Correction: Oct. 15, 2025, 11:50 a.m.: Sade Shofidiya knew Mayor Van Johnson before meeting with him at a conference in Accra, Ghana. Shofidiya maintained bee hives at the Coastal Empire Beekeepers Association’s apiary but did not learn beekeeping there.
Ignoring the sweltering temperature one late July morning, Sade Shofidiya wriggled into her protective bee jumpsuit and popped a veil over her head. After a delay to locate a lighter, she lit a smoker filled with pine straw and began inspecting four newly established honey bee hives tucked into a shady spot in Savannah’s Tatemville Neighborhood Center.
As bees buzzed in and out, Shofidiya lifted each lid and pulled out the wooden frame inside to read the hive’s activity.
“See, there’s a queen cell on this honey super,” she said pointing to what looks like a tiny wax teacup on the lowest part of the comb. “Wherever the queen cell is is really important. This is at the bottom. So this is a swarm cell, which means that they’re growing and they’re probably making a new queen to split and swarm.”
This apiary sits across from a community garden and the park’s Golden Age Center. There’s a “No Spray” sign but no “Keep Out.”
In fact, the placement was key to Shofidiya, a Chicago native and former foster child.
“The future goal for the apiary is to have programming with community members and to connect with the Tatemville community, get protective equipment that’s suitable for all age groups, and begin programming, starting with the senior golden age group, and getting the citizens involved and caring.”
Shofidiya came to Savannah for her undergraduate degree at South University and stayed to get an MBA at Savannah State University. Along the way, she fell into beekeeping as a way to address a chronic illness. Since then it’s also led to a business, a push to make Savannah a “Bee City USA,” and a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution.
“Like a honey bee, I like to continue to build and build up,” she said.
Connecting beehives and foster kids
Growing up in Chicago, moving from house to house in the foster care system, Shofidiya wasn’t into bees.
It was illness that hit her as a young adult that led her to beekeeping. While an intern at the World Trade Center Savannah, Shofidiya developed lymphedema, a chronic condition that causes painful swelling of the arms and legs, as well as thickening of the skin.
She became focused on lifestyle changes that could help alleviate her symptoms. “I started making a lot of my own skin cure products, and I was getting beeswax from a local beekeeper,” she said.
The beeswax-based products helped, but were pricey and not always of dependable quality, especially if she ordered online.
“So I thought, ‘how complicated would it be to start beekeeping? I can’t find this, so I’ll just do it myself,’” Shofidiya recalled. “Yes, I’ll have a limitless supply of beeswax, right?”
As she explored the possibility of becoming a beekeeper she contacted a World Trade Center Savannah partner, the Savannah Bee Company, a multi-million dollar Savannah-based company that operates 16 specialty honey shops around the country, including in Savannah and St. Simons. Shofidiya met with founder and CEO Ted Dennard, himself a beekeeper who taught the skill as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica.
“I was interested in their products too. Like wanting to know how was it processed, how is it made? Because I’m like, okay, maybe I can use your products to help me,” she recalled. “And I was also exploring getting into beekeeping at that time, and so I learned about the significance and the importance of bees, and we had a conversation about that.”
Dennard, who has continued to collaborate with Shofidiya on bee-related projects, recalls his first impression of her as “super smart and a “go-getter.”
Shofidiya combined her growing interest in honey bees with empathy for foster children that grew from her own experience.
“I grew up in foster care and a food insecure environment in Chicago,” Shofidiya said. “And I wanted to do something to address hunger and wanted to do something for foster children. They’re often overlooked and neglected, because that’s why they’re in foster care. And how that came together was Foster Beelief.”
That small volunteer effort of mostly Savannah State students is now on hiatus, but at its height educated foster kids about honey bees, organizing camps and care packages of bee-related products.
Bee business
Shofidiya slowly got into hands-on beekeeping, learning from others before getting her own hives and becoming a certified beekeeper. She maintained hives at the Coastal Empire Beekeepers Association’s apiary at the Oatland Island Wildlife Center in Savannah.
As a young Black woman, Shofidiya is not the typical face of beekeeping. From hobbyists to professionals, most beekeepers are men, reports Bee Culture magazine. Professional beekeepers also skew white, Career Explorer notes.
Beekeepers are taught that bees can be hostile toward the color black because it’s associated with predators like bears and skunks. “I don’t know how I feel about that,” Shofidiya said wryly, noting that she rarely gets stung.
As for the age question, in Shofidiya’s experience, she’s at least two decades younger than most beekeepers she meets.
“So the running joke I often hear is ‘you need to find some friends your own age,’” she said.
In 2021 she incorporated her business under the name BEEnevolent. Her logo is a bee named Flora who sports an afro. The LLC has grown to offer a variety of services and products, including beekeeping, teaching beekeeping and removing nuisance beehives.
Savannah Mayor Van Johnson met with Shofidiya in 2023 at a COVID-delayed World Trade Center Savannah conference in Accra, Ghana where Shofidiya presented about Foster Beelief and honey bee-related economic opportunities. Johnson remembered BEEnevolent just in time after he discovered a bee colony buzzing in the wall of a rental house he owns.
“My thing was, I was gonna get a torch, you know, and blow them all up. She’s like, ‘You know, you don’t want to do that,’” Johnson said.
His rental house bees are now installed at the apiary at the Tatemville Neighborhood Center where they pollinate the nearby community garden.
In her beekeeping career so far she’s revised and expanded a beehive inspection sheet to help keepers better record threats like pesticides, herbicides and medications that weren’t on the scene in the 1800s when the traditional inspection practices were first instituted.
Beekeepers are notorious for storing their notes in their heads or writing notes on whatever is handy.
“A lot of beekeepers, they keep records by just writing notes on the (hive) lid,” she said. That’s worrisome with bee numbers in decline.
“We can’t precisely say what’s causing the plight of honey bees, because we don’t have good records,” she said.
Shofidiya’s also developing an internet-connected “bee hotel” – a small structure that bundles hollow plant stems to give solitary bees a resting spot – that would automatically photograph and identify the hotel guests.
Dennard quickly raised his hand to order a prototype bee hotel for the pollinator garden at Savannah Bee Company’s warehouse in Savannah.
“She’s way more into apps and technology, which I don’t really get at all,” he said.
Beenevolent recently expanded to offer a honey-infused bottled drink called Neighborhood Nectar’s Golden Glow Elixir that debuted at the Great American Farmers Market on the National Mall in August. At her booth, Shofidiya met U.S. Secretary of Housing & Urban Development Scott Turner and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who gave Neighborhood Nectar a shout out on X.
Her Golden Glow Elixir is a mixture of water, honey and flavorings including hibiscus inspired by a drink called Zobo from Nigeria, where Shofidiya has family roots. She mixed up a small batch one evening in the southside Savannah kitchen space she rents from a restaurant that opens only for breakfast and lunch. Shofidiya is picky about the drink’s ingredients, using fresh-squeezed lemon juice, her own honey and locally-sourced herbs when possible.
“Everyone can try to make their own Golden Glow Elixir at home but our ingredients are different, so it will not taste the same,” she said as she steeped her brew, “And I sprinkle in good vibes and love.”
Savannah, Bee City USA
In December, Savannah City Council voted to become a Bee City USA, and in June the city was designated the program’s 227th American city to become an affiliate.
Shofidiya got the ball rolling locally on the program, an initiative of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in response to declining populations of honey bees and other pollinators. She contacted the city’s sustainability department several years ago and pushed the city to pursue the status, which offers cities a framework to improve pollinator habitat through native plantings, pesticide reduction, and community engagement.
The resulting Bee City Savannah committee is a hybrid of city and private partners including Laura Walker, the environmental administrator with the city’s stormwater department; and the Savannah Bee Company’s Dennard.
Walker praised Shofidiya’s collaborative spirit.
“She actually put in extra work and proved that it could be done by researching what other cities had done,” Walker said. “She also pulled in people from the community that could help boost it up and get it done.”
Not content with just a designation, Shofidiya led the group to sponsor a Pollinator Pallooza, a week of activities in June, including educational workshops, garden installations, and pollinator-inspired menus at local restaurants.
The work continues with bimonthly meetings of the Savannah Pollinator Preservation Committee, headed up by Shofidiya, who volunteers her time. The group is looking at ways to increase the number of pollinator friendly gardens on city-owned property and already planning the 2026 pollinator festival.
The city’s bureaucracy can be daunting, Walker allowed. But Shofidiya keeps at it.
“We’re learning together,” Walker said. “And so sometimes that can be frustrating, and I feel like maybe she’s just done. And then a couple days later, I’ll hear from her, and she’s gone and touched base with five other cities on their management practices for their insecticides and herbicides, like an email I got from her the other day.”
Shofidiya is far from done.
Now she’s in her second month of a Community and Environment Fellowship with the Smithsonian Institution, conducting independent research that explores how people and nature can thrive together. Her study site is Millen in Jenkins County, just north of Statesboro.
“It’s really looking at the intersection of pollinator scarcity – I didn’t really see any pollinators there – and food deserts and African American communities,” Shofidiya said.
She’ll be enlisting community members to use their phones to capture images of insects they see and then those images will be identified by matching them against a pollination digitization project being developed at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.
“Community members will help ensure these solutions are culturally relevant and practical,” the project’s research description concludes.
Ultimately, she’ll use the findings to develop recommendations to support pollinators in these regions, such as beekeeping initiatives, pollinator habitat restoration, and sustainable farming practices to reduce pesticide use.
Shofidiya said she strives to center pollinator health as a key environmental justice issue.
“It’s something we don’t think about,” she said. “Food sovereignty, food security, climate change are very real. They’ve always been at the forefront of environmental justice. Clean air, clean water are also very important. But will we have any life without food? Will we have any life without bees?”
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