Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 7: Connecting to community through the bees — with Sarah Common & Kevin Sleziak
Speakers: Melissa Roach, Maria Cecilia Saba, Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, Am Johal, Sarah Common, Kevin Sleziak
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Melissa Roach 0:00
You’re listening to Below the Radar, a knowledge mobilization project recorded out of 312 Main. This podcast is produced by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Maria Cecilia Saba 0:17
Below the Radar brings forward ideas to encourage meaningful exchanges across communities.
Jamie-Leigh Gonzales 0:21
Each episode we interview guests on topics ranging from environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community building, and urban issues. This podcast is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
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Maria Cecilia Saba 0:42
Hi there, I’m Maria Cecilia Saba from SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, and this is a great episode that I get to introduce. Am Johal interviewed some of our friends from Hives for Humanity, who are a pair of incredible community beekeepers and our neighbours at 312 Main. Sarah Common and Kevin Sleziak join us today to share what Hives for Humanity is all about—creating community connections through apiculture.
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Am Johal 1:04
Hi there, my name is Am Johal. Delighted you could join us for a podcast again this week. We’re here with Sarah and Kevin from Hives for Humanity. Welcome!
Sarah Common 1:23
Hello, thanks for having us!
Am Johal 1:25
Delighted you could join us. I wanted to begin with a question for some members of our audience who don’t know Hives for Humanity, if you could both talk a little bit about what it is and what you do.
Sarah Common 1:38
Sure, I’d love to. So I’m one of the co-founders, we co-founded in 2012 with my mother Julia, who’s a beekeeper, who said yes when I asked her to bring bees into the Hastings Folk Garden right on the hundred block on the Downtown Eastside. And so what we found was that the bees thrived, the garden thrived, and the people thrived in there, and we wanted to continue, so we’ve been working to create those meaningful opportunities for connection to community, using the bees as a vector, as an opportunity, working to create training and skill sharing opportunities, and to celebrate our community through all of the work of the bees.
Am Johal 2:16
Great. Kevin, how have you been involved with Hives for Humanity?
Kevin Sleziak 2:20
Well I go back a little ways with Sarah and all that when she was in other areas. When she got into the bees, I naturally fell in there. My mom was into bees, she used to get honey from the Doukhobors and all that because she didn’t like the sugars and stuff like that, and there’s all sorts of processes we can have—foot scrubs, hand saves, lip gloss, stuff like that.
Sarah Common 2:47
Kevin and I are covered in wax and honey right now because we were just cleaning the wax, the cappings from our honey extraction process. We washed those off and we saved the water and do it in a sanitary setting, and then Kevin takes it over to the Drinkers’ Brew Co-op.
Kevin Sleziak 3:02
It makes mead.
Sarah Common 3:04
Yeah, they do an exchange of home brew for illicit, street alcohol. So we’re pretty stoked that even the last of our honey gets put into community.
Kevin Sleziak 3:14
And candles!
Am Johal 3:16
Amazing. Sarah, when I first met you here in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, you were working with the Portland Hotel Society and you eventually went on to work with the Drug Users Resource Centre, you were managing that for a while I think involved with the farm as well. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about your work at the Drug Users Resource Centre and how you kind of transitioned into forming your own organization.
Sarah Common 3:42
Yeah, we got connected. I was part of a group in Global Resource Systems that were taking a course in the agriculture program out at UBC, Land and Food Systems is the name of the agriculture program out there. And we got connected to the Drug Users Resource Centre, which was then called the Life Skills Centre to come in and take a look at the food system and address, sort of identity and then see if we could address food security issues. So I met Kevin there, I met Jim, one of our other beekeepers, there, I met a ton of community there and really what happened, for me, is that I really felt like our project hadn’t really given a lot, and that actually what had happened, we had been given a lot by the community as we were students at that beautiful community which was the Life Skills Centre. And so I asked if I could come back and continue to volunteer. So I started showing up and starting showing up more and I got to participate in some of the wellness programming there. I always started, then, being like ‘can we bring food in? Can we have a snack? Can we have a meal?’ Started getting involved in the kitchen program and building training opportunities in the kitchen program. And then, organically, got then, like the next step was the gardens and what can we start growing to bring into those kitchens. So it was that first garden, the Hastings Folk Garden, that I got connected to through the Drug Users Resource Centre where I started thinking…
Kevin Sleziak 5:07
Our first hives too.
Sarah Common 5:09
Yeah, our first hives were there! So that happened there because I started thinking with the community, like Jim and Kevin and other folks who were working there, Robbie and Dennis and Melanie. How can we have more people in here? How can we have more life in here? How can we get more support for this space? How can we have it be a space that the community is really proud of? And that was the trajectory, so it’s been through food and community and land and building connection through those three things all along, and then through…
Kevin Sleziak 5:38
And jobs.
Sarah Common 5:39
Yeah, and jobs right. What a meaningful and important way: food and jobs. It’s the double hit that can really do wonders.
Am Johal 5:48
I know there’s obviously a very rich Downtown Eastside community here, where you’ve both worked in, and so there’s a lot of support for this work here, but there’s also this sort of community of beekeepers around Vancouver, the rest of Vancouver. I’m wondering how you’ve interacted with other members of the beekeeping community? I know you’ve met and worked a little bit with Mark Winston and others, but I’m wondering how the other beekeepers in town interact with you.
Sarah Common 6:15
Yeah, it’s an amazing network and a network that’s been really supportive. And one of the things that we find is that when we share our story with beekeepers, it resonates, like immediately they get it. ‘Cause most beekeepers have had that experience of bees being ‘the thing’ that connects them to their purpose. And so, when we talk about bees being an opportunity for doing that in communities that are experiencing isolation and barriers to stability, where we’re working to create that opportunity for connections, the beekeepers understand it, and you can feel it in the room, that understanding. And so this outpouring of support from the beekeeping community has included experts coming down and offering training. Mark has come for the past five seasons now and taught bee behaviour and communication and the Hastings Urban Farm. The provincial apiculturist sits on our board and has similarly come and taught workshops and so have many of his apicultural team.
Kevin Sleziak 7:10
And queen rearing, too.
Sarah Common 7:11
And queen rearers! Phil Laflamme, Heather Higo out of UBC, and then in addition, the beekeeping community has brought us out to their clubs to share the story, has made donations of their time, their supplies, and has spread the word so that we show up now at the BC Honey Producers Association regularly. We’re working with beekeepers all over the province. We were...what paper was that this morning, was that The Metro?
Kevin Sleziak 7:39
The Metro, yeah.
Sarah Common 7:40
The Metro, a story we’re looking at fungicides and the impact of fungicides on the gut of bees which prevents them from being able to digest their food. So looking at how beekeepers and blueberry growers can all work together for the bees and for the blueberries and for the people. Yeah, it’s this amazing community and the inter-connection that is in that community and that is felt into the bees and into the land, I think, is the same inter-connection that we feel, that we feel here. So there's this reflection of our community of the Downtown Eastside in the bees, and the beekeepers very much feel that reflection of their communities there too. So it’s this great mirror that we can draw inspiration and motivation from, and learn a ton from in the colony of bees.
Kevin Sleziak 8:23
From everybody too.
Am Johal 8:25
Kevin, you’ve been involved for a number of years now. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what you found the most fun and interesting in working with Hives for Humanity and working with the bees?
Kevin Sleziak 8:37
Well when I first started out and all that, it was so expensive to get educated in bees and stuff like that. I’d have to take courses from one person, where here, I have multitudes. Like I have about a dozen super beekeepers that are teaching me every day. I’m still learning, you know, after five, six years of being here. I go out in other aspects, you know, woodworking, so that we’ll keep our hives up and running and stuff like that. It’s low maintenance but we need it. And just going to other communities like the Hotel Fairmont and educating them, you know, trying to get them to use their products in their kitchens and their honeys and stuff like that.
Am Johal 9:24
Sarah, I’ve met your mother before who’s a beekeeper herself and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about her role in getting you working on bees and honey and all this work because I think, in a really interesting way, you worked in the neighbourhood but you also found a kind of project you’re really passionate about and made it happen!
Sarah Common 9:45
Yeah, well...mom, she’s always been a beekeeper. She started beekeeping when she was 21 so that’s about...40 years, I won’t do the math. But I didn’t know that until I was 26. So it took me my whole life to figure out that she was a beekeeper pretty much. She always kind of had it as her thing on the side, always doing it in partnership and doing it down the road or at a farm across the way as I was growing up. So there’s a picture of her from when she was 21 in a bee yard, always in our house, but, I don’t know. I never put it together. I think that it was when I was 26, 27 years old that I started conceiving of my mother as an individual with skills and beliefs and values and a personhood of her own past being my mom. And that synced up with this moment of thinking with the community at the folk garden and how we could do more in there. So that timing all came together, and that she said yes and said she would come and teach me how to beekeep in the community of the Downtown Eastside. And now, we get to learn all of the skill that she has and all this passion that she has for the health of the bees, and again, all of that reflection of the bees’ needs being so similar to our community needs, you know, connection, food, shelter, diversity, inclusion, all of these words we apply, balance in the colony and then there are all the words that we try to build our community around. So she’s this master beekeeper who has a ton of skill, who is our chief beekeeper, and manages our 200 colonies, is where we’re at. And she provides mentorship, both for our beekeeping team and then people who are coming to our workshops. So, you know, one of the first places, I think, Kevin did beekeeping was at the folk garden? Or the farm?
Kevin Sleziak 11:38
Yeah both places.
Sarah Common 11:39
Both places, early on, getting in…
Kevin Sleziak 11:41
Started one day a week and then after that, I just fell into it.
Sarah Common 11:45
Yeah, he started showing up everywhere and that’s what happens. So, you know, he starts showing up at every workshop, and at those workshops we get taught by Mark Winston or Paul van Westendorp or Julia, my mother. And then starts showing up at the inspection, starts helping to lift, starts coming around on the circles. So we’ll do our Rain City bees, our Lookout bees, our Atira bees, our BC Housing bees, our Portland Hotel bees, our Fairmont bees, our Big Rock bees, our VPD bees. Like, we’ll do this route and go around together where it’s me and Kevin, lifting and inspecting. And so, he’s kind of then come through the workshops, through to this mentorship level where now, I will say, “Okay Kevin you’re going to meet Julia at this time and at this location and you guys are going to do these colonies” and that’s the task for the day. So really, she provides this mentorship, this expertise in looking at the health of the colony and we do the work to engage people so that they can get access to that skillset.
Am Johal 12:45
One of the things that you guys have done at Hives for Humanity is to open up a conversation around community ethics with artists and universities that are doing work in the neighbourhood. You know, universities have spent many, many years doing work in the neighbourhood and sometimes in a very problematic way, and artists are sometimes working in a really extractive way, but I’m wondering if you could talk just a little bit about processes and work you’ve done at Hives for Humanity to elevate this conversation.
Sarah Common 13:14
Yeah, I think that word ‘extraction’ is the important one and it’s the one that we’re really trying to acknowledge that that’s how so many of these systems are set up and that, I mean, Hives for Humanity and everything we do and the projects we engage in, we don’t want them to be extractive. We want them to be built with reciprocal philosophy and practice in place. So that’s really what the conversation has been around so that when we’re thinking about how to be reciprocal with our bees, we’re thinking how we can give back to them. So we take the honey, we give back forage and habitat and education to try and change the way that people think about bees. And not just honeybees, but hundreds of wild species of bees as well. And then, in our projects, so if we’re working with a filmmaker, a photographer, a journalist, an artist, whoever it might be that is producing something out of the culture that is so strong in this community, the Downtown Eastside, that we’re asking what the gift back is. And so then we’ve been working through conversations with many of our members and members from other organizations in the neighbourhood to have this conversation about what that means, like what does a reciprocal relationship feel like and look like, and what are really practical tools for having that conversation so that I’m not just blindly saying yes to whatever newspaper wants to take a photograph of me and Kevin doing beekeeping. Instead, we’re asking, we’re interested in the opportunity, how are you going to acknowledge our time, how are you going to acknowledge this community, what bigger impact, what bigger context does this piece have? And those are questions that don’t always get talked about often. It’s the people coming in who have the questions for us and are protecting their interests and so trying to sort of stand together and have a way to protect some of our interests, which really are sharing the joy and skill and love that is rich and is present in this community and that can be, I think, an amazing model for other communities of what it means to be connected and what it means to look out for each other.
Kevin Sleziak 15:23
Which needs to be needed. You know, everybody watches out for everybody, so that it is more progressive.
Sarah Common 15:32
We have that here, you know, we walk down the street here in our beekeeping outfits visiting our different gardens and everyone says ‘hi’, and I’ve been working alongside folks in this neighbourhood for 10 years now. Kevin, you’ve been here...how long have you been working?
Kevin Sleziak 15:48
Almost 40.
Sarah Common 15:50
Yeah. So we know Petes on the street, and it’s a joy to walk these streets, and I don’t think that that is the story that is told of this neighbourhood. But organizations like yours who are celebrating culture and diversity and inclusion in this neighbourhood, organizations like our friends The Binners Project, Megaphone Magazine…
Kevin Sleziak 16:10
Culture Saves Lives.
Sarah Common 16:11
Culture Saves Lives, all these groups working to share the depth of generosity and culture that is here and that’s the conversation that we want to have.
Am Johal 16:21
I’m wondering if you could just, for our listeners, if you can, if people are interested in knowing more information, if you could share your website and also where people can buy your products so they can support wonderful social enterprises like yours.
Sarah Common 16:37
For sure, thank you for that moment. We have our website, hivesforhumanity.com, and there’s a products tab there where there’s a place where you can find all of our locations. We work with a bunch of different restaurants that feature our honey across town, and we work with many different retailers and gift shops where you can purchase our honey.
Kevin Sleziak 16:55
Ice cream factories!
Sarah Common 16:57
Seasonal ice cream at Earnest, there’s always honey at East Van Roasters, there’s always honey at The Window Art Shop, and you can also email info@hivesforhumanity.com to get hooked up with that sweet stuff. And you can also find, if you kind of read through our blog or look through community ethics on our page, you can find that empowering informed consent card.
Kevin Sleziak 17:19
Facebook, Instagram…
Sarah Common 17:20
We got the Facebook and Instagram, yes! You can also come down to 312 Main and drop in and say hi, and you can check in on our calendar for our public events or swing by one of the apiaries, our therapeutic apiaries in the spring and summer!
Am Johal 17:36
So wonderful to have you guys here and so wonderful to be neighbours with you in the 312 Main space and I know that you guys were working this morning even, and you’re smelling like honey! So thank you so much for joining us.
Sarah Common 17:48
For sure, thanks Am.
Kevin Sleziak 17:50
Thank you very much.
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Maria Cecilia Saba 17:53
I hope you enjoyed hearing from Kevin and Sarah as much as we did. Thanks to both of them for giving us some of their time and sharing their stories. Thanks to Davis Steele for the awesome music, and as always, thank you to the production team: Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, Melissa Roach, and myself all work with Am Johal at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, and we’re very fortunate to have Hives for Humanity as one of our long-time community partners.
Maria Cecilia Saba 18:16
Our next episode features another community organization that we are very lucky to be partnered with. You’ll hear from Megaphone ED [Executive Director] Jessica Hannon and one of their incredible vendors, Peter Thompson. Until next time! Thanks for listening.
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