In the back of a large, empty, unlisted parking lot, Nikkia Rowe steps out of her white Acura and gathers her equipment from the back seat. She pulls out a worn pair of bee-printed rain boots, a brown paper shopping bag, thick yellow gloves, and a small beehive smoker, then zips her veiled beekeeping jacket and pulls the boots over a pair of pink joggers.
“I only beekeep in these pink pants. We tryna blend in,” says Rowe, a lifelong educator. Since 2019, Rowe has been the beekeeper behind the John Newman Honeybee Company, a Black woman-owned apiary renowned for its premium raw honey made here in Baltimore.
Rowe trudges through dewy grass and to her apiary, a small group of beehives sitting in the middle of a field — and a refreshing sign of life amidst the corporate redevelopments of Baltimore Peninsula, more commonly known to Baltimoreans as Port Covington. It’s unseasonably cool out, this being the first day of August, and overcast, which means that the bees sense danger. After Rowe lights the smoker and stuffs it with fistfuls of grass, Kennedy Simmons, her apprentice, holds it over the beehives to calm them down by masking their “alarm” pheromones. Rowe then carefully opens one hive and the bees begin swarming.
“See how mad they get when it’s overcast? When the sun is out, they’re totally different bees,” Rowe says, before they fly into the hive again.
The Cherry Hill native is basically one with the bumbling creatures. She never washes her aggressively stained jacket, which “has bee crap all over it and smells like smoke,” because it helps her fit in with the bees, who seem unbothered by her stature, missing antennas and wings, and glaring lack of stripes.
Rowe can predict how they’ll behave based on the weather, knows they pick up on the presence of electronic devices, and has learned that if a honeycomb contains patches of blue, a bee has likely been in contact with a snowball or a popsicle. She’s even found that people in her life begin to notice bees more often after spending time around her. But she wasn’t always fond of them.
“As a kid, I think there were a couple of summers that I stepped on honeybees because I nefariously hated shoes, but I had no attraction to them,” she recalls.
Rowe’s fascination with bees began in 2018, which marked a transitional time in her career. She worked in schools for close to 30 years before taking her love of teaching outside (literally) as the founder of John Newman. She was drawn to their chaotic mannerisms, then discovered that they’re also hyper-organized.
I feel like with bees, I can spend the entirety of the rest of my life with them and still not know everything about them. Every day I learn something new.
Nikkia Rowe
“I feel like with bees, I can spend the entirety of the rest of my life with them and still not know everything about them. Every day I learn something new,” she says.
Part of John Newman Honeybee Company’s mission — named for Rowe’s late maternal and paternal grandfathers, both entrepreneurs — is sharing those lessons with Baltimore.
If bees could speak to humans, Rowe believes they’d say, “Together is the only way.” She challenges the notion that the striped and stinging black and yellow insects have a monarchy.
“It’s almost like the purest form of a democracy. If at any point, the queen is no longer a benefit to the colony — she’s laying slow, or maybe she’s dropping double eggs accidentally, or maybe she’s been injured — the collective will kill her and they’ll make another one. In a honeybee colony, nothing is ever about an individual bee. Its existence is for the benefit of the whole.”
This philosophy informs the way Rowe’s company gives back to the community. In transitioning from her role as a Baltimore City school principal to working as a full-time urban beekeeper, she knew it was important to make space for people to learn the value of a honeybee and how they can enrich our lives. John Newman’s apprenticeship program, which Simmons has participated in for the last three seasons, allows Black Baltimoreans to care for their own colonies, learn how to work with bees, and, ultimately, sell their own honey.
“You don’t really hear many narratives about Black people keeping bees, but we know that we kept bees, just like we know that we grew food,” Rowe says.
“There are opportunities for people, and community in general, to come together and to reconnect to those ancestral arts. I think it’s really important for Black folks to do that, because it helps us to own the triumph of our story.”
At the moment, John Newman, which Rowe says relocated twice before ultimately settling in Baltimore Peninsula, is raising money through Gofundme to increase honey production,
find a permanent home, and purchase additional protective equipment, including more beekeeping jackets and suits. Eventually, she wants the company to grow into a commercial, migratory beekeeping operation, with honey and other locally-made premium products available across the Eastern Seaboard.
“Folks won’t need to go to a farmers market or specialty shop. They can just walk into the store, and there’s John Newman Honey, a name they can trust.”
Ideally, Rowe says someone else would run the company so she can “just go play with bees,” and further integrate her loves of beekeeping and teaching.
“I refer to the bees as my kindred. I feel very connected to bees, and also to children, and I’m going to figure out how to get the two together here soon.”
As a yogi and a longtime educator, Rowe believes that there are several healing elements to looking after bees, and even simply spending time with them, from those who want to keep bees in their home gardens to veterans with PTSD symptoms.
“In yogic tradition, Om, which is the sound of the universe, is also believed to be the exact sound that the honeybee makes,” Rowe said. “If I start to feel any kind of stressor, I automatically [think] ‘I must be feeling this level of stress because I haven’t been around them.’ Even if I only get to do that for three minutes, it’s restorative.”
So is honey, which is why locals in need of some can buy it at reduced prices from John Newman through the company’s website, at the Black Yield Institute’s Cherry Hill Marketplace, and at the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s Saturday farmers market.
“Beekeepers say that the only way to know that you’re getting authentically pure, raw honey that is not tainted is to know the beekeeper,” Rowe says, explaining that some brands are mixed with corn syrup, and most contain ingredients with origins that can’t be traced.
“I think what makes ours special is the notion that every single thing, from start to finish — from the founding of it to how we care for bees to how we reach out and care for community — I know that it’s all grounded in love.”
Nikkia Rowe
“I’ll taste other honeys, and I think what makes ours special is the notion that every single thing, from start to finish — from the founding of it to how we care for bees to how we reach out and care for community — I know that it’s all grounded in love, like the most purest form of it. The kind that’s unchanging. The kind that is steady and slow forward. I think that breathes itself into our products.”
Rowe jokes that her honey is tasty enough to eat out of the jar, but says that customers have used it as a sweetener for salad dressings, teas, and in their Rosh Hashanah meal items. She recommends combining it with equal parts Old Bay to make a simple sauce for salmon, shrimp, or chicken wings. Throughout the colder months, she eats a teaspoon every day to keep ahead of cold and flu symptoms.
“Before there was big pharma, there was honey,” Rowe says, adding that the viscous, amber substance was a remedy for sore throats, coughs, and burn wounds — even more proof that the honeybee had looked after its human kin for eons.
“They found honey in the tombs of the pharaohs in Egypt. And just for the record, it has no expiration date. Honey has no shelf life. If it crystallizes, you just sit it in warm water. It’s good for you. It’s good always.”