From a Farmer and His Son, a Practical and Joyful Guide to Beekeeping

From a Farmer and His Son, a Practical and Joyful Guide to Beekeeping




When farmer Kamal Bell first established a beekeeping operation at Sankofa Farms in North Carolina, his son Akeem was four years old and scared of bees. But with his father’s coaching—and the help of a protective beekeeping suit—Akeem now loves tending the hives and is central to the farm’s beekeeping effort.


“I enjoyed it so much I wanted to keep doing it every day,” the now 8-year-old remembers.


“We need to be able to do things on our own, where we won’t have to be as reliant on this larger system that can change at any moment with the swipe of a big black marker.”

On a cloudy day in late February, under a tall loblolly pine tree at one end of the farm, Akeem uses a metal tool to scrape old beeswax off a beehive frame. With new bees set to arrive by early April, Akeem is helping clean and prepare the space. Kamal picks up a pile of the excess wax that Akeem has loosened and rolls it between his palms. “We want to take this and save it so we can make candles one day,” he tells his son.

In February, Kamal—with Akeem’s help—published a kids’ book, Akeem Keeps Bees! A Close-Up Look at the Honey Makers and Pollinators of Sankofa Farms. Illustrated graphic-novel style by Darnell Johnson, the book takes young readers through a beekeeping season at Sankofa. It provides detailed information about the bee life cycle, beekeeping tools and equipment, and how bees make honey, with instructions on how to establish a hive, feed your bees, handle harmful Varroa mites, and harvest honey. Kamal hopes the book can serve as a practical guide for young people who might want to get into beekeeping.



Akeem Bell scrapes the remains of old beeswax from a honeybee frame at Sankofa Farms in North Carolina. He and his father, Kamal Bell, recently published a children’s book about beekeeping. (Photo credit: Christina Cooke)


A North Carolina native, Kamal did not grow up farming, though he has always felt at peace in nature. After graduating from NC Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T), a land-grant, historically Black institution, with a master’s degree in agricultural education in 2014, he began teaching earth and environmental science at a Title 1 middle school in Durham. In 2016, he purchased 12 acres in nearby rural Cedar Grove to start a regenerative vegetable farm, which he named “Sankofa,” after the West African word for reclaiming and carrying forward what has been lost.

Education and community aid have always been at the core of Sankofa’s mission. In addition to raising vegetables—including kale, collards, salad mixes, cilantro, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and watermelon—to feed the food insecure in the surrounding area, Bell founded the STEM-based Sankofa Agricultural Academy, which engages Black youth in projects and learning on the farm. His new book ties into that same goal of helping kids learn agricultural skills, connect with nature, and experience, in his words, a “form of liberation.”

Civil Eats caught up with Kamal and Akeem on the farm recently and spoke with them about the evolution of Sankofa’s beekeeping program, their new book, the farm’s educational mission, and Kamal’s vision for the food system.



Kamal and his wife, Amber Bell, along with their son, Akeem, inspect the hives at Sankofa Farms in 2021 to ensure the colony is healthy. This involves checking for all stages of brood, making sure there is deposited nectar and pollen, and looking for evidence of a laying queen. (Photo credit: Mark Stebnicki, NC Farm Bureau)


How did you come to keep bees?

Kamal: One of the kids in the [agricultural academy] program, Kamron, mentioned, “Mr. Bell, I want to get bees.” He was an inquisitive child, and I was just like, it’s my duty to cater to that interest in this child. The part that sold me on it was when he said, ‘It would help keep me more involved in the farm.’

The only experience I had with bees was working with a farmer [during undergraduate school], and it didn’t go well—and then the movie Candyman—so I was terrified, like everybody else. But there’s a deep connection between African history and African Americans and beekeeping. Booker T. Washington actually pioneered a beekeeping program at Tuskegee [University].

And Charles Henry Turner, a Black man from Ohio who ended up being a geology teacher, proposed research on how bees can see in patterns. Once you start to uncover that history, you see there is an extensive history between African Americans and bees.


“[My dad is] giving people healthy food so they can be healthy and have a better life. And if a kid wanted to start a farm, they could ask our dad how to start one.”

I ended up going to Durham County Beekeepers Association. I met Matthew Yearout, and he brought us out to a campus right around corner. We all worked with the bees. And then a couple of weeks later, I caught my first swarm and brought the bees out here. And then that was a segue for Sankofa keeping bees. That happened in 2018.

Akeem, how did you start keeping bees? Do you remember your first time putting on the beekeeping suit and going into the hive?

Akeem: When I was little, when I saw a bee, I used to get really scared. But when I got into the suit, it felt really good to actually be able to work with the bees. [When I’m wearing it,] I’m not afraid. When I first started [caring for the hives], it was really fun. I was passionate about it.

To go into the hive, you have to grab your smoker, and then you use the hive tool to take the top off. Then you can take the frame out and see if you can see the queen or if you can see larvae. You see a lot of bees on the frame, walking around and exploring both sides.

What is the most fun part of keeping bees for you?

Akeem: Going into the hive. I like to see them making honey.

What is the hardest part?


Akeem: When the bees land on top of me, on the face part. I just stay still until they move off. Or my dad just takes it off.

How would you describe the state of honeybees in North Carolina?

Kamal: Bumble bees and carpenter bees are native to North America, but I think it’s important to identify that honeybees are not. They need a tropical environment. You will only find them in the wild if they were essentially colonized at some point down the line and then made it out into the woods [and adapted].

The winters are very harsh on them, and Varroa mites are as well, so they’re very dependent on the beekeeper in this part of North America. [That said,] we’ve had a lot of success with our swarms, because if you catch a swarm, they typically have the genetics to survive in this area.

Kamal, you’re primarily a farmer. What motivated you to write a kids’ book?



Illustration by Darnell Johnson, courtesy of Storey Publishing

Kamal: Just the idea of trying to introduce agriculture to kids at a younger age. [Akeem] and his brothers will be fine, because they are out here, and they get it by default. But I was thinking about how beneficial the experience can be when you are younger, and how you’re able to reimagine what society [could be like].

I don’t think there are many books that are tailored to teaching kids about farming. This book, you can use it as a guide—it has a glossary in the back—and you can use it to become a beekeeper. It caters to different learning styles too, because if you’re not a heavy reader, the illustrations can guide you through. I wanted it to be an inspiration for children.

How would you describe the mission of Sankofa in terms of how you work, what projects you take on, and who you feed?

Kamal: I would describe Sankofa as a place of redemption—where we have an opportunity to fix things that have gone bad. That’s from the students, to ourselves, to the organizations we work with.

I like working with organizations that are trying to solve something wrong socially. We work with Table NC. About 90 percent of our food goes there. They give access to kids who are food insecure in the area. They send them produce bags every week—right now, I think they distribute to around 1,000 kids. For us, it’s just about working to improve things that we think should be a right for people in society.

It seems like educating young people is at the core of what you do. Can you talk about how the Sankofa Educational Academy started and evolved?

Kamal: It started with wanting to get Black boys a stronger foundation using agriculture as the pathway. And what I started to see is that they became better students. They became overall better citizens. There was a feeling of ownership and belonging here at the farm. From 2016 to 2018, we had 10 kids. From 2018 on, we kept the four most consistent ones on.

When COVID hit, that’s when I started to see the work in the foundation become undone. I think COVID produced a hyper individual—kids who were only concerned about themselves because they were in isolation for so long. I started to see kids who had been really committed only coming to the farm when it was convenient for them.

They started to drift off and become the thing that we were trying to prevent them from becoming the whole time. From COVID, I decided to focus on the business part of the farm [and pause the academy]. Working with the kids, being able to teach them, is better when we’re not expanding the farm like we have been.



When we start the academy again [later this spring], we’ll have more mentors to help keep them on track. They need around-the-clock support. I was going around picking them up in the van, buying food for them, essentially paying out of pocket, using farm funds to support them. There needs to be more support when we launch. And the kids, I think, need to be younger. I think we start in elementary school this next time.



Illustration by Darnell Johnson, courtesy of Storey Publishing


What did you see the academy impart to its participants when it was up and running?

Kamal: They understood what they needed to contribute to society. They found a place. They had an identity, because we went over African history. We had conversations as they were coming into manhood. I think it would have been great if they were still here at their age now, because of all the opportunity that’s opening up in the food space. They would be primed to be able to own their own farms.

And I think philosophically, it was a meditative break for them to get away from the things that they were seeing. Some of those kids had seen people get killed; some of them had been involved in high-level violence. It gave them a place just to be. It gave them a sense of divinity and redemption, that they weren’t a product of a trauma that they experienced in their lives. From a higher level, I think it gave them a sense of balance.

Why do you think it’s so important to provide young people of color with farm education? How does it tie in with larger issues facing Black farmers and with your goals of promoting Black liberation and freedom?


“It’s the opportune time for farmers to unite from all backgrounds, to push for a better agricultural industry.”

Kamal: Because if it doesn’t happen here, where else are they going to go to find those things? There are not many spaces where that demographic can go for liberation-centered thinking. College is not necessarily the first thing on their docket. The school system isn’t that. Sports—.001 percent of people who play make it. For Black males who are not athletes or entertainers, there’s nowhere for them to go. There is only hyper-individualism for them, because society has told them that we don’t want you, besides jails and prisons.

We have a history of generational land loss [in my family]. My great-great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side owned 50 acres of land. But our family didn’t keep their land; I had to start all the way over. I wanted to be able to put [the young men] in a position to own something, to have something that they could call their own, and that way they could have some form of liberation.

The new administration is shrinking or eliminating efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and mitigate climate change. What effect do you think that might have on farms like yours, and do you have a sense of what approach you will take moving forward?

Kamal: When I saw that these things are starting to happen, I was just like—that’s why we built what we built. I think about the things that the USDA agent tried to get me to do so we would lose our farm. One thing they tried to say was, “Oh, you want to get an FHA [Federal Housing Administration] loan so you can tie in your house and your farm together.” But we bought our house separate from the farm on purpose to make it more resilient, because if I lose my house [and they’re tied together], they take everything.

I think the question that needs to arise is—how can we reduce the adjacentness of our farms to outside funding? There’s something wrong with it if we’re so heavily impacted by a [federal] funding freeze. We have to look at more resilient models so that when administration changes, when the climate changes, when everything changes, our models can adapt.

When are farmers going to start to come together across the board? The whole idea of climate change—if you talk to farmers on either side, they will acknowledge that weather patterns have changed since they’ve been farming, whether it’s by human output or by it naturally happening every so many years. We need to find more commonality so we can have discussions. There need to be more platforms where we can meet in the middle so we can advocate for a change to the farming system. Only 10 percent of farmers make over a million dollars in their operations, and everybody else is still trying to push forward.



In addition to producing honey, Sankofa, a 12-acre regenerative farm, grows produce to feed the food insecure in surrounding areas, both rural and urban. (Photo credit: Christina Cooke)


How do we need to think differently about food systems?

Kamal: We need to be able to do things on our own, because we can’t depend on the American system to always serve our needs.

Just look around now. We need more farmers. We need to be looking at how we can build more local food systems, with distribution, that are more vertically integrated. We have to be raising chickens around here. We need more seed-starting programs. We need more people with small gardens in their front yards. There’s no reason why we have should have grass lawns when we can turn them into small areas to produce food. We’ve got to reimagine this. Something needs to change.

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At the end of the day, I know that we can build a home here. We can carve out a piece of this to fully sustain ourselves where we won’t have to be as reliant on this larger system that can change at any moment with the swipe of a big black marker. Why would we want to live like that? I’m 99.9 percent sure that I wasn’t born to be under the will of a black Sharpie. That’s what I want people to take from Sankofa, that you really can build something better—you can build an alternative.

Akeem, what difference do you see your dad making through the farm?

Akeem: He’s the only person that works out here, and he’s doing a lot of work to help our family. He does so much for us, so we can have a home and food and all those things that we need.

He’s giving people healthy food so they can be healthy and have a better life. And if a kid wanted to start a farm, they could ask our dad how to start one.

Kamal, what would you like people to know about bees that may not be common knowledge?

Kamal: We can learn a lot about their social organization and how there’s no individual bee in the collective. They’re all working together consistently. You can address gender roles, because the female bees are higher in the social hierarchy. They commit to their roles, and then as they get older, these worker bees change their roles. They start out taking care of baby bees, [and go] to making decisions, to foraging. They protect.

You look at all that the bee can teach, and then just about how their history is reminiscent of Black people. They were taken from Africa [as well as Asia and Europe], and they were shipped all across the world. In each environment, they take on these different characteristics, and they’re still a collective. If we look at just how America operates—it was built off our forced labor. Once there’s some healing done with us, [and] I think bees can offer a great lesson, we can start to heal and work on other issues in this nation.

We’re in a very interesting time of humanity where it’s going to call for collective work amongst all people. And I think it really could start with farmers. Farmers have a very important role in the future of this country. And it’s the opportune time for farmers to unite from all backgrounds, to push for a better agricultural industry.