Shorewood Hills on track to allow backyard beekeeping

Published online in Wisconsin State Journal

Shorewood Hills residents may soon see more honeybees buzzing in their backyards.

The village’s Plan Commission agreed unanimously last week to recommend an ordinance to the Shorewood Hills Village Board allowing for urban beekeeping within the village. If passed, the ordinance would take effect as soon as October, according to Shorewood Hills administrator Karl Frantz.

Madison and Middleton both passed similar ordinances in 2012.

“I had enough people asking about wanting to explore beekeeping and having bees on their property, as well as an awareness of people who already had bees in the community,” Frantz said. “I think more and more people are getting interested in this.”

The ordinance would only allow the cultivation of honeybees and outlines certain regulations for those permitted to house apiaries, such as requiring a hive be located at least 25 feet from neighbors’ homes and at least 10 feet from parks or bike paths. No more than six hives would be allowed per lot.

Hives would also only be allowed in backyards with a 6-foot flyaway barrier. But Shorewood Hills prohibits its residents from having fences more than 4 feet tall, Frantz said, which means that beekeepers would need to create an alternative barrier out of vegetation.

Jeanne Hansen, a Madison beekeeper and founder of Dane County’s Beekeeper Association — which has an online community of more than 300 local beekeepers — said more cities should follow suit. In doing so, Hansen said communities will bear fruit — both literally and figuratively.

“They should do it so that people can be well-rounded in their knowledge of life and nature, and show neighbors and children that food comes from Mother Nature and not the grocery store,” she said. “Cities are so urbanized, and beekeeping is one thing that can be done in an urban setting.”

In fact, urban bees are more likely to survive during winter and produce twice as much honey on average than their rural counterparts, according to the Honeybee Conservancy. Bees are also important pollinators for gardens, Hansen said, which helps local food systems and city plants thrive.

A bad rap?

But some neighbors may still be wary of bees, she said. Over the years, her backyard has become home to multiple hives, prompting disapproval from her neighbors.

Hansen said the skepticism is unfounded. While honeybees may fly up to five miles or more away from their hives to locate nectar and pollen, they are not there to be a nuisance and will only sting if agitated, she said.

“It’s a total misconception that the bees are a danger,” she said. “You see cartoons with a swarm of bees chasing the person, but that never happens.”

Frantz also said he has no qualms about backyard beekeeping and said residents have not expressed any concerns, either.

“I think this community has a very vigorous approach to sustainability,” he said. “People here are interested in honey as a food source and also in the fact that bees are really crucial to our ecosystem.”

Drop in honey

The proposed ordinance comes as Wisconsin faces a decline in honey production. Among producers with five or more bee colonies, the state produced 2.16 million pounds of honey last year — a 27% decline since 2017, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s national honey report.

Pollinator-dependent crops account for over $55 million in the state’s annual production, with honey and beeswax accounting for $3.5 million of the total, according to the state’s pollinator protection plan.

But in recent years, Wisconsin has continued to fall among the nation’s top producers of honey. Wisconsin first dropped out of the top 10 honey-producing states in 2014 and is currently 16th in the nation in honey production, down from 15th in 2017. The number of honeybee colonies in Wisconsin also decreased from 53,000 in 2017 to 49,000 in 2019.

Better news

Wisconsin’s honeybee decline does not reflect the U.S. or the region as a whole. The University of Minnesota Bee Lab says honeybees are not at risk of going extinct, and the Upper Midwest continues to be the nation’s highest honey-producing region.

The USDA also reported an uptick in total U.S. honey production and honeybee colonies in the past year. Overall, the U.S. produced 157 million pounds of honey in 2019, an increase of 2 percent from 2018.

While the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service does not include any bee species on its list of endangered insects in the Upper Midwest, only the rusty-patched bumblebee and seven species of Hawaiian bees are among those endangered in the nation.

“I think most people are supportive of this,” Frantz said, “and if we can promote beekeeping, it can increase the sustainability of our society and the entire world.”

Plus, Frantz said, there’s one more benefit to having bees in the village: “The beekeepers hand jars of honey to all their neighbors.”