Allison Slakoper carries beekeeping commitment through graduation

Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, isn’t famous for its farmland. The names of its woodland parks and riverside trails don’t necessarily roll off the tongue or adorn tourism brochures. 

Yet the steady, formulaic suburban sprawl — which is to say, the transformation of the countryside into a long string of parking lots — leaves plenty of room for nature, just the same. White-tailed deer sprint across highways dark as marble; flora and fauna of every vibrant hue dot the shadows of treehouses and McMansions alike.

More to the point, there’s room to keep bees.

Senior horticulture major Allison Slakoper took a beekeeping class at Temple two springs ago. She wasn’t afraid, or nervous, or even unfamiliar as instructor Vincent Aloyo took strings of students through hives and honeycombs, bare-handed. Slakoper had been around bees since she was a child.

“I’ve kind of grown up pretty outside, so a lot of my time was just gardening and just being exposed to bugs and stuff like that,” Slakoper said. “So, when I got into actually beekeeping, there was really not much that freaked me out.”

A friend’s father maintained his own bee colony, on and off, a short walk from Slakoper’s house. One day, Slakoper and her friend moseyed through the grass and followed him among the bumbling swarms. 

Slakoper collected and worked with bugs as a member of her local 4-H club. And her love for nature moved her to study flowering plants and their impact on the world while a student at Temple.

The famed Boston sportswriter Bill Simmons wrote 13 years ago about “The Consequences of Caring.” He’d started attending hockey games with his eight-year-old daughter during his time as a sportswriter for “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” She fell — hard — for the Los Angeles Kings during their run to the Stanley Cup Final in 2012. 

But the younger Simmons didn’t just find a team of masked skaters in draped jerseys to cheer for roughly 100 times a year; through her, Simmons the elder saw how sports fandom can feed the emotional connective tissue of a community. Westerners — rich in money and bombarded with desire — face enormous pressure to recklessly consume. Rare are the opportunities to consider how to form a symbiotic relationship with nature.

Case in point: Human beings’ relationship to bees. We mostly see the honey they produce and their power to inflict agony and even death with venomous stings. But there’s more to them than that: Their powers of pollination make possible many everyday foods.

That interconnectedness is part of what students learn from horticulturalists like Aloyo.

“I try to get them to appreciate that there’s all these other aspects that don’t immediately come to mind,” Aloyo said.

Greg Masters grew up in Upper Bucks County, another suburban realm where miles of lush forests and tucked-away wildlife bracket the winding banks of the Delaware River. At eight years old, Masters and a friend happened upon a yellowjackets’ nest in a log and hectored it. One ventured out of the downed branch, lodged itself in Masters’ ear, and stung him.

It was a honey-dripping kamikaze mission.

“I heard him in there buzzing around,” Masters, a senior jazz performance major, remembered. “I heard him leave, too, which was comforting.”

The incident changed Masters’ relationship to bees, for sure; passing hives along the trail became a hands-off experience afterwards. But he also says he’s developed a deeper relationship to nature — and its power to heal — in the years since.

Working in — and with — nature has changed the way Slaykoper thinks about her own life, she said. Volunteering with Temple’s community gardens at Ambler and in North Philadelphia has helped her see how her interest in plants could help others patch up gaps in their diets and cabinets. And she hopes bringing others deeper into the natural world helps them see it — and their place in it — more clearly.

“It does give me a lot of hope,” she said, “because even if my impact is small — just between people that I know and stuff — I could also spread the news to them and let them know that even small impacts definitely could make a change.”