Half a million bees are buzzing in a southwestern Ontario farm to offer visitors a way to help them relax and reduce stress.
Inside a small hut on Diana Graham’s 28-hectare Comber-area farm, where she runs Bees and Bloom Wellness, four beehives are underneath each of two wooden beds, with screens separating the insects from clients who lie over them to experience bee bed therapy.
Graham and others who offer the therapy say it can be beneficial in reducing anxiety and stress.
But there’s still a dearth of scientific evidence around it.
Graham said sleeping while surrounded by bees is therapeutic, and her visitors have reported feeling “amazed” and “breathing better” after spending time in the presence of bee pheromones. She said it’s built perfectly safe, so the insects can’t sting her clients.
“The pheromones from the bees help with your immune system, lungs and their buzz, the frequencies, helps with anxiety, depression, PTSD, sleep disorders and overall health,” Graham told CBC News.
“Your anxiety will go down because the hum of these bees is absolutely amazing.”
The air inside the cabin is rich with honey and beeswax scents. Graham said it adds to the wellness.
There are a handful of such centres across Canada.
Visitors say time at bee farm helped them relax
Christine Brady of Petrolia, a town southeast of Sarnia, is among visitors to Graham’s farm who were contacted to talk about their experiences there.
Brady, who recently was at the farm with her mother and recommends the therapy, said she’s elated there’s a bee bed facility in Ontario.
Before she came across Graham’s far, Brady said, she could only find one in Italy.
“I just went there to kind of zone out and relax. It was just more for the vibration, the smell and the frequency of the bees,” she said.
“I probably got into an almost meditative trance. You kind of go into that mental zone where you’re aware, but you have kind of gone within.”
Annette Bourassa of Barrie, Ont., visited Graham’s farm a couple of weeks ago and plans to go again with her friends in the fall.
“It was incredible. I can see the benefits of doing it often. I wish I lived closer because I would probably go once a week to get this,” she said.
“The hum of the bees is so relaxing and therapeutic. I just felt very, very relaxed and soothed when I left. It was excellent…. While I was lying there, I wasn’t thinking about my stressors, or my clients or my deadlines.”
Bourassa said the experience was not claustrophobic and assured it’s safe, as people can also wear a protective jacket.
The cost for each 60-minute session, according to Graham’s website, is $85 for one person, $120 for two people, and $300 for a group of four to six people.
Bee bed buzz started in Ireland
Known as “the queen bee” to her friends, Graham inspects the hives, pulls frames with honey and checks in on the bees weekly to ensure they have space.
To set up the bee beds, Graham turned to Paul O’Neill in Ireland for guidance.
O’Neill and his partner, Anton Tovarnitskyi, a Ukrainian beekeeper and refugee, built Ireland’s first commercial bee bed houses on Valentia Island, drawing inspiration from bee beds in Ukraine.
“It’s very new and unique around the world,” O’Neill told CBC’s Windsor Morning. “It’s an old form of therapy and relaxation whereby you sit or lie on top of an active beehive.”
O’Neill said bee beds have become popular across Europe, and they have been approached by many people globally — including in the United States, Germany and Canada — to teach them how to build and manage their bee cabins. His facilities are frequented by tourists from around the world.
Amid more awareness and concern about the significance of bees, O’Neill said, the concept has been gaining traction.
“The concept of the bee beds relies around energy, microvibration, the sound of the bees and the air from the hive. It’s about this kind of connection with bees that is the key concept of why we do it.”
While Graham and O’Neill shared experiences of people feeling relaxed using the bee beds, there’s still little scientific evidence that this form of therapy helps with mental health issues.
Health Canada was contacted for comment on bee bed therapy, but the federal department declined to comment.
CBC Windsor also reached out to the Ontario Ministry of Health to ask questions including if bee bed therapy is a recognized therapy in the province, if certification is needed to practise it and if there’s any provincial health coverage.
An emailed response from a spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones said all insured services under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) are spelled out in the Health Insurance Act (HIA) and regulations, and bee bed therapy isn’t an insured service under OHIP.
Bee sound helps reduce anxiety levels: researcher
In Turkey, Yanki Tandircioglu, whose research is published in Apis, a scientific journal on honey bee-related sciences, has been looking into the effects of bee bed therapy on anxiety levels.
When she started digging into the topic, Tandircioglu said, “there was no scientific study” around bee bed therapy. While doing her master’s degree, she and her research partners designed an experiment to understand the impact of bee beds on anxiety levels.
She said two groups of participants, totalling 60 people, were chosen. One group was made to experience the bee beds, while the other group was just asked to listen to bee buzzing sounds. They filled out an anxiety questionnaire before and after the exposure, and their brain electrical activity was recorded with a portable electroencephalogram (EEG) device.
“So, we got significant results from both groups that we can say the buzzing sound affected people’s anxiety levels and it reduced it,” Tandircioglu said, referring to what was reported on the questionnaires.
But she also noted they could not “observe any significant change” in the brain activity based on EEG readings.
In her paper, she writes this study is “a first investigation” into the effects of bee beds on anxiety levels, laying the groundwork for further exploration in this area.
Since it’s still a relatively new field of research and there is no amassed scholarship around it, Tandircioglu said, she understands why bee bed therapy is still not mainstream.
The sound of the colony is different from a single bee buzzing, and the microvibrations and smell of the beehives, Tandircioglu said, add to the overall relaxing experience. She said the bee sound was found to be closer to pink noise, like waterfalls and rain, rather than white noise.
“Nature always heals, and so do the bees.”
