Anyone who has ever tended to a hive of honeybees knows there’s a meditation to the art and the practice.
Frames of honeycombed hives are lifted cautiously out their boxes. Swarms are calmed with the puff of smoke. And honey, the liquid currency of the craft, is carefully scooped as the hive hums its droning, orchestral buzz of production.
Its just this meditation that drew Trey Williams to the craft. And, two years into growing his apiary on Cleveland’s east side, it’s the same natural meditation that Williams is trying to sell as a balm to mental health and a guide for the city’s next generation of urban beekeepers.
On a grassy plot where his grandmother’s house once stood, Williams, 34, runs Hood Honey. A business that seems out of place at first glance. In Mount Pleasant, in the center of East 119th St., sits the eye-catching nucleus of Hood Honey’s operation: a gold-hued barn where hundreds of thousands of bees live, a block down from gutted brownstones, empty lots and crumbling fences.
It’s the headquarters of Cleveland’s fastest growing beekeeping operations—with five hives and counting in three east side spots—where he’s eager to sell or give out raw honey and hopes of a healed neighborhood.
“What this does is simulate being a beekeeper for the average joe without getting stung,” Williams, who grew up in the neighborhood, said sitting on a picnic table on Hood Honey’s property.
“You get a chance to see all the things beekeepers go through that’s supposed to help us live longer,” he said. “Being around the buzzing of the bees, eating the honey, the propolis, the wax.” He laughed. “Actually, even getting stung.”
Like homesteaders and urban farmers, Williams, who also grows tomatoes and purple peppers in a nearby hoop house, has certain advantages over rural counterparts. Urban bees typically have more nectar-rich flowers to land on, fewer predators and fewer pesticides. (Though more polluted flowers.) Urban beekeepers can skip distributors and sell at nearby farmers markets or to neighbors.
But after six years in business, Williams has his work cut out for him.
Thanks to the varroa mite, a Southeast Asian parasite that latches on to bees’ backs, U.S. beekeepers are struggling to shake off their worst season in almost two decades. From 2024 to 2025, beekeepers saw more than half of their colonies die off, a loss of roughly a half a billion dollars. Hood Honey’s hives were entirely wiped out.
But Williams continues on with the apiary in an impoverished, urban neighborhood.
“Like, this is literally the hood’s honey,” Williams said. “It’s honey made here in the hood. A bee farm that is for the community.”
Beekeeping, in general, isn’t a guaranteed moneymaker. Profits come with volume, meaning business-savvy beekeepers must tend to dozens of hives to really thrive in the honey market. Equipment isn’t cheap. Hive kits can run a thousand dollars. Motorized honey extractors, the kind keepers use to bottle hundreds of pounds of honey, can cost $2,700.
It’s why Williams, along with Hood Honey’s chief investor, Sam Booze, seems more motivated by urban beekeeping’s other benefits—its ability to wow and educate those in the surrounding blocks. A handful of nearby elementary schools make trips to the farm every month, mostly Black kids, Williams likes to say, that could become Black beekeepers.
“Trey is putting out exports that are almost infinite in value,” Brent Wesley, the founder of Akron Honey, said in a phone call. “He could be harvesting honey and making money. But he’s opening the eyes and lives and capabilities of all of these people to change the world. That’s what he’s doing.”
Interested in farming in his twenties, Williams worked as a receptionist at the Cleveland Clinic while researching ways to formalize his budding interest in gardening. In 2020, in his late twenties, he and Booze settled on bees as a specialty, both out of an intrigue with ecosystems and the lack of similar Cleveland-based apiaries.
A 2024 grant from the FDA narrowed Hood Honey’s focus on healing. Williams would study “the benefits of bee therapy,” he told the FDA, in a barn housing two lofted “beds” with drilled holes for so-called patients to listen to, smell and peek at hive machinations below.
A process that, Williams found, “showed that all but one of our participants’ levels of anxiety, stress and tension were charted lower by them after each of their three visits.” (Therapy backed up by a similar study in 2024.)
Lying atop 100,000 thrumming honeybees helps PTSD symptoms in war veterans and impresses a CMSD fifth grader. Or, as is common on extraction days, a neighbor biking by on East 119th.
“So, now you live next to a farm, you know a beekeeper, you’ve tasted fresh honey, you see a farm, you’re getting stuff from this farm, and then you’re learning how to interact with it,” he said, “like, just over time, just living here.”
Recently, Williams put on a tan beekeeper’s vest and hood, filled his metal smoker with wood chips, and tended to a handful of frames thick with globs of amber honey.
As usual, Williams was gloveless as he pried loose a frame. Hundreds of worker bees zigzagged over mounds of honeycomb as Williams smoked them with his bare hands.
At one point, he scooped a dollop of raw gold with his fingers. Bees flew off nearby. “It just tastes so good,” he said, a mouth full. “The stings never hurt that bad.”
“When you do this, everything else around you seems to fade,” he said. “It’s that Zen moment. It makes this all worth it.”
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