The practice of beekeeping has held up for thousands of years, dating back to around 2500 BC in Egypt. The practice's main purpose has been to domesticate and breed bees for their honey. However, in recent years, a new purpose for beekeeping has grown. As studies have shown, bees are major contributors to agriculture as one of the main pollinators on Earth, and yet bees are being pushed to the brink of extinction. One giant contributor to this is human intervention in the environment, with many bees losing their hives and ultimately dying due to a loss of a home.

This past September and December, I joined Chitra Mojtabai, a self-proclaimed bee expert and avid bee apiarist, in the bee conservation effort. Chitra, among many other bee-fanatics, provides a service in which she extracts hives that have intruded on an individual’s property. One portion of her work sees her going to an individual’s property, usually a friend of a friend that had heard of Chitra’s service, to relocate a bee infestation to her backyard bee farm. The other portion of her work involves checking the beehive, which she keeps in a row of others in her backyard. She checks to ensure that a bee population has adequately accustomed to a new home and is properly reproducing.


A few months later, Cyrus had called me to come help Chitra with checking the hives. Accompanied with a new member of Mojtabai Beekeeping, Tal Erez, we suited up again. The process of checking on bee sanctuaries occurs every two weeks, and is largely meant to ensure that a bee population is surviving, as the relocation process is extremely difficult for them. Chitra began to open the first hive box, and an immediate swarm of bees erupted out of the box. Cyrus moved to smoke out the bees, which is unharmful if done by a professional, which he isn’t. Rest assured, Cyrus took all the necessary precautions to ensure the bees were safe. Chitra began to pick out all of the different layers of the box in order to check the growth of this hive, which Chitra had since April. In the central layer, Chitra had noticed a hive beetle, which is highly invasive and requires extraction to avoid risk of a hive failing. After concluding the check for this box, we concluded the day knowing that all in the hive was good.

Chitra, in her impressionable journey through her interest, has shown me what it means to care about a passion. In her hobby for beekeeping, Chitra has been able to bring her entire family together to help in sustaining an entire species that plays a major role on our earth. Even since much of the Mojtabai-Townsend household has parted from home for their schooling and work interests, Chitra still keeps her passion going by including anyone that cares to join. With the help of people like Chitra, who truly care about the way our world works and the people it is made up of, our future looks extremely bright.

 
Chitra had begun this practice as a hobby, stemming largely from her immense interests in the world of bees. Chitra explains, “The life of the Bee is so crazy. First of all, how do they know to make those hexagonal cells so perfect every time? How do they all just know what their job is? Their brains are so small! How does it all work?” While Chitra’s deep fascination with the world of bees is imminent, she also accredits much of her interest to the current danger bees are in. She states, “Of course, they[bees] are very endangered, and they are very necessary unless we want to live in a world where everything is manufactured and nature has less and less to do with our life on earth.” Chitra shares the outlook of many others who have grown the desire to rebuild bee populations, and her own work has made strides to sustain the bee population for the future, all from her backyard. As part of her own beekeeping journey, Chitra has included her entire family and any friends that care to join, with her intricate hobby becoming more of a family tradition, even though it is a bit unorthodox.

In late September, I accompanied Chitra and her son Cyrus Mojtabai-Townsend on a hive extraction trip. Chitra had been notified of a bee infestation in a backyard in Westwood, California, for which the home’s owner was planning on hiring an exterminator. Chitra offered to come in and properly relocate the beehive without any charge, and took Cyrus and I with her. Upon arrival, we suited up and found the location of the hive, which conveniently happened to be a trash can. Since the bees were somewhat calm, they didn’t require any smoke to relax them, so we loaded the trash can into the car. From there, we made the drive back to the Mojtabai home, all sitting with our suits on out of fear of a sting. My help ended there, as Chitra continued to move the trashcan to her sanctuary in order to acclimate the newly acquired bees.



Written By: Nathan Sokolovsky
Edited By: Bluesette Miller