Honey Bee Initiative

Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory

Forensic Science Program

Greenhouse and Gardens Program

Sustainability

Biology Research

Environmental Research

Mason researchers and Honey Bee Initiative tackle environmental health, economic progress, and food insecurity issues

Marianne Klinker — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 18:54:58 +0000

Mason researchers and Honey Bee Initiative tackle environmental health, economic progress, and food insecurity issues Marianne Klinker Thu, 01/19/2023 - 13:54

Learn more about the Honey Bee Initiative

Learn more about the Business for a Better World Center

Faculty and students at ��AV are conducting impactful environmental research with the help of the Business for a Better World Center's Honey Bee Initiative.

In collaboration with ��AV’s Honeybee Initiative and faculty members of the university, Dr. H.C. Lim, an assistant professor at George Mason’s biology department with a background in evolutionary genomics, heads a project that uses DNA sequencing and barcoding to investigate pollen resources of honeybees.

The Honeybee Initiative, a program supported by ��AV's School of Business and operated by the Business for a Better World Center, is designed to empower communities through sustainable beekeeping and aims to tackle issues including environmental health, economic progress, and food insecurity. As Lim’s research focuses on diversification and speciation of birds as driven by geographic and other factors, this may seem an odd pairing, but students in Lim’s lab work on a variety of research topics, including conservation genetics of captive animals, phylogeography of Southeast Asian mammals, viruses and parasites of bees, snake fungal disease and drivers of avian metapopulation structure.

Undergraduate students Quentin Jamison and Michelle Makula carrying out DNA sequencing lab work at the Lim lab.

With funding from Mason’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth and the Office of Student Scholarship, Creativity, and Research (OSCAR), an undergraduate student, Quentin Jamison, was recruited to conduct research under the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (URSP). While conducting URSP research, he was co-supervised by Dr. Daniel Hanley. Jamison used pollen pellets that were collected by a collaborator, Dr. William Hahn, who affixed pollen traps to artificial bee hives located in various parts of the DMV region.

With these samples collected, Jamison was able to extract DNA using a method called bead milling. After DNA was extracted and purified, he amplified segments of DNA using polymerase chain reactions. These amplified gene segments were then sequenced at Mason’s Microbiome Analysis Center. The resultant sequences were matched against those from a database to identify the plant species that each pollen pellet originated from. The entire process is termed DNA barcoding, and studies such as this are important as it allows researchers to determine the diversity of plants that honeybees use. Since honeybees gather pollen for proteins and lipids, shedding light on their preferred pollen in different localities across the seasons help inform which plant species are needed to properly support a healthy hive. This information will potentially support changes in landscaping that are more diverse and bee-friendly. All of this in turn will hopefully help to increase honeybee populations.

Biology Research Semester student Toqa Elashry presenting her poster "Can Plants be Identified by the Color of Their Pollen?" during the Annual Celebration of Biology Undergrad Research

This project was followed by another that aimed to determine if pollen color can be used to predict the actual plant species it came from. While much information can be gained from the pollen itself, identifying its species can be time-consuming and expensive. Often, pollen must be identified through a microscope or using DNA sequencing. A biology department research student, Toqa Elashry, used digital photography and an imaging analysis software to break down the color of each pellet into red, green and blue channel values. Using a statistical approach called k-means clustering, she was able to cluster pollen pellets by color and determine if each color cluster contained pellets that originated from the same plant species. Although Elashry only had one semester to conduct her research, she was able to process and analyze color data of 2600+ pellets.

To date, the findings indicate heavy use of maples during early spring, followed by the use of pears and stone fruits (such as peaches and plums) in the middle of March. During late spring, a larger variety of plants were used, which included honeysuckles, camellias and redbuds. However, plant use patterns varied by sites. Moreover, honeybees in some sites used pollen from fewer plant species probably as a result of the lower plant diversity. The team hopes to gather data across multiple years and from more sites to better characterize spatial and temporal variations. Preliminary findings from the pollen color project determined that color may be an unreliable indicator of plant species. Not only can pollen color of different plant species appear similar, there was also pollen color variation within each plant species, probably due to differences in environmental conditions.

��AV’s Business for a Better World Center (B4BW), housed within the School of Business, believes that business can, and should, be a force for good in the world. Guided by the United Nations’ Sustainable development goals, B4BW educates the next generation of business leaders to prepare them to take on the world’s complex challenges; generates knowledge at the intersection of business and sustainability to transform business “as usual”; convenes leaders who have changed their companies and industries for the better so students can apply those lessons to their future careers; effects change by actively engaging in action-oriented partnerships with organizations and communities; and leads an international movement to reshape business education by advancing the ideal of business for a better world. The Honey Bee Initiative, a program designed to empower communities through sustainable beekeeping, is operated by the Business for a Better World Center.

Charish Bishop is a graduate student in the folklore department and graduate research assistant for the Business for a Better World Center.

Topics

Tech Talent Investment Pipeline (TTIP)

Hive Minds: Multidisciplinary collaboration creates virtual reality STEM experience for elementary students

Colleen Rich — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 19:34:03 +0000

Hive Minds: Multidisciplinary collaboration creates virtual reality STEM experience for elementary students Colleen Rich Mon, 12/12/2022 - 14:34

In This Story

Craig Yu

Learn more about the Honey Bee Initiative

Eighth-graders at Robinson Secondary School try out the honey bee virtual field trip. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services

Faculty, staff, and students from three units across ��AV have worked together to create a new virtual reality (VR) experience for elementary students. Through an immersive nine-minute video, students can take a “field trip” to the Mason apiary, learning from an expert beekeeper, taking a deep dive into a hive, and even flying like foraging honey bees.

Daniel Price, founder of the Sweet Virginia Foundation, talks to a student at the special screening of the honey bee video. Photo by DeRon Rockingham/Creative Services

Funded by the Sweet Virginia Foundation, a Northern Virginia-based environmental education nonprofit, this new learning tool is a collaborative venture with the School of Business, which houses the Honey Bee Initiative (HBI), the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD), and the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC). The “field trip” is designed to enhance existing pollinator curricula taught in Virginia fourth-grade classrooms, and foster interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and STEM careers in today’s youth.

The idea for the virtual field trip began nearly a decade ago with Daniel Price, founder of the Sweet Virginia Foundation, and Mason professor Lisa Gring-Pemble, HBI co-founder. Enter Mason researcher Carley Fisher-Maltese, an assistant professor in the CEHD, who helped make that dream a reality.

The 360-degree video features Sarah Red-Laird, founder and director of The Bee Girl Organization, which is widely known for teaching kids, beekeepers, and farmers how to “love their bees,” and students from Willow Springs Elementary School in Fairfax, Virginia. The video was created by CreatorUp!, a California-based video production company.

Computer science major Quang Vo helps people with their VR goggles at the screening. Photo by DeRon Rockingham/Creative Services

“This virtual field trip engages elementary school children in learning about the plight of honey bees, and their relationship to food security,” said Gring-Pemble, who is also the co-executive director of the Business for a Better World Center. “We have a moral imperative to educate our students about sustainability issues like honey bees, which are dying at an alarming rate. Bees pollinate much of the food we eat so our very survival is dependent on bees.”

Fisher-Maltese, who is leading the research initiative, said the idea behind the VR experience was to create a field trip for students who don't have access to resources like apiaries and beekeepers. “We were excited about the virtual reality technology because we felt like the experience could be really immersive and make the students feel like they were there.”

A special screening of the video was held on the Fairfax Campus in late October before it debuted in five public and private local elementary and secondary schools.

Fisher-Maltese and Gring-Pemble were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for bee research. Many came together to build the script for the virtual reality (VR) experience. CEC’s Craig Yu, and his students, computer science major Quang Vo and computer game design major Jake Wojtecki, also assisted in the project.

The Mason team that created that immersive VR field trip for students. Photo by DeRon Rockingham/Creative Services

Fisher-Maltese calls this video experience the scaled-down version of what they hope to create: an interactive, multi-user experience where the student could virtually “be a bee.” Right now, the team is piloting the video with fourth- and fifth-graders in Alexandria City and Fairfax County public schools, and using instruments like a VR sickness questionnaire to get feedback on whether students experienced motion sickness from the VR and a content measure to see if they learned anything from the video. They also conducted focus group interviews with the students and one-on-one interviews with the teachers.

The team also had the opportunity to share the video with high school students in Technology Teacher Amy Krellwitz’s advanced engineering class at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax who were looking at the experience through an engineering lens.

“They had really good feedback,” Fisher-Maltese said of the high school students. “It was a lot of things we were already thinking of—make it more interactive, make it more like a video game, but it was good to have that confirmation.”

Fisher-Maltese added, “I think the research will show that this type of immersive experience demonstrates the convergence of emotion, wonder, and meaningful learning.”

“It truly was a wonderful experience to see young people, from elementary students through high school students, getting excited about honey bees and the vital role they play in human security,” said Gring-Pemble. “The passion these young people have for caring for the natural world is what will ultimately change human behaviors in favor of protecting our planet.”

At the special screening, the team thanked Price, who has supported HBI since its inception in 2013. “Dan had a dream of bringing the awe and wonder of bees to elementary school students,” said Gring-Pemble. “Our partnership has resulted in [this] coming to fruition.”

“We are incredibly grateful and proud of our collaboration with Mason,” said Price. “Our goal is a happier, healthier planet. We think we can ‘push the needle’ in that direction by sparking a sense of wonder in children.”

In addition to Price and School of Business Dean Ajay Vinzé, Gring-Pemble also thanked many members of the team who made the project possible, including CEHD Dean Ingrid Guerra-López and CEHD early childhood education graduate students Regan Wilson and Xiaolu Zhang, CEC Dean Ken Ball, Vice President of Facilities Frank Strike and his team, and the team that shot aerial footage of Mason (Mason Forensic Science professor Steve Burmeister, Deputy Chief Michael Lighthiser of Mason Police and Public Safety, and Captain John Jeneic Jr. of City of Fairfax Fire Department).

Topics

TTIP

Tech Talent Investment Program

College of Education and Human Development

Costello College of Business

Business for a Better World Center

Research

Students get immersive experience with honey bees

Marianne Klinker — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 12:24:45 +0000

Students get immersive experience with honey bees Marianne Klinker Mon, 10/24/2022 - 08:24

In This Story

Costello College of Business Faculty Media Mentions

An article in the Fairfax County Times explains the Honey Bee Initiative’s Hive Alive project. By using virtual reality, the Honey Bee Initiative is able to reach even more kids and help educate them on the importance of bees. “The idea is simply to democratize technology and to democratize the experience. Not every kid is going to be able to come out and see the honey bees and be able to understand and appreciate the importance of pollinators,” says Lisa Gring-Pemble, co-executive director of the Business for a Better World Center and co-founder of The Honey Bee Initiative.

Read the full article.

Topics

Foundations Faculty Media Mentions

Mason Trailblazer: Germán Perilla

Colleen Rich — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 17:07:38 +0000

Mason Trailblazer: Germán Perilla Colleen Rich Mon, 04/25/2022 - 13:07

See More Trailblazers

For the past decade, Mason alum Germán Perilla, MAIS ’12, has led ��AV’s honey bee efforts.

Perilla is cofounder and director of Mason’s Honey Bee Initiative (HBI), a program supported by Mason’s School of Business and operated by Business for a Better World Center to empower communities through sustainable beekeeping. Students from across campus, regardless of major, have a hands-on opportunity to explore their interest in apiculture.

As an adjunct faculty member, Perilla has created and taught experiential learning courses involving bees, including the popular Environmental Science and Policy course Beekeeping and Sustainability, In Search of the Perfect Queen, and the study-abroad course The Importance of the Amazon in the Modern World.

Perilla has been instrumental in helping HBI develop science-based and sustainable practices relating to beehive maintenance, hive splitting, queen rearing, and disease management. The initiative currently maintains hive clusters on Mason’s Fairfax and Science and Technology Campuses, at the Route 95 Landfill in Lorton, and at the Manassas Airport.

HBI also operates in Perú and Perilla’s native Colombia, where he has been working with community beekeepers to establish hives and create a market for honey and bee-related products since he was a graduate student.

“I’m most excited about the fact that the Maijuna can use the beekeeping project for income, but still maintain their traditional lifestyle,” Perilla said in a 2011 interview about his work with the indigenous people in Perú. “The bees will provide an economic means to these communities without causing any environmental destruction.”

In 2020, HBI’s work in Colombia was selected as the 15th best overall social and environmental project in Latin America and the Caribbean by the Latinoamérica Verde Awards. The project was selected due to the results it has achieved in promoting sustainable development and the conservation of bee biodiversity.

Topics

Trailblazers

Campus News

Masonat50

Costello College of Business

Alumni

Institute for a Sustainable Earth (ISE)

New trees will support campus pollinators

Colleen Rich — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 13:06:08 +0000

New trees will support campus pollinators Colleen Rich Mon, 04/25/2022 - 09:06

Student volunteers plant American Persimmon trees near the Roberts House pollinator garden. Photo provided

This spring a small team of ��AV students used the Patriot Green Fund to enhance the diversity of the university’s Honey Bee Pollinator Garden. This garden, which sits outside of Roberts House on the Mason’s Fairfax Campus, serves as a biodiverse pollinator haven for the bees currently residing nearby in one of the Honey Bee Initiative’s apiaries.

On April 8, the student volunteers assisted in planting three American Persimmon trees. The trees are the new additions to the Mason Arboretum, a nationally accredited collection of trees and woody plants. Once the trees reach maturity, they will have vibrant blossoms in the spring and, with the help of the pollinators, will produce edible fruit in the fall.

The garden is supported by the Office of Sustainability’s Greenhouse and Gardens Program and Facilities Management’s Grounds Department. The trees, supplies, and coordination for this planting event were donated by Facilities Management.

From left, student volunteers Adam Radwick, Aiden Wells, Erich Miller, Derrick Wallis, Ethan Mercado, and Matthew McConnell. Bottom row from left, Mason professor Andrea Weeks, Marin Hull, Allanah Brathwaite, and Subihi Setiwaldi. Photo provided

“Student and community planting events such as this are crucial to our programming here at Mason, as they ensure our responsibility to provide continued education, awareness, and stewardship of our natural environment,” said Erich Miller, certified arborist and Facilities Management grounds program manager. “We hope that the skills and information passed on to the students will resonate, not only here on our campus grounds, but wherever their paths may lead.”

“Attending the planting allowed me to experience what it must have been like to plant the rest of the trees on campus that are registered within the Arboretum," said environmental science major Aiden Wells. "It was an enjoyable perspective to have, and granted me an even greater appreciation for the variety of plants we have on our campus."

Trees highlighted in the Mason Arboretum are labeled with signs that include scannable barcodes to its online catalogue.

Interested community members can support future tree planting events at Mason by donating or volunteering to help. Learn more by contacting arbor@gmu.edu.

Topics

Honey bees and their honey could be a big help in solving police cases

John Hollis — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 19:33:20 +0000

Honey bees and their honey could be a big help in solving police cases John Hollis Tue, 01/18/2022 - 14:33

An unlikely collaboration between ��AV’s Honey Bee Initiative and the new outdoor Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory could yield critical advances in forensic science.

^{Mason teams from a number of different fields are working in unison at the Science and Technology Campus in Manassas, Virginia, on an ambitious project to see if the honey produced by bees after feeding on flowers can help them better locate missing persons.}

^{“The focus of forensics is to solve cases,” said Mary Ellen O’Toole, the head of the Forensic Science Program within Mason’s College of Science and a former FBI profiler. “Outdoor crime scenes have always posed a challenge to investigators, particularly identifying the location of human remains. The bee research will allow us to scientifically demonstrate that identifying bee activity in bee farms or in the wild and analyzing their proteins can help lead investigators to human remains. In this case, the bees are our new partners in crime fighting, and that’s amazing science.”}

Volunteers plant perennials at the Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory in support of ongoing research to determine if traces of human remains can be identified in the plants or in the honey produced by pollinators.
Photo by Shelby Burgess/Strategic Communications

Proteins in bee honey contain biochemical information about what the bees have fed upon. That information has previously been used to detect the chemical signature of pesticides in honey, allowing observers to deduce what specific types of pesticides were being used within the five-mile radius from the hives that honey bees typically frequent.

Similarly, O’Toole and her team believe that volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of human decomposition might likewise be found in bee honey, allowing authorities to then triangulate where missing human remains might be located. That ability could ultimately help spare grieving families additional extended angst while also saving thousands of hours in the search for a missing person.

“If we can determine what the VOCs are for humans and differentiate that from other animals, we could then use the bees and their honey as sentinels, and, hopefully, find missing persons and solve cases,” said Anthony Falsetti, an associate professor of forensic science.

Their belief is based on the premise that flowering plants near dead bodies will uptake the VOCs before being fed upon by the bees and ultimately being deposited in their honey.

Alessandra Luchini, an associate professor within Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM), has perfected a method to extract proteins from the honey. She and Lance Liotta, a University Professor and CAPMM co-founder and co-director, have been involved with the project from the outset, following the idea’s origins at one of the monthly research meetings with the Forensic Science Program.

Honey bees are very specific in the kinds of flowers to which they’re attracted. Doni Nolan, Mason’s Greenhouse and Gardens sustainability program manager from the School of Integrative Studies within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, applied her expertise to the project, choosing the right flowers to plant within the specific one-acre section of the newly opened Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory that will house the remains of human donors in a heavily wooded area. The honey bee hive on the SciTech Campus is located several hundred yards away from the Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory.

Volunteers prepare to plant flowers at the Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory. Photo by Shelby Burgess/Strategic Communications

In November, students and researchers planted several different species of plants, which bear highly scented white and yellow blossoms, near the spots where the human remains will soon be displayed. Additional plants native to this area will be planted in the spring before the first honey samples are examined, Nolan said.

“You’re trying to see if the honey and the bees can help us find a body and solve a homicide,” said Nolan, who has a biology degree from Mason and is working on a PhD in biosciences.

The five-acre, Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory opened in early 2021, making Mason just the eighth location in the world capable of performing transformative outdoor research in forensic science using human donors and the only one in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Donation of human remains to the research facility will come through the Virginia State Anatomical Program (VSAP), which is a part of the Virginia Department of Health. Go here to learn more about donating your body to science.

Mason also entered a partnership with FARO Technologies, Inc. that resulted in the world’s first FARO-certified forensic laboratory.

In addition to those in the Forensic Science Program, the multidisciplinary project also includes the caretakers of the honey bees, as well as researchers and students from CAPMM, as well as from the Department of Environmental Science and Policy within the College of Science and Office of Sustainability, all of whom helped select the plants for the research design.

Learn more about Forensic Science at Mason

Learn more about Mason's Honey Bee Initiative

Topics

Forensic Science Program

Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory

Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM)

College of Science

School of Integrative Studies

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department of Environmental Science and Policy (ESP)

Office of Sustainability

Campus News

Research

Oct22HPT

Lisa Gring-Pemble on How Sustainability Is Good Business

Marianne Klinker — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 16:47:15 +0000

Lisa Gring-Pemble on How Sustainability Is Good Business Marianne Klinker Mon, 12/06/2021 - 11:47

In This Story

Listen to the podcast.

Lisa Gring-Pemble, associate professor of business foundations, thinks business can be a force for good in society. Also the co-director of ��AV’s Business for a Better World Center and co-founder of the university’s Honey Bee initiative, Gring-Pemble is an outspoken champion of that sensibility. She tells Mason President Gregory Washington how and why business should be a force for addressing world challenges on ��AV's Access to Excellence podcast. She also describes how business can drive sustainability success and shouldn’t be measured simply by profits but how it affects the environment and the communities in which we live. Listen here.

Topics

Business for a Better World Center

A Better World is Everyone’s Business

Marianne Klinker — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 19:02:42 +0000

A Better World is Everyone’s Business Marianne Klinker Fri, 12/03/2021 - 14:02

In This Story

It wasn’t until 1972, during a United Nations conference in Stockholm, that the nations of the world formally announced what was already self-evident to most—human activity was detrimentally impacting the environment, and in turn, threatening our future prosperity. Nearly 50 years on, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Perhaps the earth’s most essential forest, the Amazon is under tremendous threat from international economic and agricultural forces that are exchanging trees for pasture and cropland. Compounding matters are the pressures generated Local beekeepers Pilar Muravari and her husband Gabriel Caritimari, with Honey Bee Initiative Master Beekeeper German Perilla, sustainably extract honey from a nest of native stingless Melipona eburnea in Peru. by residents. Many local and indigenous communities, lacking better options, have turned to unsustainable, and environmentally damaging, income-generating activities such as logging, hunting, and fishing.

The combined effect is that the Amazon’s ability to shelter universally significant levels of biodiversity, regulate local and global hydrological cycles, and serve as a critically important sink for carbon dioxide are all imperiled. So too are the lives and livelihoods of those who depend on it for their survival.

In this challenge, the Business for a Better World Center (B4BW), through its Honey Bee Initiative (HBI), sees an opportunity to act with people, planet, and prosperity in mind to help change the fate of both an environment and its inhabitants.

Led by Germán Perilla, MAIS ’12, HBI is, of course, well known here on campus. Its expansion into the Amazon (Colombia and Perú specifically) highlights the initiative’s and the center’s fundamental ambition: making an impact globally, and at scale. By empowering communities through entrepreneurial beekeeping programs, B4BW has created sustainable economic opportunities for rural and indigenous communities. Importantly, the beehives are more lucrative endeavors than the extractive practices they are seeking to replace.

The effort has been well-received, and many program participants share the pride of Exiles Guerra, a local government leader in Perú, who observed that “The program is very important for the community...it is a new opportunity for all.” The work in Colombia has been so successful that it recently was selected as the 15th best overall social and environmental project in Latin America and the Caribbean by the Latinoamérica Verde, the largest social environmental festival in Latin America. Moving forward, HBI seeks to expand its impact by establishing a meliponiculture (study of stingless bees) school in Perú, taking the Colombia project nationwide, and using the HBI model in countries around the globe.

The success and global footprint of the Honey Bee Initiative serves as a template B4BW seeks to replicate. With a belief that a better world is everyone’s business, center leadership realize that as educators, we play a role in preparing the next generation to help reorient the business environment.

“Our goals are lofty,” says Lisa Gring-Pemble, co-executive director for B4BW. “We seek to lead a movement that will reshape business education so that it inspires students to act not just in the best interest of shareholders, but for the benefit of all stakeholders.”

Here in Virginia, the center sees its Impact Fellows program as one piece of that puzzle. Launched in Fall 2020, this signature two-year, cohort-based undergraduate program responds to the needs of first-generation students, and those from lower-income groups and who are underrepresented in business, by providing an immersive learning environment based on the United Nations Global Goals, with elements such as local and/or global field study and personalized mentoring. Additionally, the center is engaged in an audit of all School of Business courses, focused on what and how students are taught about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We then intend to develop an undergraduate concentration and a minor on the topic of responsible business.

In spring 2021, B4BW hosted the Ashoka U Exchange’s international conference bringing thought leaders, students, faculty, and foundation representatives to Mason’s campus for discussions around social innovation and responsible business. The center, its board members, and international partners share a focus on embedding the SDGs throughout business education, and creating educational programs and experiences to help students see, and visualize, how business can act as a force for good in the world.

Topics

Business for a Better World Center

Business for a Better World Impact Fellows Program

Foundations Faculty Research

Bees Are a Sweet Link Between Mason and the Community

Marianne Klinker — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 20:32:02 +0000

Bees Are a Sweet Link Between Mason and the Community Marianne Klinker Fri, 11/12/2021 - 15:32

In This Story

It’s early summer and warm, but the humidity hasn’t kicked in yet. For this part of Virginia, where the air is swampy most of June, July, and August, this feels like a gift. The sky is clear and clouds high and thin. Dennis Kelly (BA English 2012, MS Technology Management 2015) sits in a wrought iron chair on a shady patio overlooking a grassy hill that slopes gently toward a stand of trees. “The hives are just down there,” he says. “Sometimes I think about clearing some trees so we can see them.”

Amissville, Virginia, just west of Warrenton, is about a 90-minute drive from Washington, D.C. Interstate 66 is the Achilles Heel of area commuters, but the silver lining is that it leads here—to this bucolic setting and to Hinson Ford Cider & Mead. Dennis Kelly, his wife Mary Graham, and business partner Dave Shiff opened Hinson Ford in September of 2018. “We noticed a growing market for mead,” Dennis says. “which we’d been making for ourselves for years. But people are so aware now of the plight of the honey bee—and how it affects humans. It makes them want to support bees and beekeepers, which created a market for all honey-related products—including mead. So, the timing was perfect.”

Dennis Kelly at Hinson Ford Cider & Mead

The small tasting room at Hinson Ford is cozy, like a ski lodge. The walls are wooden and, on this sunny day, give the space an amber light. There’s a small, beautifully handcrafted bar in one corner and several sets of tables and chairs. Like the cider and mead, this room is a labor of love. “This used to be Dave’s garage.” Dennis says. “He just cleaned it up a little and built the bar himself.” On the walls are canvases of apples and bees and the Hinson Ford logo, which Mary designed. Bottles of cider and mead, all jewel tones of gold and garnet, line the top of a small cabinet. Everything is shiny and clean. It’s a space you’d want to sit in and stay for a while.

A short hallway leads into the production room where the mead and cider are fermented. Here, the cozy feeling gives way to one of light and air and openness. There are tall stainless-steel tanks along the room’s back wall, large fermenters in the center, and open shelving lines one wall. A bourbon barrel, once home to 53 gallons of port wine for ten years, now holds an experimental cider as it ages.

Dennis points out they made every effort to be green in designing and building the facility, including preparations for eventually installing solar panels to cut energy demand. Sunlight pours in the windows. “The air has yeast in it,” says Dave “It used to be that ciders and meads were fermented with just that—the natural yeast floating around.” He smiles. This is clearly a subject he loves. The trio came to this operation with a passion for their craft. And the passion proved necessary—it powered them through the early days of backbreaking work.

“We got approval from the Alcohol Beverage Control to start production at the end of October of 2017. That’s late in the apple season,” Dennis says.

“We rushed to find what we needed locally, and ended up with a flatbed truck of apples on Veteran’s Day weekend. There’s a press out back and the three of us with help from a couple friends just washed and ground and pressed apples for the first batches of cider. It was 22 degrees, so the best job was washer because you could have your hands in warm water. Otherwise we froze.”

Dennis calls the fermenting room “his happy space” and says, “It's amazing. I come up here when we have three or four things fermenting. It smells wonderful and I can...well, you can feel the energy; the trillions of yeasts doing their thing and you can literally walk in and smell if they're happy.” Yeast needs a certain level of nutrients, he explains, and when the level is off, they get stressed and release sulfur compounds. Dennis says, “one morning I walked in here and the smell of things wasn’t right. I could tell the yeast was off. But as long as you don’t kill it, you just have to recalibrate and it adjusts back. Yeast is a living thing.”

Mead, Not Just for Vikings Anymore

Mead is one of the world’s oldest alcoholic beverages. Archeologists have found pottery vessels from as early as 7000 BC whose chemical signatures suggest they once held the fermented honey drink. About 60 CE, Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and naturalist, penned what might be the first written recipe. His version involved years-old rainwater mixed with honey and fermented in the sun for 40 days. Around the world—in nearly every culture where honey is available—some variety of mead is also found. The Masai, in East Africa, drink fermented honey “beer,” and Tej, Ethiopian wine, is also a honey-based mead variation. References to mead have been found in Vedic texts from 1700 BCE, Celtic hymns from 500 BCE, and Old English writing from about the year 1000 CE. In early Celtic and Germanic poetry, mead was more than just a drink—it was seen as a source of knowledge, an elixir that would turn any who imbibed into a scholar. Over the years, other drinks derived from fruit and grains proved cheaper to make and so rose in popularity. Eventually mead fell out of favor and, for many in the United States, was seen as an overly sweet, odd-tasting drink you might buy at the Renaissance Fair—a novelty that most people wouldn’t go out their way to find.

Kelly recalled his first brush with mead, over four decades earlier as a teenager visiting Ireland's Bunratty Castle with his parents. "It's hilarious because we get a surprising number of folks coming here for ciders. They’re scared off of the meads because their first and only experience with mead was at Bunratty, and what they pour there is strong, it's sweet, it's still, it's syrupy, and it's part of the whole Bunratty experience. The tourists love it, and from what I've heard, the folks who make it also make some really great meads. They just don't necessarily sell them there."

The Honey Bee Initiative

Honey is, of course, the base ingredient for mead. This is where ��AV, Dennis and Mary’s alma mater, comes in. “I read about the Honey Bee Initiative before we opened Hinson Ford,” Dennis said, “and it struck me how cool an idea it is. Especially the interdisciplinary aspect of it.” George Mason’s Honey Bee Initiative (HBI) is a collaboration between the School of Business and the College of Science that “works on honey bee sustainability by providing an innovative education, conducting collaborative research, and establishing community partnerships in our local Northern Virginia region.” The HBI supports education in beekeeping, research, and entrepreneurship, and develops novel ways to improve the security and sustainability of the Northern Virginia ecosystem. The initiative reaches farther afield, too, with community partnerships in Colombia and Peru that focus specifically on offering indigenous people a means of political and economic empowerment. In these places, the HBI also generates discussion about land management and conservation. In Colombia the HBI uses beekeeping to foster economic self-sufficiency among women entrepreneurs. George Mason students involved in the initiative have opportunities to visit the Latin American partners and work side by side on those projects. Colombian students, for their part, were able to visit Mason in March of 2019 through a grant from 10,000 Strong in the Americas—all of which adds a cross-cultural dimension to the interdisciplinary whole.

Creating Connections

But back to this little corner of rural Virginia. Dennis and Dave (Mary was at work—both she and Dennis maintain full-time jobs. Dave is a retired firefighter) speak about mead and cider and their business in a way that highlights their enthusiasm for all of it. They both were home-brewers for years before they came together to create Hinson Ford. Dennis and Mary moved to Amissville from the urban stretch of Northern Virginia that borders the District of Columbia. Once they made the move, Dennis said, they had access to really good, local honeys. Over time, his small-batch home-brews got better and better and, finally, became the impetus for Hinson Ford.

Hives at Hinson Ford Cider & Mead

Dennis recalled meeting Germán at a Mason event in 2012, and shortly after Hinson Ford opened, dug out his business card and emailed him, suggesting they think about ways to work together. The timing was perfect. The HBI was just beginning to seek out community partners and the fact that Dennis and Mary are both GMU alumni seemed serendipitous. The HBI initially gave Hinson Ford about 80 pounds of honey to work with. Sales of the mead that will be made from that honey will go to support the initiative. As the HBI expanded, though more space was needed to establish new hives. Hinson Ford was game to host, knowing the bees would bolster the growth of the Tulip Poplars, Black Locust trees, the clover and the wildflowers. In turn, the honey would be hyper-local.

“You can say to people that, yeah, this honey came from these trees (pointing) right here and these flowers. That’s amazing to be able to tell customers and they love it.”

Germán Perilla, the co-founder, director, and beekeeper for the HBI, installed 15 hives on a small plot of land just down the hill from the Hinson Ford tasting room. It was a tough couple of years for bees in this part of Virginia. Two winters back there was a 60 percent loss in the bee population. Dennis is clear that he’s hands-off when it comes to bee care and honey harvesting but, because of HBI involvement, he doesn’t need to worry about ensuring bee health. “When Germán came out to set up the hives, he brought the group of Colombian students with him.” Germán and the students, all of whom are involved with the HBI project in Colombia, spent the day wooing the bees into their new homes. When they were done, they slaked their thirsts with their first ever tastes of ‘sidra’ and ‘aguamiel’ in the cool of the tasting room, leaving with several bottles for their trip home “It’s amazing to watch Germán work,” Dennis says. The respect in his voice is clear. “The calm and the grace he exudes when he’s working with the bees; it’s incredible to watch someone who really knows what they’re doing—and who clearly loves it.”

The little neighborhood of hives was painted bright Mason Green and Gold and protected by electric fencing to deter the many local black bears. On calm, bright mornings, the dull sound of humming indicated the bees thrived—no diseases or predators to threaten them. The Tulip Poplars and Black Locust trees bloom nearby, as do the clover and wildflowers the bees love.

Lisa Gring-Pemble is the co-founder of the HBI and also the co-executive director of the Business for a Better World Center. She met Germán, a Colombian, at the university, “when I met him and I found out that he was a beekeeper, it was sort of an instant idea. I said, ‘we need a honeybee field station. Absolutely. We're going to set something up.’” Things happened quickly after that. Gring-Pemble and Perilla applied to attend a conference on honeybees that was ten months away. Gring-Pemble remembers telling Perilla that, “at the conference we're going to tell everybody how we set up this field station and how we raised money for it.” She laughs and adds, “Germán looked at me like I had two heads and said, ‘we have no field station and we have no money.’ And I said, we have ten months to figure it out.” The two initiated a crowdfunding campaign with a goal $10,000. They made $12,000.

Lisa Gring-Pemble sees the HBI as an incredible educational opportunity. “This is everything higher education needs,” she says. “It’s problem driven, so it’s not about ‘what’s your major?’ it's about a challenge you want to solve and it involves the greater community—people like Dennis Kelly and experts who can work with students. That’s the kind of college experience we should be offering.” Her enthusiasm is infectious—both for the HBI and for the idea of social entrepreneurship—a notion the ��AV School of Business takes seriously.

Inside every beehive are three types of bees. The queen, workers, and drones. Each has a role and each performs it perfectly and in concert with the others. They are connected to one another through their overall mission—gathering pollen and nectar to sustain the hive and its brood, maintaining the structure of the hive, and repopulating the hive. It takes a lot of honey to make mead, and being able to host the bees that make the honey-makes Hinson Ford’s mead hyper local, which small-batch consumers appreciate. But it’s also hyper local in the sense that it’s bolstered by deep community connections. As Gring-Pemble says, “We're focused on bees and we're focused on how sustainable beekeeping can empower communities. And it doesn't matter whether that community is in Colombia and it's a group of women or if it's the Covanta landfill over here. The point is that we're improving lives in communities.” Dennis agrees, “I immediately thought the HBI was a cool idea. It's a neat program. It's an interdisciplinary approach. And, frankly, I think it's nice to see the university doing something positive like that, and it’s a great to be a part of it.”

The bees—for logistical reasons no longer living on Hinson Ford land—were unaware of the role they played in connecting George Mason to the wider community but their legacy continues. As Gring-Pemble says, “We're focused on bees and we're focused on how sustainable beekeeping can empower communities. It doesn't matter whether that community is in Colombia or if it's the Covanta landfill. The point is that we're improving lives in communities.”

Topics

Costello College of Business Alumni