When National Pollinator Week happened in June 2016, exciting news broke at Portland State University about hosting two new honeybee hives at our 49-acre urban campus.
Over the years, PSU has made significant progress on reducing the university’s impact on the environment by reducing pesticide use, intentionally managing our urban tree canopy, and contributing cleaner water to our urban watershed. With these efforts (and many others!) underway, it was easy to see that there was an immense opportunity for the university to fulfill its educational mission by using the campus as a living laboratory to explore sustainability issues and raise awareness about the plight of pollinators, including honeybees.
Two years ago, I first started working on a project to bring honeybees to Portland State University. Inspired by documentary films like the Vanishing of the Bees and More Than Honey, I took up beekeeping at my home under the tutelage of a local beekeeper. During the summer of 2014, I learned a lot about beekeeping—including a lot of what not to do. Through the experience, I connected with a beekeeper that was interested in starting an apiary at PSU, and also discovered some PSU faculty who were interested in urban beekeeping.
With this stage set, I built support among different colleagues and found a real partner in PSU’s Campus Sustainability Manager, Jennifer McNamara. I drafted a proposal, which Jenny and I pitched to leadership in both the Facilities and Risk Management departments. Being at a large urban research university, we undoubtedly had to negotiate our share of bureaucracy to advance the project, and the delays and hurdles unfortunately meant that we lost a beekeeper along the way. But with persistence and a little luck often comes success.
Photo: PSU Institute for Sustainable Solutions
In April 2015, a motivated student interested and experienced in beekeeping caught wind of the project. Stefanie Steele and I connected, and we charted a new path forward. From there, we brought onboard another beekeeper named Tim Wessels. As one of the founding members of the Portland Urban Beekeepers, Tim is one of the definitive experts in the Portland-metropolitan region around urban beekeeping. To round out the team, we connected Stefanie with Heather Spalding in PSU’s Student Sustainability Center so she could take advantage of leadership trainings, mentoring, and peer-to-peer connections with other students interested in sustainability.
Fast forward to Spring 2016. Two hives hosting up to 100,000 honeybees were located on campus, and Portland State was recognized as the 10th “Bee Campus USA” for its commitment to raise awareness about the importance of pollinators. This project has created quite the “buzz" on campus and in the news, and this summer will undoubtedly be an exciting time at the PSU Campus Apiary.
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