A Pollination Sensation

Melanie Kirby (Tortugas Pueblo) was thinking about moving to San Francisco to become a DJ, but the Peace Corps came first. It was the mid-’90s, she’d just graduated from St. John’s College in Santa Fe and was looking around the world to see what the future had in store. Paraguay was the answer, and an introduction to the world of rustic South American beekeeping.

“I didn’t know anything about it, I just wanted to travel and not carry a weapon,” Kirby tells SFR. “I had no idea it was going to have as big of an impact and direct my career path as it has.”

Today, her life revolves around the buzzing little pollinators, both in her education job and on her Taos County apiary farm, Zia Queenbee Company (ziaqueenbees.com).

Kirby earned her graduate degree in entomology from Washington State University, and her studies have taken her from South America and Hawaii to Ukraine and Morocco to study honey bees and apiary culture. Now she’s set up shop as the extension educator for the land grant program at the Institute of American Indian Arts—and of course her bees are coming along, too.

The land grant program educates students as well as the broader community in traditional and modern agriculture, with a heavy focus on Indigenous methods. Kirby’s beekeeping program is part of a three-year expansion initiative for the school’s overarching agricultural offerings, and part of the idea is helping to increase pollinators and the plants serving bees across the property.

“It’s like having a new baby on campus,” Laurie Logan Brayshaw, director of sponsored programs at IAIA, explains. “Everyone’s so excited about it. We’ve been wanting to have a program to teach individuals to do outreach about agriculture, and since we can’t have livestock we just kept thinking ‘bees’—and then we found Melanie.”

IAIA sits on 140 acres at the southernmost end of Santa Fe, but Brayshaw explains its buildings only occupy 40 of those acres. With all the open land, the school is planning for a natural restoration—ensuring runoff is controlled and straying from watering technology that isn’t organic or natural. What’s good for the campus, Brayshaw says, is good for the bees.

“[Bees] need a place to forage from,” she continues. “It’ll help bring up birds and bats. We want to make it as beneficial for nature as possible. It also helps make it a better environment for learning as a meditative space for students to wander through, to get close to nature, and use some of that material for classroom projects. We ask ourselves, ‘What can we do to improve life for us and for the wildlife?’”

Three hives are set up on campus; Brayshaw and Kirby note how big a hit the bees have been with the students helping Kirby acclimate them to their new home. Using biomimicry—a process wherein humans mimic a process found in nature to solve an ecological problem—the bees can get a jump start. For example, Kirby explains, colonies need a lot of nectar to get their hive going as the apiary gets established. It takes 20 pounds of nectar for bees to produce one pound of wax. With the wax, they build their hive and store their food. But, Kirby cautions, if summer rains don’t come in turn, or the wildfire smoke gets too heavy, the bees can starve as they head into winter.

“I get so nervous with the wildfires,” she says. “They’re beneficial, but it can take a long time to recover. It gets more challenging with the shifting climate. When there’s a lot of smoke in the air, it’s hard for them to smell the flowers.”

Part of that biomimicry is a “tea” for the bees, a kind of organic sugar water with camomile and lemongrass that bees consume and convert into wax. Further, with an established hive, bees have a better chance of holding out through the colder months.

Still, contingency plans are in place, such as taking the hives into the mountains if or when conditions get too arid—but Kirby says that’s all part of the challenge of raising honeybees in New Mexico, anyway. She takes inspiration from her Indigenous ancestors, who made a life in what is today New Mexico by knowing the methods of the land. Kirby describes them as the first ecologists, agriculturalists and scientists in the region.

“We’re the fifth largest state by area and one of the lowest in population. And that all comes down to water,” she says. “Our various tribal communities know that. Tribal communities would follow the natural resources by seasons, and I approach it like that with bees. If it gets too dry and too hot, I’ve got to migrate with them to greener pastures to follow that bloom. It’s all about following the bloom. These are ancestral ways that connect us to overall health.”

Despite bees facing such challenges in New Mexico’s unique range of climates, Kirby is quick to point out honeybees are not an invasive species.

“Our own American honey bee on the continent went extinct during an ice age,” she says. “Like horses, they were here pre-contact. So I see our modern day honeybees as cousins to our ancestors. Broadening that narrative and indigenizing the practice means we can do this mindfully and in tandem with other pollinator species.”

Kirby, brings it back to her relationship with the world around her.

“The bees taught me about collaboration,” she says. “We really flourish more in a community. The bees really have taught me that.”