In service of the bee.

I founded Bay Beehives in memory of my father, Paul McAndrew.

My love and fascination for honeybees began as a young child. One summer while swimming in the family pool, my father had his arm resting on the ledge when a honeybee landed. Fearful of him being stung, I yelled to warn him. My dad; a gentle, loving, and kind soul; looked down and reassured me that it was alright; the bee just wanted a drink. I watched in amazement as the little bee drank from the water droplet on my father's arm, forever to be in love with the sweet honeybee. Forever in love with him. This tiny moment made a lasting memory and inspired a lifelong journey to celebrate the honeybee.

I spent years in the corporate world, but bees never stopped calling. In 2016, I left it behind, packed up my life, and moved to California to find a mentor and learn the old, careful ways of natural beekeeping. I trained for five years under one of Sonoma County's most respected beekeepers before founding Bay Beehives in 2022, shortly after I lost my father.

The heart of Bay Beehives is teaching. What we offer is an apprenticeship - the ancient way of passing on beekeeping, hand to hand and hive to hive. We install and tend hives for private clients across the Bay Area, and we apprentice them alongside the work, so that over time the hive becomes theirs in practice as well as in place.

Bay Beehives also serves as the Official Bee Partner of REAP Climate Center, where we host hive tours and tend a living classroom for the next generation of beekeepers.

To work a hive is to be fully present; it is a meditation. It is also a way of honoring the mystical bond between the honeybee and the human - a bond as old as agriculture, woven into the telling of the bees, into folklore, into the way the hive has always asked us to slow down and listen.

A healthy hive is a gift to far more than itself - bees pollinate the gardens, the orchards, and the wild places that feed us. I don't sell honey. I take only what can be responsibly harvested, and I leave the bees with enough of their own stores to carry them through winter. My work is in service of the hive, the habitat it tends, and the quiet education of anyone who wants to come close.

Since my first day with the bees, I've tended hundreds of hives over more than a decade, guided by one principle: what's best for the bee.