If you look close enough at your Thanksgiving table, you start to notice the quiet workers behind the food. Not the chefs. Not the grocery clerks. The ones even further back. The ones most people rarely think about.
The Bee.
And the Beekeeper.
They don’t show up on recipe cards, but they make the whole spread possible.
Let’s start with the bee.
She’s small. She’s relentless. She spends her short life moving from flower to flower, carrying pollen the way a farmer carries seed. Apples. Pumpkins. Almonds. Berries. Even the alfalfa that becomes livestock feed. She’s the engine under the hood of American agriculture.
But she doesn’t get there alone.
Because there’s someone else in this story. Someone whose work is as physical and unforgiving as any rancher or grower.
The beekeeper.
People imagine a hobbyist in a white suit pulling frames on a sunny day. That’s the beekeeping romance. Here’s the beekeeping reality. Eighty-pound boxes lifted again and again. Long drives hauling hives through the night. Cold mornings. Hot summers. The pressure of keeping tens of thousands—sometimes millions—of living creatures cared for and healthy under weather you can’t control, against deadly diseases and predators and in the face of cost and markets you can’t predict…this is the beekeepers reality. Bee stings? Believe it or not these are the least of a beekeepers worries.
A beekeeper is a livestock manager. A migrant worker. A scientist. A mechanic. A therapist for stressed colonies. A small business owner trying to make the math work on margins that tighten every single year.
And right now the work has never been harder.
Winters are stranger. Summers are shorter. Forage windows swing from feast to famine. Pathogens, pesticides, nutrition stress—they stack. And every stack falls on the person standing between the hive and collapse.
They do it anyway.
Because they know what’s at stake.
And because they believe—deep in their bones—that the bee is worth protecting.
So when you sit down at your Thanksgiving table this year, try seeing it with different eyes.
- The apple pie
- The green beans
- The cranberries
- The butter in the mashed potatoes
- The cotton napkins.
Even the turkey, raised on feed that begins in bee-pollinated fields.
There’s a beekeeper’s fingerprints on every one of those things. And there’s a hive—maybe dozens or hundreds—quietly behind them.
If you want to honor the unsung heroes this Thanksgiving, honor both the bee and the beekeeper.
The bee who makes the food.
And the beekeeper who keeps the bee alive.
And if you want to support the people doing this work, we’ve got a donor offering a $20,000 match through the end of the year. Every dollar you give doubles. It goes straight into research, habitat, and direct support for the folks holding the line.
Give thanks. Give back.
If you can, please make a doubled gift today and help us protect what sustains us all. And if you have already given to our year end match, THANK YOU. Now, spread the word, share with your friends and family and help us to meet this goal and do more in 2026.
With Gratitude,
Eric Mason, Executive Director, Save the Bee,
