Primal Bee: The Women Shaping the Future of Beekeeping
March 8, 2026 | Originally posted at Primalbee.com
Excerpted from Primal Bee:
Jasmine Joy: rescue, relocate, rehabilitate, educate
Founder, Beelieve Hawaii
Launched Beelieve Hawaii in 2012 as a humane bee removal service.
Rescued four beehives from ‘Iolani Palace, the only royal palace in the United States, in 2020.
Founded VBU (Virtual Beelieve University), now in its sixth cohort.
Runs pollinator outreach (POP talks) for kids across O‘ahu and Kaua‘i.
11 years as a partner and educator at Hoa ‘Āina O Mākaha farm.
Researched and tended bees internationally in places like… Bali, Italy, Greece, Ireland, Mexico
Reiki practitioner. Former professional skimboarder and poet.
Jasmine Joy grew up watching her grandfather put on a bee suit that looked like an astronaut’s gear and climb a grassy hill. She was four years old. Before he walked up, he told her one thing:
“No matter what happens, don’t be afraid.”
She wasn’t. That seems to have set the trajectory.
Joy is the founder of Beelieve Hawaii, which she launched in 2012 as a humane alternative to extermination. She’s also a Reiki practitioner, a former professional skimboarder, a poet, and the creator of VBU, an online ethical beekeeping course now in its sixth cohort. Her path into bees was unconventional: she started by making organic skincare products from the hive at Honey Girl Organics on O‘ahu before she ever kept bees herself.
“I did it backwards,” she says. And she thinks that changed how she sees the whole enterprise.
“Anything I touch, whether it be my bees, the products I make, even just touching the lives of my students, they all have that healing Reiki energy.”
In August 2020, she rescued bees from all four towers of ‘Iolani Palace, the only royal palace in the United States. In five cohorts of her school, only two men have graduated. She has never marketed it as a women’s program. The women just show up. Joy has her own framework for why, rooted in ancient symbolism and the interior world of the hive.
“The hive is like a womb. Honeybees are solar animals. They have five eyes. They see in ultraviolet. But inside that hive, it’s completely dark. People don’t think about it that way.”
She draws a connection between bees and snakes: both live in the dark, both carry venom, both are deeply medicinal, and both terrify people. “These are ancient creatures. Ancient practice. Ancient ritual. I think men over time have become more and more separated from that connection.”
Joy also runs a pollinator outreach program for kids, what she calls POP talks, and has been teaching third graders at Hoa ‘Āina O Mākaha, a farm on the west side of O‘ahu that shares a fence line with an elementary school. She’s been there for eleven years. Her slogan: rescue, relocate, rehabilitate, and educate. The full hexagon, she says.
Her students don’t just buy bees from her at the end of the program. They earn them, after sixteen weeks of instruction built from fifteen years of her own experience.
“When I bring the bees to schools, I tell the kids: I rescued these bees from somewhere. And it just opens their minds and their hearts to possibilities they wouldn’t otherwise know.”
