Boston’s Best Residential Beekeepers: 60 Minutes with a Bee Doctor

Think of Best Bees as the pollinator whisperers. Founded in Boston in 2010, the innovative company installs and manages beehives across the city and the country—from private rooftops to community gardens—helping clients support biodiversity and create hyperlocal honey. So how do they do it? For our Best of Boston issue, we caught up with “special operations” beekeeper and data analyst Ronald “Ronnie” Thompson III on his daily rounds.

1:06 p.m. Thompson loads up a branded van with his bee suit and supplies, including a flat metal hand tool and smoke pot, which he’ll use to generate pleasant-smelling fumes that help control the bees’ behavior (otherwise…yikes). Then he sets his GPS for a home in Cambridge. “There are times when a beekeeper notes some weird stuff going on,” Thompson says, likening the job to a bee doctor. “That’s where I come in.”

1:26 p.m. Thompson parks on a residential street outside of Harvard Square, then suits up. This particular site visit is to check on a hive that may need a new queen. The beekeeper who last visited the hive noted it appears to have recently swarmed, meaning the queen took off with some of the colony. Thompson will check if the remaining bees are on track to repopulate. Just in case, he has a mated female ready to work, buzzing inside a tiny cage in the pocket of his khakis.

1:38 p.m. Thompson grabs the smoke pot and fills its chamber with his fuel of choice—burlap—before setting it on fire with a torch lighter and closing the cover. With his tool, he heads toward the hive, located in a front yard filled with flowers. Squeezing the bellows of the smoke pot to release a steady stream of smoke, he uncovers the bee boxes one by one and uses his tool to carefully pry out the beeswax-covered frames to search for the queen.

1:58 p.m. There’s no sign of her, and as he gets to the bottom box of the hive, the bees seem more agitated. That suggests they’re without a queen who can repopulate the colony, Thompson explains. He decides to leave them with the apiary-reared queen from his pocket, who can start laying eggs immediately.

2:06 p.m. The worker bees react calmly, Thompson observes. “If they didn’t like her, they would start buzzing loudly.” He covers and stacks up the bee boxes, pausing to record notes on his iPad for the next beekeeper. “Getting to beekeep every day and then also develop my skills on data and research is fantastic,” he says.

Roxbury, bestbees.com.

This story first ran in the print edition of Boston’s July 2025 issue, as part of the Best of Boston: Service package.