A Milwaukee beekeeper finds life lessons in his hives. And faith leaders are spreading the message.

MILWAUKEE — Charlie Koenen doesn’t lead a church and he doesn’t preach from a pulpit every Sunday. But he has dedicated his life to spreading a spiritual message, and he's counting religious leaders among those he's won over.

He’d call it beevangelizing.

Koenen, a Milwaukee beekeeper, travels to churches, synagogues, nursing homes and schools to spread the word about honeybees — how crucial they are to the world’s ecosystem and how to care for them properly.

“People don't understand how intricately woven into the fabric of our existence pollinators are,” he said.

Koenen has catchy, religion-adjacent names for various facets of his educational mission. He hopes to make people bee-leavers — that is, to believe in the importance of bees, and to leave them alone.

If people set up hives of their own, they become bee-sciples. Koenen teaches “bee-ology” – combining “the biology of bees and the theology of nature,” he said.

“I have an advertising background. So buzzwords come easy to me,” Koenen said.

Koenen hopes that by framing his message in faith, it will resonate with people.

He's found a supportive audience in some local faith leaders, who have embraced beekeeping in recent years and see lessons for their congregations in the bees’ actions: selflessness, tenacity, teamwork.

“There are so many beautiful things that you can learn from the honeybee,” said Hafiz Muhammad Shafique, a beekeeper and the religious director at Masjid Al-Qu'ran, a Milwaukee mosque.

Hive heists: Beekeepers are using GPS tracking devices as hives get stolen nationwide

Koenen, who was raised Catholic and now aligns with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has built a wide network of allies in local religious circles over his 22 years in beekeeping. 

Across many faiths, he’s found a common belief: A higher power put bees on Earth to teach us how to live, he said. Several religions’ sacred texts mention bees and honey.

“If we observe their actions in the box, we can find ways to make us — whether we're a doctor or a lawyer or a policeman or whatever — go about our life a little bit better,” Koenen said.

Koenen’s work has evolved since he got into beekeeping in the early 2000s. Back then, he was running a computer store. He first became fascinated with bees while taking photographs of hives at Growing Power, the now-shuttered urban Milwaukee farm, for its website.

He began learning as much as he could and within a year he sold his business and began teaching classes on bees at Growing Power. By 2015, he had engineered a new type of hive and launched a nonprofit. He was educating all sorts of people about bees and their keeping.

Koenen moved his operation to Redeemer Lutheran Church near the Marquette University campus, where the Rev. Dr. Lisa Bates-Froiland agreed to let him set up an office and some hives on the roof. The church had been looking for someone to run an apiary and a friend knew Koenen.

The bees ended up becoming main players in Redeemer’s mission to serve the community.

Koenen started a beekeeping training program for a group of homeless men that attended the church, and he gave Bates-Froiland regular updates about the bees’ movements. She’d weave the information into her sermons, drawing connections between the bees and the congregation.

“It’s easy to say that you have bees on your rooftop as a way of acknowledging God’s creation and our call to the stewardship and wise caretaking of it,” Bates-Froiland said. “It’s another to … look at the bees as a model of Christian fellowship and calling in the world.”

Honeybees gather in the hive and then go out into the world to pollinate. Churchgoers are asked to do the same, Bates-Froiland said.

“We as Christians are to pollinate good news wherever we go and to help fruitfulness happen,” she said. “Then we come back to the hive for nourishment and re-energizing.”

Each year at harvest time, church members gather to jar the honey and make beeswax candles. The events are a chance to bond as a congregation, Bates-Froiland said.

Today, Koenen has his own building with a classroom and beekeeping equipment shop. He served as the state bee inspector and the beekeeper for Milwaukee County Parks — he’s set up some hives at county golf courses. He is currently the district chair for the Wisconsin Honey Producers Association.

And he travels the area frequently, giving presentations and doing advocacy work.

“I have soup-to-nuts as far as people that I've taught,” Koenen said.

Escaped bees: 5 million honeybees die at Atlanta airport, Delta apologizes for 'unfortunate situation'

As he’s met people of diverse religious backgrounds, he’s thought more and more about how bees connect to their faith traditions.

“Honeybees are selfless in how they act, are altruistic in how they behave in a community, are tireless in what they do and are amazingly productive,” Koenen said.

One worker bee produces a fraction of a teaspoon of honey across its entire lifetime. But the collective work of a colony of 50,000 bees is remarkable, Koenen said.

“It’s inspiration for anyone,” he said. “Can I find a better example of all for one and one for all? No.”

Shafique, the Masjid Al-Qur'an religious director, is a new connection for Koenen. The mosque property houses several hives now and he hopes students and community members who visit the hives at the mosque learn this message.

“The honeybees know that they are not going to live to benefit from that honey, but they still keep on working and working for the coming generations,” he said.

Protecting pollinators

Koenen and the religious leaders know that honeybees are good for more than just life lessons. They’re essential to the future of agriculture.

In the mid-2000s, the world first became concerned with colony collapse disorder — or the mysterious, mass die-off of bee colonies. Protecting pollinators remains critical today.

“Pretty much everything that we find wholesome and nutritious is something that came to us because of the pollinators. And were they to disappear, we'd be pretty much just eating oats and rice and wheat,” he said.

These days, Koenen’s interest is growing in the hundreds of other kinds of bees that help to pollinate plants. Known as solitary bees, they don’t live in large hives like honey bees and their habitats often need less hands-on care.

The gospel Koenen has preached for two decades isn’t for everyone. He knows that maintaining honeybee hives requires a lot of time and energy and that people tend to give up on beekeeping after a few years because the challenges feel insurmountable. 

Creating homes for solitary bees could be an easier way to help the environment, he believes.

Saving animals: Should you support zoos and aquariums? Here's how some are making efforts to save endangered animals

“I'm still a total fan of the honeybee, I still have 50 hives, but I'm switching gears in my  ‘beevangelizing’ to emphasize more and more that people should get into this,” Koenen said.

No matter which message Koenen is sharing with people, Bates-Froiland knows he’ll communicate it well.

“His passion for bees just very quickly becomes also his passion for people,” she said. “He has this deep desire to educate and advocate and he can’t do that without connecting with the hearts and minds of humans.”

Two decades into beekeeping, Koenen doesn’t consider himself an expert.

“I’m just a storyteller,” he said.

Like a faith leader, he sees himself as a guide, helping people understand how they fit into the complex web of the wider world.

“My job is to try and give people the idea that there is this jigsaw puzzle of interconnectedness and the bees are part of the glue that makes it come together,” he said.

Follow Sophie Carson on Twitter: @SCarson_News.