Managed Beehives for Your Property in the Pittsburgh Area
Since 2010, The Best Bees Company has offered a unique, turnkey way for individuals and organizations to make a positive impact on the environment. Operating in Pittsburgh since 2018, Best Bees is now the leading beekeeping service in Pittsburgh and throughout the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
We work with both residential and commercial clients, including Nova Place and BYN Mellon.
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Find out if your property is right for bees
Our Mission
To expand the bee population while improving the health of honeybees and other pollinators here in Pittsburgh and across the world. Our locally certified beekeepers install and manage hives on your property and use the data we collect to drive the science of pollinator health forward with scientific partners that include Urban Beekeeping Lab, NASA, MIT and National Geographic.
Services Provided in the Pittsburgh Area
We offer innovative solutions that can help bring your corporate sustainability programs to life. These include the highest standards on beekeeping, as well as developed workshops and programs that will engage your community — employees, guests, tenants, community leaders, and the public — in your sustainability work.
Commercial Services
Beekeeping for Your Residential Backyard
If you’d like to save bees, build a healthier environment, pollinate your garden, and have your own honey harvest, then our residential service is perfect for you! We offer turnkey beekeeping, honey harvesting, and DNA analysis designed for homeowners in a wide range of environments. Regardless of the size of your property — whether you garden on a balcony or have acres of land — we can install and manage one or several hives for you. .
Residential Services
Beekeeping Education
We offer a number of educational programs at varying price points that have proven popular with commercial clients, schools, gardening clubs and organizations promoting sustainability.
Pre-recorded and live hive tours
Experience a guided tour as one of our bee experts takes you on a walk-through of your hive visits and inspections. Get a glimpse of the busy life of bees, and learn more on how to keep tenants engaged with their local environment. Live tours are available for up to 20 participants.
Meet an expert beekeeper
Participate in a beekeeper-led webinar and Q&A session. This virtual event is a great opportunity to learn about your bees through the lens of a beekeeper. We’ll discuss the data collected from your beehives, why bees matter, and what it's like to take care of your bees.
Virtual keynotes
Gain insight into the world of bees with our Chief Science Officer and Founder, Dr. Noah Wilson-Rich. Noah's knowledge of honeybee health and his passion for bee research will leave your audience spellbound, and with a wealth of new insight about our natural world. Our virtual keynote package includes signed copies of his book, The Bee: A Natural History.
We also offer free and open online programs, such as live meetings with beekeepers and educational webinars.
How Professional Beekeeping Works
Installation
We help you choose an ideal location to establish one or more beehives at your home or workplace.
Maintenance
Our impassioned and experienced beekeepers service your beehives once a month, providing high-quality care and detailed reports.
Harvesting
You keep 100% of the raw honey produced. We’ll handle the rest— small batch extraction and bottling with personalized labels.
Research
At every visit, we collect data and share it with our research partners to advance the science of beekeeping and improve the health of pollinators worldwide.
Safe
Our honeybees, Apis mellifera ligustica, are the most docile species of honeybees, making our hives extremely safe and the instance of stings very unlikely.
We situate our hives in safe locations, secured from animal intrusion and weather damage.
Secure
Our beekeepers have extensive experience working in densely populated areas in and around Pittsburgh, and are experts at safe hive placement on rooftops, balconies, and gardens. They’ll work with you to site your hives in visible, low-traffic areas, where you can safely enjoy observing your bees as they come and go.
Insured
Our beehives and beekeepers are fully insured for personal liability and damage. We can provide you with a Certificate of Insurance (COI) if needed.
Beekeeping Laws in Pennsylvania and municipalities in the greater Pittsburgh area
Pennsylvania requires beekeepers to register their hives with the State Department of Agriculture and send professional inspectors to check hives for infestation annually.
Beekeeping is legal in most cities and towns in the area. In Pittsburgh, you are permitted to have two hives on a property of at least 2,000 sq. ft., and additional two hives for every 2,000 sq. ft., up to 10,000 sq. ft. You must provide a flyway barrier at least 6’ high. Regulations vary by municipality, so check with your local health department if you’re considering keeping bees.
Our beekeepers are locally licensed to use pesticides and are trained for safe roof-top work.
Pittsburgh Service Area
We service hives in the city of Pittsburgh and in Allegheny County areas up to 90 minutes away, including parts of the following counties:
Westmoreland County
Armstrong County
Butler county Washington County
Beaver County
What's Included
- Site Evaluation
- Hand-crafted, all-natural beehive equipment installed onsite
- A colony of docile honey bees (Apis mellifera ligustica)
- Monthly maintenance visits and follow up reports
- Advanced scheduling so you can alert your team
- Full-time customer service team available by phone or email
- Raw honey, harvested and bottled just for you
- Replacement colonies provided at no cost
- Fully insured professional service
About Local Honey
Honey production varies from colony to colony, depending on the strength of the Queen, the health of the hive and the availability of nourishment. New colonies tend to produce less honey than established ones. When there is a surplus of honey, we will harvest and jar it for you.
The composition and flavor of honey varies from hive to hive as well, depending on the floral species available to pollinate. This means that honey from your hive will have a unique profile. Tasting it, you’re tasting the composite of all the flowers your bees have visited! DNA analysis of Pittsburgh area honey shows two of the most common species that bees are pollinating are legumes (15.3 and daisies (11.7%).
Many of our residential customers are planting native species in their gardens to help both honeybees and native pollinators.
HoneyDNA
We pioneered the process of identifying the exact percentage of various pollen species found in honey through advanced genomic sequencing. Understanding where bees foraged reveals which plants best feed pollinators in the local environment.
Pollinator Friendly Plants
At Best Bees, we encourage our clients to landscape their property with pollinator friendly plants, if space allows, add ground level and roof-top pollinator gardens, and use a variety of trees, shrubs and plants that will provide forage throughout the year, such as common service berry, elderberry, wild bergamot, great blue lobelia, giant hyssop, joe pie weed and goldenrod, all of which work well in Pittsburgh area gardens. For a list of pollinator friendly plants native to the western Pennsylvania and the Great Lakes Region, visit the Xerces Society.
Already Have a Hive?
At Best Bees, we’re proud to be a part of the local beekeeping community in every area in which we work. If not already a member of one of the area’s beekeeping associations, we encourage you to join either the Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association or Burgh Bees.
Join our Citizen Scientist movement! Here are some ways you can participate:
- Plant more pollinator habitats on your property
- Use bee-safe pesticide alternatives
- Get involved in local and national lobbying
- Submit your honey for HoneyDNA
You can also post your data to bee Citizen Science programs like iNaturalist, The Great Sunflower Project, and Beecology Project.
We gladly share the learning from our research and our best practices with everyone. To learn more about the findings of our research work, visit our Research page. To watch one of our many webinars, visit our Webinars and Video Resources page. Finally, to stay in the loop on our latest thinking, check out our Blog.
Unique Challenges and Opportunities to Beekeeping in Pittsburgh Area
Pittsburgh beekeepers face issues common to northern cities: cold winters; erratic weather patterns; pathogen infestations; and with varied hill and riverine ecosystems, they must deal with micro-climates that change significantly every few miles.
In Pittsburgh, though, the positives outweigh the negatives: Pittsburgh is rated one of the top cities in the U.S. for green space per capita, and with a diverse floral environment with two strong nectar flows, and a strong and growing sustainability movement, it’s an excellent environment for beekeeping.
“There’s so much potential here for keeping more bees, especially on commercial property roofs.” Says Best Bees beekeeper Nancy Thorne, who joined our team this spring, “Pittsburgh could be a model for other cities.”
Thorne especially enjoys working with residential clients, as many of them have landscaped their homes with pollinator friendly trees, shrubs and plants.
“They take a real interest in their bees.” says Thorne, “They observe them every day and are eager to report on what they’ve seen. Each service visit is a chance for me to answer their questions and learn from them too!”
Thorne was introduced to beekeeping a number of years ago when her daughter’s boyfriend built her her first hive. Since then, she’s turned land behind her community’s recycling center into an apiary, which is accessible for residents by a path and bridge built by local Eagle Scouts.
“It’s in a kind of rural area,” she reports, “where bears can be a problem for honey bees.” To keep bears away from her apiary, she’s installed a solar-powered electric fence around it. “They get a zap or two and decide it’s not worth the trouble!” she adds.
Bringing Innovative Beekeeping Practices to the Pittsburgh Area
With every hive a datapoint, we’re able to observe bees in a wide variety of conditions and test alternative treatments in hives across the country. This allows us to introduce successful innovations to Pittsburgh and take learning from our Pittsburgh hives to other cities.
“We have a lot of beekeepers here in Pittsburgh,” says Best Bees beekeeper Thorne. “Many with great experience, and some just starting out, who don’t know yet how to deal with issues such as mite infestations and swarming.” Thorne hopes to share Best Bees scientific learning with the local beekeeping community to help improve best practices.
Frequently Asked Questions
We install and maintain honeybee hives on your property. Our expert beekeepers monitor the health of your bees and perform a variety of tasks throughout the year to help them thrive. At each visit, we also capture a range of metrics and share the data with renowned research partners to help the scientific community better understand the plight of pollinators. Towards the end of the season, we extract the honey and jar it for you.
About once per month for our Pittsburg Area hives. If your bees are distressed and need extra support, supplemental visits are included. We coordinate each visit in advance and send a summary report afterward.
Only a few square feet! A beehive takes up as little as 2’ x 2’ x 3’. Our beekeepers need a few feet around the hive to access it, and the bees’ flight path will need to be unrestricted.
In the Pittsburgh area, we typically install hives when all threat of winter has passed, which is typically in early April. Installations after June are accommodated on a case-by-case basis, depending on our inventory levels.
We fully guarantee the health of our bees and queens. If a colony dies, we’ll replace it with a healthy one from our own stock at no additional cost. While we hope each of our hives will thrive for years to come, the reality is that pollinators are still dying at an unprecedented rate. In places like Boston, where winters are often severe, we can lose 40-50% of our hives annually.
Our Boston-based headquarters is staffed full time and available Monday through Friday during work hours by phone or email to answer any questions. When a colony requires extra attention, additional visits are made at no cost to you.
Yes, we provide a range of event support packages for our commercial clients. See Hive Programs for Commercial Customers for details.
Green roofs earn credits toward a building’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. Green roofs provide vegetation for water control, wildlife habitat, and better urban air quality. Honeybees can help maintain the green roofs that are becoming more common in big cities and thus contribute to a building’s LEED rating.
We service hives in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County communities up to 90 minutes away from the city center, including parts of the counties of Westmoreland, Armstrong, and Butler.
We handle visit scheduling for you. We’ll contact you at least 72 hours in advance via email.