You Better Bee-Lieve It

In certain circles the buzz about bees has become deafening. Take, for example, earlier this year, when David Beckham exchanged beekeeping tips with King Charles III, or when the singer Zayn Malik gave Kelly Clarkson honey from his farm during an appearance on her talk show. (Clarkson revealed she has bees on her property, too.)

Should you find yourself in a conversation with Beyoncé or Martha Stewart, bring up their backyard hives and you’ll surely win some points—or a jar of honey.

“Our world is drunk on AI, performance, algorithms, and optimization, but making honey hasn’t changed in centuries,” says Richard Christiansen, owner of the garden centric lifestyle brand Flamingo Estate, which sells $250 jars of the stuff harvested from Tiffany Haddish’s Los Angeles yard (proceeds go to charity).

“It’s this analog practice: Put the bees in, wait for the flowers, come back. There’s something beautiful about the simplicity of beekeeping.”

Christiansen’s parents were beekeepers, and today he keeps 30 to 40 hives on his hillside property in L.A. He sells honey from hives located in the yards of LeBron James, Ai Weiwei, and Julianne Moore, and likens the process of making honey to making wine. “There’s a real complexity, snobbery, and rivalry in the honey world,” he says, noting that VIP collaborators often ask him to leave his hives behind. “There are people who just obsess over it.”

Yao King, who runs a New York City hedge fund, bought a home in Bucks County, Pa., in 2020 and added hives to help keep his small farm’s ecosystem in balance. “It’s a nice way to get out of the city and use my brain in a different way,” he says. “Out here it’s like, ‘Oh, the bee population is dwindling. What’s causing it? What can I do?’”

He’s now a devotee: a reader of bee books, viewer of YouTube bee videos, and a member of various groups for the “beek” (online shorthand for beekeeper) community. “It helps me think about how things fit together, in the broader picture of nature,” he says with a touch of awe.

Bees have long cast their spell over the rich and powerful. Aristotle considered them divine, Napoleon used them as his emblem to represent diligence and orderliness, and they have been a signature motif for Gucci since the 1970s. Ancient Romans gave honey as a welcoming gift, and Samuel L. Jackson gave 10 pounds of bees to Scarlett Johansson as a wedding present. Martha Stewart said in a 2013 interview that there’s something “so romantic” about raising them.

Nature has long fascinated the affluent—just think of Bunny Mellon’s or C.Z. Guest’s gardens—perhaps because it’s the one thing money can’t control. It doesn’t hurt that honey is also touted for its alleged healing properties, a preoccupation of the upper class. Gwyneth Paltrow has advocated apitherapy treatments to relieve inflammation, and beestings are said to help with everything from Lyme disease to scarring. Christiansen recalls bumping into Stewart at a function and her saying he looked tired.

Her advice? Dab honey and olive oil on his skin.

King thinks something deeper may be at play. “Bees are symbols of freedom and self-sufficiency,” he says. “People feel trapped sometimes, but there’s this calling in our DNA: We want to be out there, growing, nourishing, and cultivating these natural things in their lives.”