Pollen Pants

Tamara Carroll never thought beekeeping would become her business. Pollen Pants is a seven-minute documentary for TLC Bees, the San Antonio small business she owns and founded, told in her own words.

She started as a hobbyist with one hive and grew to 34. With only a few hives at first and years of drought, she wasn’t getting much honey, so she began leasing hives to people who needed bees on their property. In Texas, she explains, honeybees count as livestock, so keeping them can lower the property tax on 5- to 20-acre properties.

The film doesn’t hide how hard the work is: boxes that can weigh 50 pounds or more, summer inspections in a full bee suit when it can hit 100 to 105 degrees, and 40,000 to 60,000 bees around you. That’s why she counts on her beekeeping partner, who’s also her best friend. Bees rely on one another too, and she sees the same in people: we always need “somebody that we can trust and rely on.”

She loves teaching, especially answering kids’ questions, and she ends with a request: plant pollinator-friendly flowers and skip pesticides and herbicides. She calls herself “a conservationist like my dad.” A two-minute excerpt is also on our site.