Rob and Chelsea (who also lead
HoneyLove.org) are featured in an
LA Weekly cover story about the Backwards Beekeepers. Also appearing: LA Backwards Beekeepers Kirk, Ceebs, and Max; LA City Councilman Bill Rosendahl; retired California State Supreme Court justice Carlos Moreno; Pizzeria Mozza; and more!
Soon [Rob] started going on rescues, too — as many as three a day. He climbed a tangerine tree in the middle of the night and brought down the biggest open-air hive Chelsea had ever seen. With a frenzied smile, Rob gripped the severed branch with massive honeycombs dangling off it — a 60-pound lollipop of bees. Chelsea snapped a picture.
Then the dawning realization: "Where the hell do we put them?" It is a recurring question that will consume their next few days, then months, then years.
The tangerine tree hive sat on their roof for a spell. The McFarlands live in a modest house in the Del Rey neighborhood, a narrow, two-mile strip that cleaves Culver City from Mar Vista. They don't exactly have a lot of space. And what kind of neighbor welcomes a swarm?
By some miracle, after weeks of shlepping hives across the city — after the crazy logistics of matching up people who had bees but didn't want them with people who want bees but didn't have them — Chelsea secured a spot: a small, scrubby hilltop in agrarian Moorpark, overlooking an organic farm owned by a friend of a friend. The McFarlands christened the hilltop the HoneyLove Sanctuary.
Today it hosts 16 hives in colorful wood boxes, each from somewhere around L.A., rescued from water meters and birdhouses and compost bins, places Rob can't recall anymore.
"Each one of these is a family," Chelsea says. "We're usually rushing to beat the exterminator out there."
Read the whole thing
here.
