CLICK HERE if you are having a problem viewing the photos on a mobile device.
As many as 120,000 honeybees could make their home in two colorfully wrapped beehives on the roof of the Redwood City Public Library. Each hive typically holds 40,000 to 60,000 bees.
Beekeeper Kendal Sager, owner of Sager Family Farm, manages the two beehives on the roof; she also manages about 30 other hives throughout the Bay Area, including in backyards, which she found through the website Nextdoor and Woodside’s Filoli.
The hives have been on the roof for about a year. One produced no honey, while the other produced a modest 40 pounds of honey — about three gallons, or 72 jars. Half of those jars sold out at the library store, and Sager sold the rest. One healthy beehive can produce about 100 pounds of honey, about 7½ gallons.
Not many bees were found in the two hives this cool day. Sager may have to replenish them from “swarm calls,” or calls from residents not sure what to do when a beehive shows up on their property.
“If you search ‘aaah bees” I’m one of the ones (websites) that comes up,” she says. Learn more about Sager Family Farm here.
People can also call the Beekeepers Guild. The bees will become more active in the next few months.
In conjunction with the rooftop beehives and the help of members of the Beekeepers Guild of San Mateo, Sager produced the “Bee Wall Interpretive Center” to help educate children about bees and their importance to the environment through interactive displays and books.
Inspired by a first grade field trip to Los Altos’ Hidden Villa, Sager became an animal lover and volunteer. Once she moved into a home with a backyard, she researched the “‘easiest farm animal to put in my backyard,’ and through some research I figured out the answer was bees.” She “could ignore them all week long and basically take care of them on weekend.”
Sager, a former character technical director at Dreamworks Animation, was pondering what she would do after her time there. She was not yet working at the company when ‘Bee Movie’ was released in 2007. When the company shut down their Redwood City offices and moved some employees to their main campus in Glendale about four years ago, she remained in the Bay Area and was able to get back to her original goal of teaching others about animals.
Sager says she “read ‘Beekeeping for Dummies’ and bought my first hive and it all kinda of spiraled from there.” She earned a California master beekeeping certificate through UC Davis’ continuing education program.
She typically visits 70 to 80 elementary school classrooms a year and has taught more than 400 adult students about beekeeping, bringing her observational beehive to help educate them. She realized early on that it was easier to bring the hive to the students rather than have them visit her farm — her backyard in Alameda, which includes honeybee hives and chickens, and soon a couple of sheep.
“It’s so much easier to get 5,000 bees in a box than it is to get 24 kids on a bus,” she said.
