Confidence shows itself in many ways.
For second lady Karen Pence, campaigning to help her husband and President Trump win reelection, it’s how she manages her two beehives at the vice president’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory.
During an interview to talk about her hives and years of tending bees, I tried a curveball that grazed politics and her future.
“Are you planning on keeping them here through the next four years or moving them to northern Virginia or someplace?”
Without hesitation, Pence smiled and said, “We’re planning on keeping them right here, yes.”
It wasn’t a bluff. As an exclamation point for her second-term plans, she has just placed a vinyl fence around the bee yard about 50 yards from her and Vice President Mike Pence’s front porch. And a special sign was installed just this week, reading, “The Vice President’s Bees,” though, technically, he is only a visitor.
“They are really my bees, yes,” said Karen Pence,“ although he likes to come down and look at them, too, but he doesn’t get as involved in it as I do.”
Like former first lady Michelle Obama, the first in modern history to bring beehives to the White House, Pence is the first to have them at the vice president’s residence. Pence is more hands-on, though there is a day-to-day beekeeper, the facility’s horticulturist, Derrick Williams.
Pence, also a part-time art teacher, said that she got into bees when her husband was governor of Indiana. The idea came to her while talking to a governor’s wife of another state who had installed a hive.
“What a great place to put a beehive,” Pence responded. “That’s all it took. I was fascinated by it,” added Pence, who has never been stung or even anxious around the hives.
Fast forward to 2017, when the Pences moved into the vice president’s residence. “One of the first things I asked of the groundskeeper was, ‘Do we have beehives here?’ and he said no,” said Pence. Looking around the lush green grounds, she said, “This would be a great place to put a beehive.”
A hive was built and placed on the grounds, and a box of bees was poured in. But that year, a honeybee enemy, wasps, killed the hive.
So, in 2018, they were replaced, and this year, her two hives, filled with about 80,000 fuzzy bees, finally produced honey, about 40 pounds, which she helped harvest.
It was enough to fill hundreds of little bear bottles she gives to visitors and guests. The label is a tiny copy of her watercolor of the vice president’s residence, used for the cover of her and her daughter Charlotte’s book, Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President.
Pence said that she feels her role is partly to teach children about bees. She’s also promoting programs to get veterans with PTSD involved. “It’s such a calming hobby to have,” she said.
She also is an ambassador for saving the insects, which face constant threats from natural enemies, chemicals, and development. For that, she has enlisted the help of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who helped unveil the first hive and has put a focus on bees at the agency.
“I don’t think people know how dependent we are on the bees,” she said. “Our bees are the main pollinators, and we need to take care of them,” added Pence, who encourages people to buy honey to help beekeepers and put vegetation around their yards.
She certainly does at the residence, where white clover has been added to the still-blooming strawberry plants in the bee yard, and plants attractive to pollinators have been put in the garden.
“Whatever they want, we let them have it,” Pence said. “We keep them well fed.”
