What's Up With the Bees? Protecting Pollinators With Susan Jones

Update: 2025-05-22

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This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we're talking to Susan Jones, a pollination expert in McCormick, South Carolina.

Jones' passion for bees grew from an unlikely source: a farrier and third-generation beekeeper visiting her family's farm began nudging her to give beekeeping a try. He eventually gifted Jones her first two colonies.

Those first bees didn't make it through the winter, but that brief window of time was enough to get Jones hooked, especially when she saw the difference having pollinators made on her garden.

"My garden went from OK to on steroids with pollination with the bees. I was just dumbfounded that there was such a difference. Then when I didn't have bees the next spring, it was like, why am I even bothering to garden?" Jones said.

In the two decades since, Jones has evolved from a hobbyist beekeeper to an educator and advocate. She is currently the Apiculture and Pollinator Specialist at the South Carolina Governor's School for Agriculture and has served as the director of the Master Beekeeping Program of South Carolina.

Her journey has afforded her plenty of opportunities to spread the word about pollinators and how we need to start protecting them, especially in the face of a recent uptick in colony losses.

"I do a talk that shares the coordination between how pollinators need us, yet we need them, and they face so many different obstacles. I think it's a death by a thousand cuts. There's no one single contributor to these losses. There are so many," Jones said.

Part of the problem, she explained, is that because these challenges stem from various sources, there needs to be a collaborative effort to address the issue – and that's not happening.

"The problem is all the different factions, whether it's environmental, whether it is pesticides and chemicals use or whatever it is, none of these entities are really talking and collaborating with each other," she said.

Jones also owns Susan Marie's Bees, a honey production operation with 20-25 colonies, which she says helps continue to inform how she teaches about bees and allows her to stay connected to the strong beekeeping community in South Carolina.

"The joke in beekeeping is if you ask 10 beekeepers a question, you get 12 different emphatic answers, and nobody seems to agree," Jones said. "But I have found over the years that women in particular are detail oriented and they're good observers and they are great problem solvers." And that, according to Jones, is what makes a good beekeeper.