The queen bee of sustainability
By Jericho Sanchez
It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, the sun is blazing, chickens are scuttling about, and bees are buzzing erratically. Inside the queendom of Charlene Potter, she wears an all-white beekeeper suit, her armor against the tiny soldiers. All the while she wields her trusty J-tool, a beekeeping multitool, her weapon of choice. That day was the 10th day of the new queen’s reign and she was ready to rule her hive without the worry of her subjects killing her.
When a new queen bee arrives, she is often met with worker bees trying to kill their new ruler. For the worker bees, there can only be one queen. So Potter puts a protective case on the queen to avoid the inevitable death and give rise to a non-native Italian queen bee.
For Potter beekeeping has been a lifelong passion. As a professor at Pasadena City College and chair of the English and Linguistics Department, Potter is a busy bee in her own right. Her week starts with meetings, lectures, classes, grading papers, and managing an entire department. Above all else, Potter is an advocate for sustainability.
Potter does what she can for the environment on a daily basis, such as reusing products like grocery bags or drinking her water out of a canteen. Her largest contribution is her pursuit to save the bees and educate others on how to beekeep.
Potter is the vice president of the Los Angeles County Beekeeping Association (LACBA). There she holds meetings that invite researchers, like UC San Diego’s James Neih, an authority on the cognitive sophisticated behaviors of bees. Potter’s goal is to teach those with the passion to learn about how to sustainably raise bees.
“I have been fascinated with bees since being stung by a bumblebee in my grandma’s garden when I was five,” she said. “I cried. My grandma packed mud from the garden on the back of my hand. The mud dried and sucked out the toxin. My hand didn’t hurt at all anymore. Magic.”
From recycling old clothes, reusing every single component of a beehive (wax to lip balm, cosmetics, honey), and recycling her egg cartons, she has built her life around being as environmentally friendly as possible. She first rediscovered her love for beekeeping visiting a friend in Canada who had an apariary. This interaction sparked her childhood fascination with beekeeping, leading her to research where to begin. Six years later, she describes when she first discovered beekeeping and how she fell in love.
“As an adult, I never knew that backyard beekeeping was a thing,” Potter said. “I found LACBA and took classes. Six years later, I cannot imagine my life without bees. The smell of a hive is therapeutic and I love working with bees,” Potter said.
While the rest of the city sleeps, Potter has already started her day at 5 a.m. transporting her new hive from Alhambra to their new home in Altadena. The best time to check up on bees is when they aren’t busy because they start their day when the sun rises.
In her time off, Potter is classified by the Department of Agriculture as a bee remover. Most days, she gets constant calls of people requesting her expertise on a possible bee removal job. Potter rarely says no to a job, unless it impedes on her schedule at PCC.
Adding to her already busy schedule, Potter runs a separate company called Lil Bees Beekeeping services to relocate and rehabilitate unwanted bees to new locations for varying reasons. As a result, she has almost 27 hives that have their own queen.
“This was actually what kept me sane during the pandemic,” Potter said.
There are many ways that beekeepers take shortcuts and disregard the aspects of animal welfare, for example some exterminate the hives. To maintain all the effort the bees have put into their hive, Potter extracts their honey with a centrifuge machine that extrapolates the honey by centrifugal force, leaving the honeycomb intact for the next season. Her efforts are barely enough to maintain the bees.
Many beekeepers do so as a hobby. While some might make money doing bee removals or selling bee products and honey, beekeeping is not profitable.
One of Potter’s main values in beekeeping is minimizing loss. What this may look like is allowing bees to take their time (which can be long) to naturally recolonize into a new beehive when doing a job, or doing a weekly check up on each hive to maintain the proper size of a colony and to avoid overly dense hives. Even when she is handling her hive, her slow and careful inspection assures that she doesn’t hurt or squish even one bee.
“Hives with lots of bees are great,” Potter wrote in a text. “Caveat: nice bees, gentle stock, Italian bees, not Africanized or feral bees. If feral bees get too big, you are asking for trouble. They are NOT manageable when they are big. They are a health and safety issue because you cannot work with them. They are highly defensive. Our club promotes keeping known genetics stock, not feral bees, if you are doing backyard beekeeping. It is the only right thing to do.”
Most new beekeepers, given their lack of experience, might not be able to keep up with the challenges of beekeeping.
“Not managing your hives is a big mistake,” Potter emphasized.
Beekeeping is a full time job. Potter has to put time aside every week to keep up with the maintenance required to sustain her hives. She wakes up early to check the signs of healthy bees or address small issues that might easily be fixed with experience. Experience is the best way to keep a hive alive, and working as a beekeeper apprentice or volunteering under another beekeeper is a good start.
“Beekeeping is a lifetime. Once you’re in, you’re in for life,” Potter said.
As hives will continue to expand and grow over the years there will be more bees to take care of. According to Potter, people who keep feral bees often abandon their hives because they can’t work with them. They are too defensive. Africanized bees are not fun to work with. They will sting if they are disturbed and they will not accept a queen with Africanized genetics, unless they are completely broken down into much smaller hives. When people find that they are getting stung, another beekeeper or a pest control company is called in to put them down.
“Personally, I won’t do that because there is no guarantee you will succeed and it takes a lot of time and money for the effort to try and manage them,” Potter said. “It isn’t worth it for me and it is not a pleasant experience.”
For new beekeepers this might be a challenge. So Potter recommends that when making the decision to start beekeeping, the best option is to help an established beekeeper run their hives. The Los Angeles County Beekeeping Association helps individuals new to beekeeping get a first look at the trade while reducing the loss of the initial mistakes that they might run into.
Most Italian bees are far more tame, create more nectar or honey and pollinate more crops than Africanized bees. The question of whether or not to use non-native bees to pollinate comes up often.
“Well, people are weird, [they say] ‘well, the honey bee is not native to North America these are not native bees’ well you know what neither are you.’ Everything comes from somewhere else, we don’t live in boxes, we live on a planet,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with the fact that European honey bees are not native to North America. If we didn’t have it, we would not have the food we have.”
Potter was granted $5,642, seed funding for a PCC beekeeping club, from the community excellence grants. Starting in the Fall semester of 2022, Potter will be creating a club for aspiring beekeepers to start their journey into their own king or queendom. A chance to volunteer as beekeepers, and possibly have a hive to care for at PCC.
