edible seattle | Summer 2025 15 Walking up the driveway to the headquarters of Rainy Day Bees in Shoreline, you don’t hear the bees at all. From the street, it’s simply a lovely house, shaded by trees, tucked away from main roads. But come upon the large greenhouse attached to the house, you’ll see the hives—and hear them. The warmer weather has the bees hard at work, flying to and fro, collecting pollen and nectar to bring back to their hives, and the whole scene has a low, comforting hum. With the sun shining on the hives, the air smells faintly of warmed honey. “I had always liked social insects,” says Peter Nolte, who owns Rainy Day Bees with his wife, Amy Beth Nolte. “Eighth grade was when we were at the Puyallup fair as a family, and a beekeeper told me—‘Oh, you can have bees in the city.’ So that was probably when I first got interested, when that first felt like a possibility.” He started with a gifted hive that a friend in Phinney Ridge hosted in their backyard, and now more than 14 years on, the Noltes are all about backyard bees. Rainy Day Bees was founded in 2014, and is most well-known for its hyperlocal raw honeys. Some are specific to the flowers and crops the bees have foraged from, like fireweed or blackberry blossom—others harvested by neighborhood, which is where things can get interesting. “The bees can forage between two and six miles around their home base,” says Amy Beth. “So obviously our residential hive hosts get more pollination in their yards, but the bees are all over. And that’s the magic around the neighborhood-specific honey, is that the bees are all around. People in the neighborhoods feel real ownership of the bees.” The Noltes and their beekeeping staff spend swarm season, usually March through June, checking on their hives all over Seattle on a weekly basis, sometimes more often to prevent swarms and keep the bees happy and healthy. “Bees are a superorganism, and if the superorganism dies, that’s the end of the colony’s genetics. So spring is when they have the most time to create a new colony, and have the best chance of surviving the next winter,” Peter says. “So in the spring, the superorganism naturally divides itself in half, like an amoeba, and half of the bees fly away with the old queen to go find a new home. The other half stay in the hive, finish raising a new queen and continue the life of the original colony. No single bee can survive by itself.” Preventing the bees from swarming can require some subtle persuasion on the parts of the beekeepers—convincing the bees they’ve already swarmed by manually splitting colonies, and other techniques that keep half your honeybees from flying off without you—and keeping their honey all for themselves. The Noltes have planted many native plants over the years in conjunction with their hives, and encourage their hive hosts to do the same, but admit some of the fun is in the wide variety of plants Hardworking honey bees zoom around the hives at Rainy Day Bees in Shoreline. “Bees are a superorganism, and if the superorganism dies, that’s the end of the colony’s genetics. So spring is when they have the most time to create a new colony, and have the best chance of surviving the next winter… No single bee can survive by itself.” —Peter Nolte
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