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Beekeeper Toni Burnham stays close to her hives.
Photo: Amanda Abrams.
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Good gardeners that they are, the residents of Brookland’s Franciscan Monastery knew the flowers and trees on their property could benefit from a little assistance. So they contacted Toni Burnham.
Burnham’s reputation as a beekeeper is quickly spreading among local gardeners and advocates of organic living. Not the only one in the city, but probably the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable, Burnham is becoming the face of urban beekeeping in the District.
Burnham has hives in four locations around the region, holds regular demonstrations at area youth gardens, and mentors the keeper of the new White House hive, which was installed around the same time as the South Lawn garden. But she’s poised for a big growth spurt: the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) just received a grant to establish community gardens around the city, some of which will include beehives. While Burnham isn’t expected to look after all those bees, she’ll oversee much of the project and will be training community members in the art of beekeeping.
After a few minutes with Burnham at the monastery, it becomes obvious that the work is a labor of love. Busily chatting about bees’ habits, she approaches her hives—stacked white boxes nestled against the edge of the woods—to observe the bees. They are flying all over, yet Burnham notices details invisible to the average visitor. “Oh, we just got checked out,” she remarks after a bee comes and goes, explaining that one member of the hive might fly around visitors to take in new information.
Burnham gets stung about 20 times a year, but at this point it barely registers. Nonetheless, she dons a white coat and ‘veil’ providing 360-degree protection to her head, and lifts the top off of a box. Two of the four hives are mature and crawling with bees inside and out, while the other two are newer and might need help getting through the winter, when almost a third of a hive can die off. Already in late summer, she’s bringing sugar water to support the bees during a hot, dry, nectar-less time, though on this day she decides they don’t need it.
It’s the attention to her surroundings required by beekeeping that Burnham loves about the activity. “I become more aware of my body, the moment, myself,” she says about working with the bees. “I smell new things—I live in a different place, one that most Washingtonians don’t see.”
A “dot com dropout,” Burnham got curious about beekeeping in 2005 after hearing a BBC program about it. One of the elements that attracted her was how well bees could fit into an urban environment. DC, it turns out, is a surprisingly good place for bees: they gather nectar from black locust and tulip poplar trees that are ubiquitous throughout the city, and get a boost from the linden trees planted along the length of Massachusetts Ave.
Her urban hives, it turns out, are far more productive than those she keeps in the suburbs—the result of greater plant variety and less wholesale spraying of chemicals. And the honey, she says, is way better. This year, she harvested between 200 and 300 pounds of the stuff. “I’m tremendously covetous of my honey,” she says. “It’s a snapshot of a particular place at a particular time; the plant cover always changes. It’s like wine in that way.” About half of her harvest goes to the men at the monastery; the rest she eats or gives away.
Burnham started out as a hobbyist, but gradually, she’s become essentially a professional beekeeper. Soon she’ll be spreading her knowledge throughout the city. DPR’s new grant—$25,000 from Whole Foods—will allow the department to establish community gardens in every recreation center in the city; one in each ward will include beehives. With Burnham’s oversight, DPR will hold classes and recruit community members to care for the bees.
Kelly Melsted, DPR’s director of environmental education, really pushed to include hives in the grant proposal. “I think there’s a shortage of pollinators in the city. People should be more educated on bees and how they’re part of our environment,” she said, adding, “Toni’s so passionate…her enthusiasm really rubs off on you.”
It’s true—Burnham’s passion is contagious. Finishing up at the monastery, she muses on a variety of bee-related topics: bees’ altruism; their lack of individuality distinct from the hive; their 25,000 year relationship with humans; and the fact that early settlers to the New World valued bees so much that they used up precious cargo space to carry hives on their ships.
Looking around, Burnham shakes her head. “There’s something about those bees,” she muses. And by the time she winds down, beekeeping seems like the most natural and fascinating activity in the world. |
