Will backyard beekeeping solve the rapid decline of honeybees?

Just listen.

There’s quiet in this suburban neighborhood, where Lanny Hammett stands in the picturesque backyard of her home pushed up to Curtin Creek. The creek laps gently. Birds call overhead.

Then there are honeybees. Thousands of them. They dance overhead, buzzing in a low, gentle tone. They zip left and right in the search for pollen and nectar in the blackberry bushes that tangle on the shores of the creek.

Just listen, Hammett advises as she slowly approaches the two powder blue beehives in her yard, and whispering, “Hello, babies,” as she goes.

That, she says, is the sound of happy bees.

“There is this sound that you hear of a contented hive,” Hammett said. “There is this tone, and if they are disturbed in any dramatic way, that tone will raise a few octaves.”

Hammett is relatively new to beekeeping, having installed the hives — nicknamed “Two Bee” and “Not Two Bee” for the bee insignias she’s labeled each hive with — last year. She joins a growing population of beekeepers in Clark County, many of whom, like her, are hosting the busy creatures in small backyards.

The Clark County Beekeepers Association, like others across the state, offers support and advice to local beekeepers. Its membership has been steadily increasing for several years, member Howard Scott said. When he joined after moving to Clark County in 2008, there were 80 members. Today, there are 150, ranging from backyard apiarists such as Hammett, to commercial keepers with hundreds of hives.

“We exchange ideas and experiences about what works with beekeeping and what might not work,” Scott said.

But from the parasitic varroa mite, to habitat destruction, to pesticides that are toxic to bees, right now can be one of the most challenging times to be a beekeeper. The Bee Informed Partnership, an effort by the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to work with honeybee experts across the country, estimates that beekeepers lost 44 percent of their colonies last year.

That’s troubling, given that the total economic value of commercial honeybee pollination services ranges between $10 billion and $15 billion each year, according to Bee Informed. As those challenges make headlines across the nation, Scott said more people are wanting to keep bees of their own.

“Here’s something that an individual can do to help the world, help the environmentalist,” Scott said. “A concrete step by trying to help these bees along.”

And indeed, that interest is piquing statewide. Dr. Steve Sheppard is the chair of the Department of Entomology at Washington State University. He also leads the Apis Molecular Systematics Laboratory, where researchers study more than 250 colonies of bees.

“There’s reports from local associations around the state that the level of interest in becoming a beekeeper is really, really high,” Shepperd said. “A lot of them have to turn people away.”

Whether backyard beekeepers are the solution to slowing perishing bees, however, is not so black and white — or black and yellow. Sheppard called beekeeping an “interesting and rewarding past time,” but cautioned against doing so without being prepared to make a significant time commitment.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people get into it and don’t realize the amount of effort it’s going to take, and (their bees) die over the first winter,” Sheppard said. “For those folks, they probably could have helped bees a little better by planting flowers, rather than starting a hive they don’t take care of.”

‘Genetic’

Hammett’s interest in beekeeping and the reasons she keeps them have evolved over the years. But they’re rooted in the 62-year-old’s childhood, visiting her grandfather’s commercial bee business in the San Joaquin Valley as a child.

“Someone said it was genetic,” she said.

She recalled her grandfather, Charles Krugman, loading bees onto the back of a flatbed truck to pollinate nearby orchards. Best of all, though, were the times he’d load frames of honeycomb into an extractor, a spinning cylinder that used centrifugal force to pull honey.

Sculley is known simply as “the guru” at Vancouver nursery Shorty’s Garden and Home. He blogs about gardening and gives shoppers tips on maintaining their yards. In a recent blog post, titled “Bee crazy,” Sculley poses in a wide-eyed selfie with his bees.

“Bee crazy” is an apt description for Sculley. His yard, adorned with ornamental flowers and no lawn, was designed with pollinators in mind long before he welcomed the little creatures to his home. The flowers, all of them perennials, are teeming with fat bumblebees, hummingbirds and Sculley’s honeybees. Adding hives was the natural transition, he said.

“They know what they’re doing,” Sculley said as he watched his bees zoom overhead. “They have this program. It’s just crazy to watch them dutifully do what they do. I have so much respect.”

Unlike Hammett, Sculley isn’t harvesting honey from the bees, preferring to stay as hands off as possible. He’s just there to play host and enjoy the company of his hives. He sits in his garden every morning, listening and watching his bees go about their business.

“Smell this,” he says, pointing to a small opening in the back of his hive. “Smell there. You smell that?”

A warm, bread-like smell emanates from the hive.

“That warm honey, that warm smell,” Sculley said, dreamily. “All the heat. That’s the smell of a happy hive.”

Hammett too loves watching the goings-on of her bees.

“I think almost like a perfect society,” she said. “They know what their jobs are, they do their jobs, and there’s no protesting.”

She points to the worker bees, their legs loaded with bright orange and yellow pollen as they return to the hive. She holds up a frame, showing churning bees at their daily jobs. Though she calls them her babies as she approaches, these are not her pets, she said. They’re simply cohabiting.

“All I am is like a steward of a box of bees,” she said. “They’re the ones that do all the work.”