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by Crystal Clear Photography
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by Crystal Clear Photography
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by Crystal Clear Photography
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by Crystal Clear Photography
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by Crystal Clear Photography
As she approaches the hive, Ryann Showmaker does everything she can to slow her breathing. She is inches away from a colony of roughly 5,000 bees, and every one of them can smell anxiety. Luckily, Showmaker is something of a breathing expert: As a yoga instructor, the 27-year-old makes her living teaching others the art of relaxation. This comes in handy on days like today when Showmaker is hard at work on her side hustle: bees.
Specifically, Showmaker sells honey out of her yoga studio, Chameleon Yoga, in Fort Worth. The honey comes from her bee yard, a multiacre property occupied by the thousands of insects that Showmaker has saved in the last two years.
Her goal is to create a bee sanctuary, and judging by the 600-acre bee yard 15 minutes from the heart of Fort Worth, Showmaker is well on her way. She knows what she’s up against: A third of the world’s food depends on pollination, and the rapidly dwindling bee population is the No. 1 source of pollination. According to Time and a study by Yale University, more than 700 North American bee species are on pace for extinction, and the colony collapse of winter bees hit an all-time high in 2018. Simply put, the bees are in trouble, and Showmaker wants to save them.
In 2018, the bold Fort Worth yoga instructor decided to become a beekeeper — a career move that is not as random as it might sound.
Her yoga career led to a passion for ayurvedic medicine. One of the oldest systems of medicine in the world, ayurvedic medicine values the healing powers of honey. The more she learned about honey, the more Showmaker learned to love bees. This, in turn, led her to this moment: Donned in full beekeeper regalia, tasked with removing a colony, approaching a swath of bees that would strike fear into the heart of, well, almost everyone else.
“You can’t go into a situation like that stressed,” says her friend, Ben Bradley, who works in pest control. “If you do, the bees will mark you with a pheromone that says you’re a threat. Then they’ll swarm.”
Showmaker didn’t think about any of this as she approached the colony. She closed her eyes, did everything she could to relax, then reached out.
Showmaker grew up in Fort Worth. As a student at Arlington Heights, she played soccer and loved to swim. She considered herself a “pretty intense wakeboarder” at one time. In between all of these sports, she yearned to leave Fort Worth.
“I was one of those high school kids who wanted to be as far from home as possible,” she says.
Her senior year, Showmaker broke her orbital bone and cheekbone while wakeboarding. Suddenly, she had to find another outlet to channel all of her frenetic energy. She had tried yoga before; but in college, Showmaker began to fall head over heels for the ancient Indian practice that preaches physical, mental, and spiritual balance.
“Once I started getting into yoga, I realized it was therapy,” she says. “It helps your mind, body, and soul.”
Her college career began at The University of Alabama, but in 2011, an F5 tornado tore through Tuscaloosa. Showmaker calls the incident “traumatic,” and it spurred a move back to Texas.
“I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to go all the way home,” she says. “So, I went to Austin.”
She gave college another try, this time at Texas State, but the allure of yoga was too powerful. She yearned to know herself and to help others know themselves, too. So, at 21, Showmaker enrolled in a 200-hour yoga teacher training program.
When she talks about yoga, Showmaker is effusive. It’s clear the practice has given her health and balance, yet it’s not her health she is eager to discuss — it’s the health of her students. She loves helping people find calm, even if they’re not facing down swaths of bees.
“I’ve always wanted to help the world in some way, and I figured out my way was yoga,” she says. She didn’t want to do it in Austin, which she calls “a big pond” for yoga professionals. Instead, she returned home.
“I wanted to put down roots,” Showmaker says. Chameleon Yoga was born.
Chameleon Yoga occupies a cozy corner off Camp Bowie Boulevard. It has the signature trappings of a classic yoga studio, but there’s one twist: the honey.
Shortly after opening her studio doors, Showmaker decided to become a beekeeper. The choice raised many eyebrows and prompted several questions, but Showmaker was happy to educate others.
“Without bees, our food source would suffer greatly, and in turn, we will suffer,” she says. In other words, her career move was as much of an imperative as it was a choice. She cares about the Earth — and about its humans — and wants to do her part to help. Plus, she explains, honey is a potent antiviral and antibacterial, the exact kind of product she wants to supply to patrons at Chameleon Yoga.
The honey Showmaker sells comes from her bee yard, a wildflower-dotted swath of land that grows a little bit every time she removes a colony from a house or shed. She is careful about how much honey she takes from these bees because, as she puts it, “if you’re a good beekeeper, you don’t extract honey more than twice a year.”
Showmaker shares her love of bees with Ben Bradley, a local pest controller and childhood friend. When Bradley found out his old friend was beekeeping, the duo teamed up to rescue bees together.
“People call me all the time and ask me to come kill bees for them,” Bradley says. “My first question is always, ‘Did you know there’s another way?’”
The first time the pair went on a removal trip, Showmaker did everything she could to slow her breathing and rid her mind of any anxiety. By this point, she had heard all about how bees could smell anxiety, and she had no desire to get stung. As it turns out, yoga experience comes in handy when removing bees.
“She was a natural,” Bradley says.
Showmaker reached out, carefully removed the colony, and slid it into a box in her Jeep. She then made the 45-minute drive back to her growing sanctuary, all while clothed in full beekeeper garb.
“I know that was probably illegal,” she says, “but, hey, if six of those bees escaped, that would’ve been bad. I’m driving, after all.”
Not all of the bee removal excursions have been as smooth. Showmaker has gotten stung as many as 15 times in one day, and her beekeeping suit offers slim protection. For that reason, she is judicious about who she invites to her bee yard. Her boyfriend, Danny Cunningham, is one of the few people who has seen it.
“The first time I was there, I remember her turning to me and saying, ‘You should probably get out of here as slowly as you can,’” Cunningham says. “It turns out there were thousands of bees on my suit, and I didn’t even see them.”
Showmaker knows how terrifying that sounds. She also knows beekeeping is not for everyone. Still, she insists there are simple things each of us can do to curb the impending bee extinction.
We can plant more flowers, she says, specifically lilacs, honeysuckles, and sunflowers. These flowers produce a lot of honey for the bees, which in turn creates nectar, which bees need to survive. We can also think twice about killing bees, as terrifying as they might seem.
“The best advice I can give is this: just relax,” Bradley says. “That bee that is scaring you knows that stinging you will cost him his life, so he’s not going to do that unless he is threatened.”
And the next time you find a colony in your backyard, you can call Showmaker.
“I love what I do,” she says. “I think I’m helping people and the planet. I’m excited to wake up each day, teach yoga, then go see my bees.”