Here at Betterbee, we are committed to operating our business in the most sustainable and efficient ways possible, and we are constantly improving our methods of doing so. For us, sustainability is both a direct and indirect practice. As one of the larger employers in Washington County, we are dedicated to continuing our sustainable practices. At the same time, we’re always looking for new ways to improve and increase our positive environmental impact both in our local community, and across the nation.

Shipping & Receiving Practices

We are constantly shipping and receiving orders at Betterbee. Our warehouse team spends their days packing customer orders and loading them onto the delivery trucks (which go out once at the end of each day in order to minimize the amount of fuel being used in shipping).

When packing orders, we make use of fully recyclable materials, and we reuse packing materials from shipments we receive from our vendors. We highly encourage all of our customers to recycle or repurpose the boxes and materials that their orders arrive in. We have dozens of recycling bins located around our premises for employees and customers to use throughout the day.

We have also changed the way we handle LTLs (orders that must be shipped via tractor-trailers) and dealer purchase orders over the last few years. Rather than having a constant influx of large trucks in and out of our facility, we strive to consolidate these types of shipments to minimize the amount of fossil fuel emissions. We now send as many orders as possible on the same truck instead of loading a single order (or two) on multiple trucks.

Pest Control & Groundskeeping

Pest management is a vital part of beekeeping, and there are a lot of methods that can be used to treat a hive. At Betterbee, we use pest control methods that are non-harmful not just to the bees, but to the surrounding fauna and flora in our local ecosystem (except for the pests we are trying to keep out of our hives). We meticulously monitor each of our hives to ensure that we are never over-treating for varroa and other pests. Additionally, we constantly reuse and repurpose old hive bodies, frames, and more in an effort to minimize the amount of waste we produce each season.

When it comes to maintaining the grounds at Betterbee, we do our best to preserve the wild clover (and other flowers that offer resources for our bees) whenever it is time to mow. During the month of May, we join the "No-Mow-May" movement, which provides a surplus of resources for the bees and other pollinators in our area. We have a number of large garden beds surrounding our headquarters at 8 Meader Rd, offering even more resources for the local pollinator population. By the way, our headquarters is even a “recycled” horse barn that Betterbee has grown to fill (and eventually overfill) since our founding in 1979!

Education & Responsibility

Education is a HUGE part of Betterbee, and we are always doing our part to share our knowledge with others in the beekeeping hobby/industry. A major part of our education program is making sure that we are promoting responsibility, sustainability, and adaptability. Through our variety of beekeeping courses (taught by our own Dr. David T. Peck), we teach our students how to sustain their hobby/business in an environmentally-friendly way. If we help you keep your bees alive, and keep your equipment in good shape, new bees and hives don’t need to be made and shipped across the country to you. Our business model doesn’t need us to ship you a new hive every year because they keep falling apart. We’d rather sell our next hive to your neighbor, because you and your bees are doing so well that your neighbor wants to become a beekeeper too!

Betterbee also takes part in a variety of local events and charities as a way of giving back to our community. We will often bring an observation hive to these events (along with plenty of educational reading material), which gives us an opportunity to discuss the importance of pollinators and how much they do for our local ecosystems. These events allow us to connect with individuals in/around our area, build meaningful relationships, and work together to build a more sustainable and eco-friendly community. We love connecting with others and educating our community on the ways they can take part in helping our local ecosystem. Would you like Betterbee to come speak at your event? Reach out to us at education@gm-colo.com.

Other Sustainable Practices

There are many other ways in which Betterbee is dedicated to promoting sustainability and efficiency in all we do.

• We use solar energy to power our new warehouse.
• We upgraded our lighting (in both our new warehouse and our 8 Meader Rd location) for energy-efficient bulbs, which has drastically reduced our energy consumption.
• We have adopted an energy-efficient heating system and water system.
• We updated our insulation and added energy-efficient windows to cut down on fuel and energy costs.
• We continue to strive to be completely paperless in our accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll processes.
• We continue to create educational videos and articles to help our customers fix product issues using DIY methods, which help avoid unnecessary shipping back and forth. Such videos can be found on our , , and .
• Our sister store, Humble Abodes, uses scrap wood as much as possible to make a variety of different products. Unusable scraps are turned into sawdust, which is then used by local farmers. The hive part factory at Humble Abodes is even efficiently heated with wood scrap.
• We are constantly working to make our wood manufacturing machines and processes more efficient by using as much of the lumber as possible, saving more trees, and also cutting our total energy usage.
• Beeswax from uncapping (during honey extraction) is processed and used in our beeswax candles and skincare products. Any candles that have not sold are melted down once again for use in new candles at the beginning of each season, to avoid any waste.

Final thoughts on Sustainability & Efficiency

Our commitment to building a sustainable and efficient business is a never-ending work in progress, and we are very proud of how far we've come over the last few years. We consistently look for ways in which we can improve upon our processes, and we are quick to implement new, environmentally-friendly practices into our day-to-day routines. We look forward to continuing to make Betterbee as eco-friendly as possible with the help of our local community!