It was easy for Katy Fackler “to hand someone a sandwich and think that you’re a good person. It’s another thing to watch someone’s entire journey.”
Fackler is a longtime volunteer at the Blanchet House and is currently a volunteer beekeeper at the Blanchet Farm, which offers up to 22 men suffering from alcohol and drug addiction a safe and supportive environment to work on recovery.
“Caring for other creatures is probably the most important aspect of any type of recovery of anything,” she continued. “Which is probably something that I didn’t realize that I probably needed just as much as they did.”
The way it works is that the food waste left over from the Blanchet House — a Portland-based non-profit that offers three free hot meals, six days a week to anyone that wants it — gets sent to the livestock on the Blanchet Farm located in Yamhill County, which in turn gets sent back to the Blanchet House.
Blanchet Farm’s program additionally includes, among other things, eight months of free room and board, a case management team and a substance-free environment.
Beekeeping is one of the most recent additions to Blanchet Farm because it provides a cathartic and calming activity for those recovering on the farm, and as an added bonus, it provides honey for the Blanchet House. To quote Fackler: “everyone loves honey!
Although beekeeping therapy can appear to be a counterintuitive form of therapy — bees are something to be avoided in the modern parenting playbook — it has been used since WWI to help shell-shocked veterans.
“You slow down to match the bees,” Fackler said. “It allows people to really tune out the rest of the world and become hyper-focused… Everyone is always surprised at how calming it is.”
“Especially for people who have been using really hardcore drugs for a long time, it’s interesting that they’re able to have something that quiets their mind that is not a pharmaceutical,” Fackler continued.
Fackler said that when the residents on the farm first try beekeeping, “they’re like, ‘I can’t wait to get some honey’ and then they don’t care one iota about the honey. The product means nothing.”
Domestic beekeeping started at least as early as 2500 B.C.E. in Egypt, however, the process of harvesting honey from beehives can be traced back to as early as 9,000 B.C.E to a cave painting in Spain that shows a person climbing a tree to put his hand into a hive while bees buzz around him.
Hives contain 20,000 – 80,000 bees working in unison to maintain the hive, gather and store food and reproduce and raise the young. In spite of the lifespan of a honeybee ranging from a month to two at most, a colony can survive for years.
Blanchet Farm is a uniquely great location for the bees because of the multitude of other crops located nearby like the wine vineyards, vegetable and flower gardens, and hazelnut trees, — which bloom at different times than most vegetable and flower gardens — to name a few.
“They have this abundance of food source that isn’t out there usually for bees because so many farms just our a mono-crop,” Fackler explained.
The increase in mono-crop farms has led to many migratory beekeepers, who have to move their bees from crop-to-crop or farm-to-farm so they don’t die out, Fackler said.
“They just have so many different things that are around so many different types of farms that the bees are just ideally situated,” Fackler continued. “They can live out there quite happily out on the farm with the pigs and the chickens and everything else and be integrated and don’t really need to move at all.”
Fackler fell in love with beekeeping through her wanting to help her father tend to his bees. Her zeal for the process is tangible and is undoubtedly part of the reason that many residents at Blanchet Farm have taken to it.
The most powerful experience Fackler has had was seeing one of the residents, who took to beekeeping, Jordan, artwork. All of the residents took part in an art project where they drew three pictures: how they see themselves, how others see them and how they want to be seen.
Jordan’s — who had been using since he was 14, more than half his life — first picture showed him looking haggard and like an addict. His second drawing showed him looking like someone who had destroyed themself.
“And the last picture… he drew himself in a big suit and when the person asked him about it, he said ‘when we’re in the suit we’re all equal and we’re all caretakers,’” Fackler said.
For Fackler, working as a volunteer beekeeper has changed her perspective on what it takes to make a tangible impact on someone’s life.
“It’s very easy to be dismissive and think ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Here’s your sandwich. Hope you get off the streets,’” Fackler explained. “It’s another thing to be like ‘these are some things that might help you.’ It’s an entirely different situation and it’s really sort of humbling.”