner is a meaningful, visible way to align your business with a cause your customers care about, and to help fund the rescue, habitat, and education work happening right here in Northern Colorado.

Our collaborators

We're proud of the company we keep. Connect is also where we recognize the organizations and individuals working alongside us, from regional groups and fellow beekeepers to the broader movement protecting pollinators across Colorado. Highlighting our collaborators isn't just gratitude. It's a way of showing that this work is a shared effort, and an invitation for others to join it.

Coffee With A Beekeeper

Our standing open invitation: sit down, ask anything, and talk bees. We host informal drop-in sessions on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month. No experience needed, just curiosity.

Upcoming events

We're lining up talks, garden days, and community gatherings across Northern Colorado. Check back soon, or join our community to be the first to hear about them.