July 16th, 2025 • By Caroline Reitmeyer
5 Minute Read
Creating Buzz: Inside Greener Golf’s Bee Collective
Golf courses are often seen only as recreational spaces, but they also make up a significant footprint of managed green space across many regions. With millions of acres dedicated to golf worldwide, these landscapes offer a surprising opportunity to support pollinators in meaningful and measurable ways, many of which still remain untapped.
On an average 150-acre course, roughly 95 acres are maintained as turfgrass. That leaves around 55 acres of land that can be transformed into high-quality pollinator habitat without interfering with play. By planting native wildflowers, reducing chemical inputs, and managing land with biodiversity in mind, golf courses can offer food, shelter, and nesting grounds for bees, butterflies, and other beneficial species. These changes not only support pollinators and overall ecological health, but also improve community and operational performance, reducing long-term maintenance costs, and create educational opportunities for golfers and surrounding communities.
Looking forward, golf courses should serve as a vital conservation tool for protecting, promoting, and propagating pollinator populations across the globe. This idea was the focus of a research project out of the University of Michigan, which examined how multifunctional pollinator habitats can be intentionally designed and integrated into golf course landscapes to support pollinator health, biodiversity, and long-term landscape resilience. With thoughtful planning and intentional design, golf courses can do more than host the game, they can help protect the species and ecosystems that make the game possible.
Greener Golf’s Bee Collective
The Greener Golf Bee Collective is an initiative designed to help golf courses become active stewards of pollinator health through on-site habitat creation, ethical beekeeping, and ecologically aligned land management. Rather than treating bees as pests or passive bystanders, the Bee Collective integrates them into the course’s identity, turning underutilized areas into vibrant pollinator zones, supporting native species, and promoting awareness among golfers and community members. Participating in the Bee Collective means joining a growing network of golf courses working to restore biodiversity, foster ecological resilience, and tell a more sustainable story through golf.
Participation in the Bee Collective is more than just installing hives, it is a commitment to thoughtful land management, ecological responsibility, and community connection. Here are the key principles we implement together with our partner courses:
Caring for Pollinators: A Gateway for Sustainability
Mindful Chemical Application: Our team works closely with superintendents to assess current turf management practices and suggest safer, pollinator-friendly alternatives. We prioritize products with low environmental impact quotients (EIQ) and provide guidance on timing applications to avoid peak foraging periods. This reduces the risk of harming pollinators and helps maintain a balanced ecosystem on and around the greens.
Reduction of Water Use and Expansion of Native Habitat: Through habitat mapping and turf usage analysis, Greener Golf identifies underutilized areas of the course that can be converted into pollinator havens. We assist in planting native wildflowers and bee-friendly vegetation, not only reducing irrigation needs but also transforming the course into a vibrant, ecologically diverse landscape.
Humane Treatment and Relocation of Honey Bees: Our expert beekeepers are trained to humanely capture and relocate swarms without the use of harmful pesticides. This ensures bees remain a protected and respected part of the golf course ecosystem and never treated as pests.
Adherence to Best Management Practices: We align our services with the best management practices outlined by the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA). Our beekeeping protocols complement these standards, creating a framework for long-term pollinator health and responsible land management.
Sustainable Honey Extraction: Honey harvesting from our on-course hives is done with care. We only extract when bees have created a surplus, ensuring they retain enough to thrive through periods of low forage, resulting in delicious, sustainable honey while maintaining healthy, resilient hives.
Community Engagement and Education: Every hive we manage is also a learning opportunity. From signage on the course to community workshops and member tastings, we help courses share their pollinator story. When golfers see the bees and understand their role, they begin to view the course not just as a playing field, but as a living ecosystem worth protecting.
Caring for bees may seem like a niche environmental effort, but on golf courses, it often becomes the gateway to something much larger. When a course introduces an apiary or pollinator-friendly practices through Greener Golf’s Bee Collective, it sparks curiosity, dialogue, and ultimately, a broader awareness of the course’s environmental footprint. In this way, pollinator care acts as a gateway: a small, accessible step that paves the way for more transformative sustainability practices.
At first, the motivation might be aesthetic or educational: a desire to have bees on-site, produce local honey, or enhance the course’s image as eco-friendly. But as superintendents and staff engage with the bees, they begin to ask deeper questions. How are our chemical applications affecting the hive? What’s the condition of the habitat around the fairways? Could we convert that unused rough into wildflower space? These questions naturally lead to action.
Our collective helps to foster a mindset shift from managing turf against nature for pristine fairways to managing a course within a living ecosystem. In short, bees are the catalyst. What starts as a commitment to pollinators becomes a broader transformation in how the land is viewed, valued, and cared for. Greener Golf provides long-term support, data insights, and habitat improvement strategies because we know that once a course starts down the path of pollinator stewardship, they are often inspired to go further. Sustainability becomes not just a box to check, but a guiding philosophy. And it all starts with the pollinators.
With roughly 350,000 pollinator species around the world, pollinators are keystone species in nearly every ecosystem. With approximately 87.5% of the world's flowering plants and 35% of the global food crops relying on animal pollination, pollinators rank among the most ecologically and economically important group of animals on Earth. This equates to one in every three bites of food being dependent on animal pollination. Pollinators contribute over $34 billion each year to U.S. crop production, underscoring their essential role in sustaining agriculture and supporting the diversity of foods in our diet.
Yet despite the vital role they play in sustaining healthy and diverse ecosystems and our agriculture industry, pollinators across the globe are experiencing critical declines due to increasing environmental pressures such as habitat loss, disease, climate change, and excessive use of toxic pesticides. Addressing this crisis will require creative, coordinated action across industries and landscapes to ensure pollinators and the essential services they provide can thrive into the future. Surprisingly, some of the best opportunities to protect pollinators may be found in the last place most people would expect: golf courses.