Jana Kinsman, The Busy Beekeeper – The People Issue 2024

Jana Kinsman has a life all her own as a beekeeper, illustrator, and more. After falling in love with beekeeping, she began Bike a Bee, a project that places beehives all over Chicago. She does her honey extraction and equipment building out of the Plant in the Back of the Yards, and she sells her honey online and at the 61st Street Farmers Market in Woodlawn. She also runs Doodlebooth, a hand-drawn portrait service for weddings, markets, and events. Through 13 years of self-employment, Kinsman has built a life that ebbs and flows with the seasons.

I started off as a graphic designer, and I was totally living the corporate life. I had this wonderful community of creative people around me who were starting businesses. And there was kind of just this attitude of “you can do anything”; everything you see is created by another person, and there’s no rules—just go for it. So I was kind of getting more curious about creating work that was my own—like I did work and made a product with my own hands.

I’ve also always been really interested in nature since I was extremely young, and the guy I was dating at the time wanted to do an urban homestead sort of lifestyle. I’d grown vegetables in the past and hated it: I find it so tedious, and it just wasn’t inspiring. So I was like, well, what can you do with livestock in the city? I thought bees would be something fun, and I took a winter beekeeping class with the Chicago Honey Co-op, a really great beekeeping organization here in the city, and I was just totally enthralled. Things definitely didn’t work out with the guy, but beekeeping has been a lifelong love.

So I did a beekeeping apprenticeship in Portland, Oregon. The guy [who ran it] had multiple hives throughout Eugene, Oregon. I feel like I got 5 percent of the knowledge taking the class and 95 percent just working with the bees. You take a class, but you have no idea what the whole universe of bees is like until you’re actually hands-on, working with the colonies.

[In Oregon,] we would visit the hives in his truck to check up on them. At the time, I only had a bike, so I was like, I want to do this in Chicago, but I want to do it on a bike. It’s so contrived, but bikes are really a window to the world, and if you can learn how to fix it, then you have transportation for life. I had a roommate at the time, Brent, and we just did everything by bike. We would buy new mattresses or sofas on Craigslist, and we would transport them on bike with a complicated trailer setup. And I just wanted to prove that you could really do anything by bicycle. I look crazy with this trailer full of stuff, and so you know, more people notice me, and I get to wave at people and get them interested in the hives. 

I was 23, 24, and I started Bike a Bee. I created a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for getting ten hives started; I cold-called community gardens and asked them if they wanted to host beehives. Pretty much all of them said yes. So then I started that spring in 2012 with ten hives, and I’ve just been growing ever since. 

Now, most of the hives are in community gardens around the south side, so people get to live and work around them, walk by them when they’re going to their house. They can see them here, and it just enriches their lives, I think. And then they get to try honey that’s made in their neighborhood. Everybody who hosts the hive gets a share of honey from the hives, and they’re in smaller jars so that they can hopefully hand out multiples to people in their neighborhood. 

Apiaries in different neighborhoods end up producing different flavors because the bees are visiting plants in different quantities. In a neighborhood like Englewood, where there’s a lot more vacant land, you get a lot more clover influence, because a lot of clover grows on the ground; at high locations near parks, they visit a lot of trees like linden trees, chestnuts, buckeyes, black locust. It’s like a taste representation of the neighborhood.

Being the type of person I am, where I learn best by just doing, starting my own apprenticeship was a total no-brainer for me. I started it right away—I thought I can just easily offer this to people, so they can start beekeeping, even if they have no idea how to start or how to manage a hive. And I’ve got to watch so many people see the magic of it, and it just changes their life, and it makes them think about the world differently.

Simultaneously, I started a second business called Doodlebooth, where people hire me for events to draw quick portraits of them. I get hired at weddings, I do the Renegade Craft Fair every year, and I get to go to a lot of fun places around the country. I think my style has gotten more refined through the years. I can draw more people faster, like 22 people per hour. They’re kind of just nice, cute pictures of people. 

And for a long time, that would subsidize all the beekeeping work, because I didn’t make much money from doing bees and honey. But now, it’s pretty neck and neck, because I have about 96 hives now and produce a lot of honey. Beyond that, I did construction part time at the Renaissance Society, which is a contemporary art museum in Hyde Park.

It’s an interesting life dynamic—to live within the rhythms of nature. Especially with those becoming more and more unpredictable.

I’ve always been really eager to say yes to something that excites me: a really fun opportunity comes along, and I’m really into chasing novel things. Which gets me in a lot of trouble, because then I’m like, oh, well, I’m not doing the work that I should have been doing for this or that, and I’m doing something else. But I think I finally figured it out this year—13 years into self-employment, I’m like, OK, I’m not stretching myself thin anymore.

I grew up out in Wheaton, Illinois, and then I moved here when I was 19, so I spent an equal amount of time living there and in Chicago, because I’m 38. I was living in Logan Square when I started Bike a Bee and Doodlebooth, and then I’ve slowly been moving south, to Pilsen, then McKinley Park, and then I bought my house in West Englewood, I think in December 2018.

I’ve always wanted a house. I grew up in an old house, and I watched my dad and grandpa do so much rehab on it. I always was curious about doing that myself. It’s like a beautiful red brick two-flat, and I bought the vacant lot next door to it, so I’ve got this big garden with hives, and it’s magical. I got a really wonderful block with great neighbors, and the house was just cared for enough: a lot of the original features were in place, like the hardwood floors and the trim.

It’s been a real adventure, rehabbing it, redoing all the electrical and plumbing, and then learning all of that stuff myself as I went with the help of smart friends and family. It’s almost done; I only recommend it if you’re crazy and don’t mind living in a construction zone. 

When the bee stuff slows down in October, November, then I either work on the house, or like last year, I was able to travel. I visited my sister in California. I did some really big hikes. Wedding season is in the fall, and doing Doodlebooth means I’m only working weekends for events and stuff. [When I worked at the Ren], they only have four shows a year and take a summer off, so it [was] a nice rhythm. 

It’s an interesting life dynamic—to live within the rhythms of nature. Especially with those becoming more and more unpredictable.

With beekeeping, every year I learn more and more, and everything happens in a year cycle. So I try one thing one year, and I’m like, OK, well, that didn’t work, and I guess I’ll try it a different way next year. There’s no quick iteration on trying things, you kind of just see how the season plays out, and then each season is different. So there’s not even a baseline, it’s very unpredictable. 

I got really intimate, too, with the rhythms of nature by being on a bike. In the beginning, when I was still learning the rhythms of all of the nectar plants and foliage, stuff that the bees eat, being on the ground, I got to see which trees were blooming, when and who was gonna bloom next. And I can change what I’m doing with the bees in order to make time for that upcoming bloom. 

In all my work, there’s so much critical thinking involved, and that really is what lights me up. I love the flexibility in my life, and I love the variability and the seasonality, even though it can be really challenging when I go from this beautiful lifestyle of beekeeping every day to working in my basement. I do a lot of hard mental work to become OK with that change, and then spring comes and I have to be a beekeeper all over again. But I love the changes, and every year is new with beekeeping, like every Doodlebooth gig is different, a different set of people. You know, they did these studies about how doing different things slows time down—it slows your perception of time down. I feel like that’s part of my underlying desire to keep doing different things, because that keeps life slow and spicy. 

This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.