Natural Beekeeping, The Best Honey, And How To Help Bees With Nathalie B.

Why are bees so important for our food supply and for life on this earth? How is “natural beekeeping” different from regular beekeeping? What are horizontal hives? And what can we do to protect natural bees in our area? And what’s the deal with honey? How do we find the best source?

Nathalie B. has answers to all of the above in today’s podcast. She goes over why honey is considered a superfood and often referred to as ‘liquid sunshine,’ sharing its powerful nutritional and healing benefits. And she explains what it is like to be a natural beekeeper and how you could even start an apiary in your own backyard!

Visit Nathalie’s website: bee-mindful.com
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Listen to the podcast here

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Nathalie B.

Are we in danger of losing bees altogether because of colony collapse? Why is raw honey different and better than what we find in little plastic bears on the supermarket shelves? If we want to help bees, does that mean we all need to become beekeepers? Our guest is Natalie B. Natalie is the creator and owner of Bee Mindful, a full-service beekeeping company that offers a comprehensive and wide range of services, including beekeeping apprenticeships and workshops in sustainable and natural beekeeping situations, as well as offering affordable practical horizontal hives and treatment-free bees.

Natalie goes over the amazing benefits of honey and how we can help bees, and know we don’t have to all become beekeepers to do so. She goes over why she’s not particularly worried about colony collapse either. That said, she explains how we can get going if we want to start a small apiary in our backyard or rooftop and what we can do to support the natural bees in our environment, whatever we do. Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to become a member of The Weston A. Price Foundation.

Did you know it’s only $30 for the year? Yes, using the code POD10. When you join hands with us, you continue our important work of education, research, and activism. On this 25th anniversary of the Weston A. Price Foundation, you can become eligible to win some prizes from wise traditions-friendly companies. Just go to The Weston A. Price Foundation, click on the Why Join button, and then join us again using the code POD10. It’s only $30 for the year, and you just might win a little something something. Thank you in advance, and welcome to the family.

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Welcome to the show, Nathalie.

Thank you so much, Hilda. I’m so happy to be here with you.

Bees Don’t Read The Manual! Unveiling Bee Surprises

I have heard you say before that bees don’t read books. What do you mean by that?

We know quite a bit about bees, but not everything that the bees actually do in real life. Very often we’ll find ourselves confronted to situations that we didn’t expect because the theory, the books were saying one thing, and that’s what all the beekeepers are repeating. All of a sudden, you find yourself in a situation where the bees are doing the complete opposite. That’s one of my favorite things to say is the bees don’t read the books.

The bees don’t read the books.

I love it. Can you give us an example of something that was surprising that you encountered that wasn’t in the books?

One of my favorite things that happened to me a handful of times, actually, and I do a lot of bees, so it’s not very common. Everybody tells you when you keep bees that there’s only one queen and then there’s 60,000 workers, and maybe at times 10,000 or 15,000 drones, the boys. The queen does everything, and she’s the egg layer and the glue, the cohesive actor of the colony. Some of the things that happens when there’s a swarm and the colony will raise several queen cells.

The first one that gets out after the old mother queen is gone is supposed to either kill the other queens in their cells, or if there are several emerging at once, they will fight to the death, Game of Thrones style. What we don’t tell you in beekeeping classes is that, actually, very often there’s something called supersedure where you have a mother-daughter team that’s making up for the lost ground of the failing queen. They made a new queen with a daughter, but they’re not replacing her quite yet because together they’re stronger.

You can find two queens in the colony at times. The reason why people don’t realize that is very often when you’re looking for your queen and you find her, you stop looking, and you don’t realize there might be another queen. There are signs that tell you sometimes you can tell, “I think there’s been a supersedure. I bet I can find a queen.” This happened to me like a handful of times, and it’s always so magical because it’s like mind-boggling how they don’t read the books, and they do it their way.

Monoculture Mess & Bee Stress: The Pollination Paradox

We’re going to cover a little bit about bees and their lives and the things that they don’t do by the books, which I love. I also want to talk to you about honey and how we can make sure to find unadulterated raw honey and why that matters. A little bit about your own story. Let’s start with how people say we should thank the bees for our food. Can you explain why that is, Nathalie?

In the grand scheme of things, with the way our food system is set up these days, we went away from local crops and just growing our food next to ourselves in our gardens. We like to delegate all that to big corporations overall, and they’re doing the big monoculture and the whole crops across California, and it’s just been centralized. It’s basically everything is a lot bigger, and because of it, they’re having a hard time pollinating those crops. They bring in and cart from all over the country thousands and thousands of bees to those big crops when they’re in season in order to get them pollinated, because there are not enough pollinators locally. Plus, they use a lot of pesticides and things.

There’s so many factors, but has never crossed my mind until you just said it, that when we do this monoculture situation where it’s all like a whole field of, let’s just say carrots, for example, or what have you, then there simply aren’t enough bees to pollinate all of that produce. They’ve got to import bees. It’s a whole artificially constructed situation. No wonder it’s difficult for the bees to survive and for the crops to do well. Is that right?

Yes. It’s stressful for the bees, not only for the transportation and the stress we’re putting them through, but also we use a whole lot more pesticides and fungicides and all kinds of stuff to keep the weeds out. That puts them under more stress. There’s a lot of poisonous environment going on when we do it that way.

You’re throwing this term around, there’s stress for the bees or stress for the bees, but what if someone was like, “Show me the data. What are you talking about? Where is the proof that bees are stressed?” What would you say?

There’s data out there between the Bee Informed Partnership and the Honey Bee Coalition and other organizations that are collecting data, even the USDA, about what the average rate of loss for colonies of bees is year to year. It’s about 50% these days.

It’s huge. How long did bee colonies used to live?

Colonies of bees can survive about 7 or 8 years in the wild, but because of the way we are putting them to work, there are a lot of factors that come into play. If you think that the colony is centered around the queen, these days commercial beekeepers are replacing their queens every year, and maybe even in some instances every six months, because they’re under so much stress, mostly from pesticides. The beekeeper applied pesticides too. That’s something that your readers might not be aware of is that 90-something percent of beekeepers use poisons pesticides in the hive to keep pests at bay.

As if the bees couldn’t do it themselves.

Commercial Beekeeping & Backyard Secrets: Navigating Bee Sourcing & Care

Thank you. This is my whole thing. The bees can learn to do it themselves. The problem is when you put them under commercial conditions and there are a lot of stress, and the way you raise Queens, the bees suffer a lot. They’re not in the best of situations. That’s why this is happening.

That’s why they have to keep replacing the queen because it’s like they’re getting queen burnout situations.

Queen burnout, the queen has been damaged by the pesticides. They were not necessarily as well-made. They were not, as they use a process called grafting, which, in a nutshell, is that you are mass producing queens under less than ideal conditions. It’s easier for them to sell queens that way and replace queens that way. You have a little bit less than ideal conditions. That’s part of part of the problem as well.

Beekeepers, Nathalie, their name sounds like they are protecting them, which I guess some of these conventional approached people are like, they’re thinking, “Let’s keep the pests at bay.” Unintentionally, sounds like they are hurting the bees.

I would not generalize, but certain practices do hurt the bees. You have a lot of really mindful beekeepers or well-intended beekeepers that are taking those stressors into account and trying to minimize that pressure on the honeybees. 94% of beekeepers out there are really small-scale backyard beekeepers.

Wise Traditions | Natalie B. | Beekeeping — Beekeeping: Certain practices harm bees, and many mindful, well-intended beekeepers consider these stressors, trying to minimize the pressure on honeybees.

They have about 1% of commercial beekeepers, and they do represent the vast majority of the colonies that have been kept in the United States, but there are very few of them. There are all kinds of things that come into play here in the backyard. Beekeepers don’t transport their bees, but they do rely on the commercial beekeeping companies to source their bees and their queens, and they rely on them to educate them as well. There’s a little bit of cross-pollination if you like.

That’s a cute way of putting it. It sounds like if I wanted to start backyard beekeeping, I would probably get my bees from some conventional thing, not even realizing that certain bees are bred a certain way. Tell me how I could be more judicious when I make those decisions.

I would look into non-commercial hives to start with, because you can put the bees under a lot of stress just by the simple selection of the boxes that you put them in. There are things like horizontal hives and especially horizontal top-bar hives that are frameless. They rely on natural comb, and the methods are much more bee-friendly, bee-centric. If you care about that stuff, I highly encourage you to look that up.

Actually, we have some free plans to make hives on our website. They take about two hours, it’s super easy, very not intimidating, and they’re available for free. Anybody that wants to try to look into that, that’s one way to look at it. The other thing I would say is be careful where you source your bees from and ask the right questions. It’s the same thing for honey, by the way. When you are purchasing bees or honey from a beekeeper, I highly encourage you to ask, “What do you treat your bees with?”

What that does is that when a beekeeper is naturally treating and just using those conventional approaches, they will be very happy to tell you what they’re using because they’re proud of the things that they do to help the bees. The people that do not treat will be very happy to tell you as well. If you ask, do you treat or do you not treat, they will get a little suspicious and they will say, “I’m not treating or I’m using organic treatments,” which by the way are very caustic.

You got to have to ask the right questions that will also tell you if the bees that you’re purchasing are going to be naturally resilient and naturally resistant to the past. If they’re treated all the time, they’re not fit. They’re not adapted to doing well on their own without those pesticides that dependent on those pesticides. If those bees are naturally raised without any poisons, then they are stronger, and you don’t need to put those poisons in the hive. Does it make sense?

Yes. I’m thinking about how we domesticate animals. Let’s say we have animals in a zoo. You cannot just release them to the wild because they’re not accustomed to fending for themselves. They’ve become dependent on the zookeeper, for example, to providing the prey. It’s not like they even have to hunt anything down. Bees could be similarly domesticated and unable to fend for themselves in some ways.

It’s basically that their health would suffer. They’re still free. Bees are a very particular animal that we keep as “livestock” because they really are free to go and fly to go fetch their food, and they can take off any time they want to. We cannot keep them bound to the box. They stay because they’ve raised babies and they’ve raised their comb there and they were like, “We have a home,” but they’re free to leave anytime. It’s not like a cow. That’s in a field and cannot escape or something. They don’t depend on us for food, as opposed to a lot of the animals that we keep as livestock, where we have to take care of them and feed them and everything. This is a semi-wild animal as opposed to most of the livestock that we keep.

From Corporate Life To Bee Obsession: Nathalie’s Journey Begins

Have you always been a bee girl?

No. I used to work for corporate. I’ve done graduate school and be a corporate consultant, all this stuff, and when I got tired of that, I started a French conversation school because I don’t know if you can hear my accent, but I’m not from around here. I started doing getting a little bit some experience with my own business. From there, at some point, for Christmas, I got a present of a beehive and bees that would come in the spring. That’s because I had, when I was eight years old, written a report about the waggle dance and the communication language of the bees.

It stayed with me. It was absolutely fascinating. That’s how it came to fruition. At some point, when I turned, I think about 40, I got my first beehive. I warn people when they want to start keeping bees, this is a be forewarned, this is a highly addictive activity. If you get a bit by the bug, literally, that’s pretty much something that you’re going to keep with you for the rest of your life. It’s just very fascinating.

Can you keep bees anywhere? If I were like, “I’m so inspired, I’m going to build a little apiary, I’m going to start small, take the free instructions from your website.” Even if I’m in the city, I can build a beehive?

You could do that. Again, forage in the radius of one mile on average, maybe three when they don’t have as much. That means they don’t stay on your land very often. They will go forage everywhere around. You could have them on the rooftop. You could have them on a balcony. You don’t have to have a yard. Now, you have to be careful that you don’t turn them into a nuisance to your neighborhood, because then people will get upset. The beauty of those horizontal hives, they don’t even look like hives. people barely even know. I’m big on saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission when it comes to that.

What people might not realize is that what they’re considering a nuisance is essential. This takes us back where we started the conversation, Nathalie, like we need the bees for food because what happens if crops and produce isn’t pollinated, what happens?

There’s a say that we would lose about a third of our food sources or maybe even 2/3. Eventually, humankind would disappear if we didn’t have the honeybees to pollinate. Not really. That’s a little bit exaggerated as far as colonies of honeybees, they’re not the only ones that pollinate our crops. In the grand scheme of things, even though there’s a rate of loss yearly average for the honeybee colonies in the United States of almost about 50%, beekeepers have learned to multiply them back and be swarm all the time. What people don’t know is that there are about 2 to 3 times the amount of bees in the wild that they are under our own management.

Can you repeat that? There are 2 to 3 times bees in the wild then there are bees that are in our specific little hives.

Correct. We’re not the only source of honeybee colonies, and they swarm. Their whole purpose is reproduction, like every living organism. Our whole purpose is reproduction, passing our genes down to the next generations. Honeybees do that through swarming, which is colony fishing, which is basically just think of it splits itself into similar organisms where the mother queen leaves with a bunch of the bees and start another nest somewhere else where the initial colony gets new fresh queens, the daughters of the mother that left, and they inherit the nests with better chances of survival.

Yes, the swarm will have only 20% chance of survival. The mother colony will have an 80% chance of survival. In the grand scheme of things, it all evens out between the losses and the gains. You have a population that is fairly stable despite the losses that beekeepers are experiencing. We’re in danger of losing a lot of the bees and the diversity and a lot of pollinator power, not just with our colonies of honeybees, but with all our bees. There’s a lot more native bees and things like that in the environment than there are really honeybees.

Honey’s Hidden Powers: From Superfood To Super Scam?

Why is raw honey like the ultimate in my mind is like raw milk. It’s very different than the product we see on the supermarket shelves. Can you explain why?

Honey is, I call it liquid gold, and liquid sunshine is basically a super food. It is got a lot of really interesting properties that also make it a medicine in a way. It has antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, and antimicrobial properties. It contains a certain level of hydrogen peroxide. It is a great substance

to use on wounds of all kinds, burns. It helps with healing. It helps with disinfecting your wound. It can help with like stye and pink eye and strep throat. It helps with your gut. It helps with your brain. It’s an amazing substance.

We don’t have a lot of studies about it yet, but it’s a substance that not only has all those, that bioactivity level, but it also has a lot of nutritional benefits, including somewhat probiotics, but mostly it has almost every nutrient that we would need for the most part, except maybe proteins for sustaining life for extended periods of times. I believe it’s even one of the foods that we use when the elderly is unable to really eat very well and you dilute it with water and you can feed people that way for a while because it contains a lot of micronutrients, including vitamins and minerals and enzymes and everything that’s really good for us.

Isn’t that interesting because even if you said where it’s understudied to a degree, if you go back, as I understand it, to ancient cultures and study, for example, the Egyptians, didn’t they have evidence that honey was kept in some of even the tombs? It was that important in the culture for nutrients and so forth.

They were using it for balm months, and they knew the healing properties of honey and its nutritional properties. That research might’ve been empirical. They learn through experience, but I think that it would behoove us to have a lot more research into the properties of honey for healing and all kinds of things. You were asking about the grocery store, honey. I want to make a point that what you find in the grocery store honey is often not the honey that I’m referring to.

It doesn’t necessarily come straight from a hive. Very often, actually, it is the second most adulterated food in the world, behind olive oil. What you find a lot of is honey that’s been mixed and diluted with rice syrup, high fructose corn syrup, or things like that. It tastes a little bit of honey goes a long way for it to taste like honey. You can tell it tastes like syrup as well. It’s very sweet, and it’s not a lot of people say, “I don’t like honey.” They try honey straight from the hive, and their mind is blown. It’s like, “I’ve never had this. This is so good.”

It’s like the difference between a grocery store tomato and a tomato straight off the vine. It’s like two completely different foods. My question to you, Nathalie, is don’t they have to put on the little bare bottle that they’ve added something, or is it such an industry standard that apparently they don’t even have to put it on the ingredient list?

It’s one of the least regulated industries in the United States. There are no guidelines. Anything goes. You could see on a bottle of raw local honey. It doesn’t mean that it is rollicle honey at all. You do not know any of it. People can tell you whatever they want. There are requirements on the labeling for things like as far as saying, “They’re not recommended for children under one or where it was bottled, which address, and things like that.” You’re not sure what you’re getting unless you’re a beekeeper or you have a good source. Look, to be in a grocery store, there needs to be a certain volume of honey that you produce.

The brands that you see there are not capable of sustaining and answering the demand unless they buy back and buy outside, unless they’re a huge commercial beekeeper that produces a whole lot of honey. Here are some of the things that happen in the beekeeping world that you guys might not be aware of is that there’s a lot of what we call packer and basically people buy in bulk and they can buy from abroad tank loads of “honey” and repackage it or mix it with other things and repackage it. A lot of beekeepers sell honey that’s not theirs, have their own. That happens a lot at the farmer’s market as well, by the way.

Disappointing.

You were talking about the little bear plastic bottles. A couple of things about that. Honey and plastic. Honey has a certain acidity. I wouldn’t put it in plastic to store it long-term, first of all. Second of all, a lot of the grocery store honey that you see has been either pasteurized or heated to a certain extent to basically prevent it from getting crystallized. That kills a lot of the enzymes that make it raw and that give it a lot of its beneficial properties.

Grocery store honey is often pasteurized or heated to prevent crystallization, which unfortunately kills many of the enzymes that give raw honey its beneficial properties.

Beyond The Hive: How Everyone Can Protect Bees

There are a lot of things that you need to know. What I would recommend is getting your honey from a local beekeeper that you actually know is producing all their own honey, but even go beyond that and ask, “What do you treat your bees with? Do you heat your honey in any way and at what temperature?” That you know a little bit better what you’re buying and what you’re getting.

Let’s say we don’t aspire to have our own hives in the backyard or on the rooftop. We do make these steps to get raw honey. What else can we actually do to help protect the bees? I know you said only 1/3 are cultivated and the other 2/3 are wild, but what can we do to help bees in general?

That’s my favorite question. Thank you for asking, Hilda. We don’t help the bees by becoming beekeepers. What we help the bees with is by planting. On our website, there’s a planting list for central Texas, for example, of pollinator-friendly plants that our local beekeepers and people that we recommend who are looking to help the bees, we point them to that. Free download and they go and they can see what’s going to grow in the area and help the bees, not just the honey bees, but all the native pollinators. Planting is one of the things that you could do.

If anybody has lists like that across the States, I would refer to that, the Xerces Society had some really good databases. Some local nurseries are good at that. The other thing that you can do is avoid pesticides, glyphosates, and neonicotinoids, and things like that, when you are growing your gardens, just be very particular. The third one is to share and educate your neighbors because as it spreads through, the more we do that collectively as a community, the more we have been all the pollinators.

What’s interesting about glyphosate is that you would think the farms, the big pathos, and the monoculture crops and all those things, they’re the ones using all the glyphosate, but no, the biggest users of glyphosate are people with just backyard gardens or lawns that they’re trying to preserve.

I’m not going to cite brands or anything, but we all know that that’s the typical culprit, the usual suspects there. If we can reduce that and replace any like herbicides with that contain toxic substances with things that are more neutral for the environments, like I don’t know, soap and water and maybe some vinegar and not so much salt because that can kill the ground, but things that are a little bit more inoffensive or innocuous to the environment.

That would be fantastic. The other thing we could do is instead of growing a lawn, and basically, this is what I look at. I got people that are fertilizing, putting herbicide and all the stuff, and watering like crazy, and to grow grass that they’re going to spend a whole lot of time cutting after that. When we don’t have that much water, sometimes to squander it on things like this.

What I recommend is also to try to go with native landscapes and xeriscapes and things that don’t require as much maintenance, that don’t require fungicides, fertilizers, and all that stuff as well. That provides food for the pollinators. I’m currently working with a project that’s called Legalize Weed, and it’s talking about this exact thing. We’re encouraging people to grow their front yards and their gardens into native pollinator gardens, and a little bit crazy. That’s okay. Let’s just embrace that.

I love that. I have a friend who has an ample backyard, and I cannot tell you how much money and time and herbicides she’s used to get rid of a particular plant. I think it’s called vetch. I haven’t said this to her because sometimes these subjects are a little sensitive, but I’m wondering why she doesn’t just let it grow.

That’s food for the bees.

It’s partially because we’ve got this mindset like weeds are bad, must eliminate, but who said so?

Who decides what a weed is? Some of the lambs quarter, some people look at it as a weed, but it’s edible. It has all kinds of beneficial micronutrients. We’re also focused on how weeds are bad, that we fail to recognize that it’s a part of life, and who has categorized them as weeds in the first place.

That’s a great question to ask ourselves. Do you ever get any people who say to you, “Nathalie, you’re just too into the bees. You’ve gone bee crazy. You’re getting a buzz from the bees.” No, I’m just kidding because you were talking about the weed thing. Do you get naysayers who think you’re putting too much importance on bees and their future and our future?

Not directly. I think people actually respect that. Anybody who spends five minutes looking at the honeybees, especially, or bees in general, it’s a fascinating world. I think people respect that they can be very addictive, and we’re doing a good thing overall, helping them out. The only pushback I think in that part of me is conscious and mindful of that, is the pressure that colonies of honeybees have been said to have sometimes on being competitive to other bees. The way to get around that is to help those native bees in other ways by providing bee hotels and native bees, raising native bees as well, providing food for all of the bees, things like that.

If I do want to have a horizontal hive in my backyard, I should first observe the landscape and see what native bees are around. There’s not like feeling that my bees are encroaching on their turf.

Honey Before Bed: A Sweet Secret To Wellness?

This whole thing, by the way, is a little tug and pull. You will have native pollinators everywhere. While bees are very efficient at pollinating and collecting food because they are a superorganism, and they work in huge armies. They’re very efficient. They are also making the environment better because by pollinating all those trees much more efficiently, they’re one of the only animals that are able to leave more than they’ve taken in their environment.

You see an increase in flowering plants, and they’re better able to fruit and grow offspring because of colonies of honey bees, which in turn makes more food for the other bees. When I was talking about a pushback, I think that it’s a little overblown. I think that in the grand scheme of things, it’s a give and take, and everything finds a balance there.

That’s helpful. There’s not going to be a bee war in my backyard.

No, there’s not going to be a bee war in your backyard. I have much more bumblebees and things like that. I have honeybees. This tells you because everything is pollinating, and in the end, that’s more food for all of them.

Just like they say, “A coffee shop doesn’t mind if another coffee shop comes nearby because you’re more traffic. That line is too long. I’m going to go to the other one.” Listen, we need to wrap up. This has been fascinating. I do want to ask you the question I love to pose at the end that if the reader could just do one thing to improve their health, Nathalie, what would you recommend that they do?

What I like to tell people, and I’m not a medical doctor in any way, but what I do for improving my health every day is before I go to bed, I take two tablespoons of raw honey that I know is raw honey without pesticides and if you read a book called The Honey Revolution, it will tell you exactly why that is. My understanding is that it bypasses the blood, the blood-brain barrier.

It goes straight to your brain, feeding your brain as you sleep, and helps with your nervous system and your brain house, as opposed to sugar, which would get absorbed by all your other organs, your liver, and everything. It’s like hogs it and leaves your brain to fend for itself. This does the opposite. Also, it’s good for your gut. The book says that I’m not again a doctor, but I believe in what it says. It helps with things like Alzheimer’s and neurological aging. That’s what I would do. I would recommend try it and you will sleep better. I would say try it at least.

I was thinking at the very least, it’ll give you sweet dreams.

You get to, I love it. That’s a great line.

Nathalie, it has been an absolute pleasure on behalf of the Weston A Price Foundation. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me, Hilda. It was my pleasure, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Thank you for having me.

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Our guest was Natalie B. You can go to her website, Bee Mindful, to learn more. For a review from Apple Podcasts, Pania81 says this, “I love this podcast. This podcast helps me continue learning about my health and how important the correct foods and practices are in my everyday life. I am an avid listener and member. Thank you for continuing to bring this information.”

You are so welcome. Thank you for not only listening but also becoming a member. As I said earlier, membership supports the work of the foundation. If you’ve benefited from this show, please join us. Just go to The Weston A. Price, click on the Why Join button, and join us for only $30 for the year. I can’t believe it’s such a good deal. You put in the code POD10, and that gives you that little $10 discount.

We welcome your membership and your joining hands with us. As I said, because it’s our 25th anniversary, you might just be winning a prize because they’re putting all of the names of the new members in a hat and they’re picking out some to win prizes as a thank you. In the meantime, I thank you personally for reading and stay well, my friend. Keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Natalie B.

Nathalie B. holds an MBA from Ohio State and a master beekeeper degree from Texas A&M. She owns Bee-Mindful.com, where she manages almost four hundred colonies through several counties around Austin, Texas.

A passionate and engaging natural beekeeping expert, Nathalie offers beekeeping apprenticeships and classes in sustainable and natural beekeeping, as well as services related to beekeeping for agricultural exemption, affordable horizontal hives, and treatment-free bees.

Nathalie is a contributor to the American Beekeeping Journal and the founder of the first natural beekeeping club in Texas and of the World Bee Day Natural Beekeeping Webinar. She also hosts the “Natural Beekeeping Corner” on the popular Hive Jive beekeeping podcast.

She is a past president of the Hays County Beekeepers Association, vice president of the Travis County Beekeepers Association, a director at the Texas Beekeepers Association and chairman of the Real Texas Honey non-profit.

Nathalie is passionate about community outreach and volunteering, and has set up free training programs and teaching apiaries for refugees in the Congo, Nigeria, and Texas, donating and leveraging simple, cost-conscious, easy-to-manage, and sustainable horizontal top-bar hives in the process.