A beekeeper who became a geophysicist who kept writing about bees.

I’m Ron Miksha, a writer, beekeeper, and bee ecology researcher living in Calgary, Alberta.

Bees have followed me through most of my life. I learned beekeeping in Pennsylvania, kept bees commercially on the Canadian prairies, and spent winters in Florida raising queens. For years, bees were my livelihood. Later they became something else as well: a way of looking at agriculture, ecology, history, weather, human behaviour, and the remarkable tendency of simple questions to become complicated.

I eventually studied geophysics and worked in Earth science. Much later, I returned to university to study bee ecology. Those different worlds—field work, science, writing, and beekeeping—still overlap in nearly everything I do.

My book Bad Beekeeping grew from diaries and memories of commercial beekeeping. I’ve also written for bee magazines and journals, maintained the Bad Beekeeping Blog, taught beekeeping, and spoken about bees in classrooms, conferences, interviews, and community programs.

These days, much of my writing and research finds its way into About Bees, Culture & Curiosity, a podcast that gives me permission to follow an interesting question wherever it leads.