Job diary: I've been a beekeeper for 4 decades, co-founded an urban bee non-profit, and now I work at a hotel connecting the community through beekeeping

• Julia Common, 66, started her beekeeping career four decades ago working at The University of Manitoba, where she first fell in love with honeybees; her bee-related education includes earning her BSc & MSc agriculture, and Bee Master and BCHPA instructor certifications.
• She co-founded "Hives for Humanity" with her daughter Sarah — a non-profit organization that connects people to nature, community, and themselves through beekeeping.
• People visit Julia on-property from all over the world to come see the bees in the property's four hives, which house approximately 250,000 total bees onsite.
• She's currently working on research to better understand how environmental factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic impact the bee population and honey.
• This is her story, as told by freelance writer Molly O'Brien.

I took one course about bees and absolutely fell in love with beekeeping. From there, I landed a job in a bee lab — and as my hands were in the hive I felt that I had simultaneously lost and found myself! I started hobby beekeeping after that, and wherever I've lived since then, I have always had bees. In 2011, my daughter asked me to bring some bees to the downtown East side of Vancouver, where she was working for the Portland Hotel Society, a Canadian non-profit society created to provide advocacy, housing, services, and opportunities for the marginalized citizens of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Sarah felt that bees would greatly enhance the spirit of the community there, which has been marginalized in the past. With great trepidation I brought a single colony downtown, and was instantly amazed by the warm and attentive reception the bees received from the entire community. I was surprised by the care that was instantly shown to the bees, and shortly thereafter I was absolutely astounded at how the colony was thriving in their new home in the urban garden.

From this moment on, I began to appreciate the potential for keeping bees healthy and safe in the city. The combination of community engagement with the bees and the health of the colonies inspired us to create the non-profit organization Hives for Humanity in 2012. H4H is a non-profit organization in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver that offers socially and economically vulnerable populations a variety of experiential education workshops and mentorship and training. This translates into work experience through activities like pollinator gardening, therapeutic beekeeping, and mentorship beekeeping.

Part of the challenge and excitement of beekeeping is that the bees do not read any textbooks or instruction manuals — they just naturally know what to do.

They are constantly teaching us more and more about their world and the environment we share with them. Therefore, I suspect I will never be an "expert" beekeeper, but, by this stage in the game, I have had plenty of humbling experiences. My respect for these wondrous creatures grows daily.

It was still the very early days of H4H when The Fairmont Waterfront hotel heard about and understood our mission, and provided financial support for our programming. This partnership program has not only been good for the pollinators, but also for the larger community and the city of Vancouver as a whole. It's provided greater opportunities for at-risk populations in East Vancouver to participate in H4H's programming and increase their connectivity to nature, and created a supportive environment for them to work and learn.

As a result of caring for the Hives for Humanity colonies in both the city and country, I started to see the parallels between pollinator health and human health. I began to see that a proper home with good food and community was vital for both bees and for people.

As for my day-to-day — in this job, you always go in with a plan, but frequently the bees steer you in quite another direction.

The bees are on a growth cycle that peaks mid summer, and a beekeeper needs to keep ahead of the colony growth so that they do not swarm which is especially important in the crowded city.

Working at The Waterfront, I've become acquainted with people onsite in every position from housekeeping to valet, and beyond; it has been amazing to see how everyone relates to the bees and asks about how they're doing. Guests will return to see the bees, and beekeepers from around the world will come to share beekeeping stories and check up on how the bees are doing. I meet people from everywhere, young and old — it's a great opportunity to spread the word about how important pollinators are to us, and the planet.

People seem to be naturally drawn to the bees, even when they're a tad bit frightened of them.

The bees are a great leveler — they take you out of any closed mindset and preconceived ideas you may have, because they require your total attention when working with them. Instead, you're just focusing on the bees. From celebrity to politician to plain old human being with very little in life to call their own — it is magic. Hold a frame of bees in your hands and the ego disappears.

Oftentimes, you talk about getting someone out of the city environment to have some restorative time, but the bees allow this to go on in the midst of the chaos of the urban area — it's an oasis of sanity. You don't have to create rules and regulations when you're with the bees. The bees will let you know if what you're doing isn't going to work for them. You can't help but have respect for them when you're up close and in-person like that, so you start to take your cues for behavior from the bees.

Bees can seem scary because they sting, which hurts. They require quite a bit of concentration, and they usually require someone who can get over this fear factor; then, they become all-absorbing and everything else around you seems to disappear. But bees are also calming because you just have to take everything at a slower pace to work with them. I'm a hyper person, but when I'm around the bees, I calm down. You want slow conscious movement, because if you move too quickly you can get clumsy and drop things, which may startle the bees and cause them to become defensive.

I get stung frequently, and it is sad because I know that each bee that stings me will die.

Although the science has not been entirely proven behind it, I believe that the immune system gets a good boost from the bee venom delivered by a bee sting, so during these COVID times, I say "thank you so much for keeping my immune system strong!" Even the smell of the bees as you open up the box is naturally therapeutic, because they smell delicious — like a blend of babies, pollen, propolis, wax and honey. What could be better?

When we're transporting the new bees into the hotel we have to be very careful about handling them because we don't want them escaping.

We have all sorts of devices that we use to keep them safe and enclosed when we bring them into the hotel. We take them inside the property, up in the elevators, through the spa — it's quite a trek up to the roof out by the swimming pool, where we keep our bees and guests can look down onto them. There is even a honeybee observation hive at The Waterfront where people can come up at any time, and look inside the glass window to see the actions of the bees without worrying about getting stung.

The hotel normally leads "bee tours" every day at 2 p.m. during the summer with one of the hotel's bee ambassadors. The annual honey harvest usually brings in just over 200 pounds of honey from the nearly 250,000 resident honeybees. All year long at the hotel's ARC Restaurant, the chefs find creative new ways to infuse the honey that's made onsite into dishes including chocolate, pastries, salad dressings and signature cocktails. There's even a hand-churned burnt honey ice cream made from the rooftop honey.

In Canada, the bee industry relies on bees coming into the country from around the world.

This pandemic has had an impact on the supply of packaged bees and queens shipped in from Chile, New Zealand, Hawaii, and California; the border issues have been a challenge. At Hives for Humanity, we're self-sufficient and we rear our own queens, so they're still up and running over there.

However, this summer COVID-19 has limited many opportunities for beekeeping at the hotel.

The Fairmont Waterfront made the responsible decision back in March to close the property. This meant not having bees onsite while the premises were closed, because the beekeepers would be unable to access the bees. Instead, during this time I've been working on a cross-Canada project to study the health of bees pollinating crops such as blueberries and cranberries. I hope that the results from this work will not only benefit my bees at The Waterfront, but bees all across the country.

Environmentally, this pandemic situation has been quite interesting.

In the countryside where I'm doing my research, the roads are less crowded and parks are more quiet. We've been sampling the honey out here during COVID, and we're going to sample the honey after COVID too in order to see if there's any difference in the pollutants within the honey.

All of these creatures normally do very well in the city, because there's lots of space for them to nest and a huge amount of food with diverse floral sources that provide a balanced diet. It's not at all a monoculture where the bees would get one thing to eat; they're healthier and more well-fed in the city.

The most challenging part of my job is just keeping the bees alive due to environmental factors.

It's a 21 day cycle for these bee workers to emerge, new bees are constantly being born, and old bees are constantly dying. They reach a peak of their growth cycle in about July or August, and then it starts to taper down and in the wintertime, they go into a "cluster" to keep themselves warm.

I've loved my time at The Waterfront. At first, I felt frustrated as I was constantly interrupted while I was trying to work — but then I realized that this was a huge opportunity to educate many people from all parts of the world about bees.

It's very exciting. When people think about bees, they often only think about "stinging" and "honey." They know bees pollinate, but they don't know why. There's a whole life cycle which can be explored on The Fairmont's Beekeeping digital video series.

The Waterfront has become a home for the bees, and indeed it has been a home away from home for me as well. The interest in the bees is palpable throughout the entire space, and it makes me feel wonderful to contribute to such a major component of what the hotel stands for. It's such a privilege to be The Waterfront's Chief Beekeeper and I'm grateful for the diverse opportunities it's provided me to make a difference in my community.