By DCist Contributor Vanessa Schipani

Photo by Vanessa Schipani

White House beekeeper Charlie Brandts has transported more than one thousand bees using Metro — on more than one occasion. Brandts was the guest speaker at the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation urban beekeeping course last Monday, the second class in a series of four. A carpenter for the White House, Brandts keeps bees at his home in Maryland. When President Barack Obama got word about Brandts’s hives, a green-eyed commander in chief asked Brandts to set up one for the White House — the First Beehive. In its first full year’s harvest, the hive produced a considerable amount of honey — all told, around 134 pounds — went into the Obama family’s bellies. Fresh honey is delicious, no doubt, but Obama had other, less hedonistic, reasons for harboring thousands of stinging insects next to his organic garden: Bees are pollinators, and bees are dying. A worldwide disappearance of honeybees, known as colony collapse disorder, is thought to result from a combination of disease and environmental factors.

In the class on Monday, Toni Burham, the course instructor, discussed what a world without honeybees would be like. Everything would be affected, she said: flowers, birds, other insects, even water and people. The four-class workshop was organized in an effort to introduce the importance of beekeeping in an urban environment and to get the DC community involved in caring for a number of hives that will be stationed at recreational centers across the District. Even if you didn’t attend the class, you are still welcome to volunteer. The course was designed to give volunteers a head start before spring comes and the real work begins.