Tehya Shea - Installation Artist and Weaver, California
Working with Ariella has been a deeply empowering and refreshing experience. The way that she relates to bees is woven in with our own personal work and becomes about not only an honoring of the hive as a whole, but an honoring of ourselves as well. Ariella has dedicated her heart and many years of her life to working with bees and it shows in the way that she shares this knowledge as well as in the way that she works with the hive. Beekeeping is so needed right now, and I couldn’t recommend her more highly as a solid, steady presence in supporting each of us to find our own way in honoring and working with bees.
Hive Style: Top Bar Hive
Megan McCollam - Polly's Paladar Supper Club, California
Ariella helped me with my first hive. She brought my bees all the way out to me, described the process thoroughly, and aided me throughout installation. Her calming effect was felt, not only by me, I am sure, but to the honeybees too. I have a thriving hive that made it through summer and its first winter. She gave me the confidence to walk the path of a beekeeper with a different stride than I had originally imagined. One of tenderness and devotion. I spend my first year as a beekeeper deeply entranced by the power of the beehive and I can attribute that to the sweet beginning that my hive was able to have thanks to Ariella.
Hive Style: Top Bar Hive
Ali Pinion Bee Guardian, Ceremonial Priestess & Candle Artisan
I have been a bee guardian for almost 4 years, and when Ariella opened up her Womens' Beekeeping Apprenticeship I was excited to sign up. I believe that we are beginning beekeepers at least for the first 10 years, though bees will continue to teach us through a lifetime, and I have learned and grown so much through her course. She provides so many wonderful resources, instructional videos, and one on one consultations. My favorite part of the apprenticeship has been our monthly meetings as well as our private chat group. I have met and connected with so many amazing women, and learned so much from interacting with them and their questions. Each week, if we feel called, we are encouraged to sit with the land and dream with our bees. So many potent messages and healing experiences have come through for me during these sessions. I have found that my relationship and connection to the bees and land has grown so much deeper with her guidance. 2020 has been a heavy year for me, and it has been so very healing to be able to work in sacred space with her and the amazing group of women in the apprenticeship. I highly recommend taking part in this group whether you are trying to decide if you would like to work with bees or if you have been keeping bees for years. There is so much to learn, and Ariella helps you facilitate the most beautiful relationship with the land and its creatures. She provides you with many wonderful readings and resources, but she encourages you to find your own connection and relationship to the land. I have the utmost respect for and appreciate this style of teaching, which helps you develop your own divining skills with your surroundings.
My experience with the online beekeeping apprenticeship can be best described as a beautiful mixing of the magical and the mundane and how the perceived distance between the two is not vast, but interchangeable. The time I have spent participating in this experience has helped me deepen in my ability to not only trust what I am hearing, perceiving and dreaming with the bees but to bring these more etheric threads into the everyday, weaving a web of the quotidian mystery.
For example, early in the beginning of the course I had a dream that I gave birth to a swarm of bees. The texture of this dream felt like an invitation of what was to come. If not for this course I wouldn’t have felt equipped to hold onto this dream thread and to follow its weave. However, because the course supported the wisdom of dreams AND went in depth with preparations such as different hive styles, how to actually gather a swarm and the equipment needed, I was able to prepare in the physical for what I received in the dream time. I felt prepared and excited and lo and behold, I gathered my first swarm and have been developing in relationship with them since May!
Jessica P, mama of two punks, artist & dream worker
For me the experience of Dreaming with the Bees was to be literally taken within the warmth and comfort of the hive. Ariella is a skilled facilitator who gracefully moves between sharing expansive ancient wisdom and weaving a communal space to work with dreams. I made contact with the bees through her class and have continued to communicate with them through my dreams. I learned a tremendous amount about dream mirroring through communal practice. I cannot recommend her highly enough.
Gretchen
The Women's Beekeeping Apprenticeship changed my life in many ways: I was introduced to an incredible group of new friends, developed a meaningful relationship with the bees, deepened my relationship with nature, and learned about my own capacity for healing and connection with the land and beings all around me. Ariella is a brilliant and inspiring teacher. She has a deep grasp of folklore, the pollen ways, beekeeping, and history. She has the ability to create a safe, ceremonial, and meaningful learning environment for her students both in-person and online. Each apprenticeship weekend felt like I had crossed a portal into a timeless space for learning and connection with the bees and my classmates.
Kate D., Ohio
I am grateful for every class I have taken with Ariella, and even more grateful to her as a teacher and mentor. Ariella is welcoming, kind, engaging, sensitive, inspiring, and generous with her wisdom and knowledge about beekeeping, dreamwork, and history. I have learned so much from her beekeeping classes, from the foundational techniques and knowledge to the more detailed aspects of natural beekeeping, as well as dreamwork and seasonal practices to feel connected not only to myself, but to the earth in a deep and meaningful remembering. In every class, I have felt seen and heard, as Ariella holds space for each person, perspective, and experience within the whole.
Breanna, Washington
Ariella's dreamwork courses are magical and empowering. This is truly the best way to describe them! I am so grateful for Ariella's ability to hold space for everyone just as they are, and for her gift in acting as guide into the realm of mystery and inner knowing. Each class session has filled my heart with soul poetry. This healing balm has been an incredible treasure that's continued to unfold in my waking life, as well as in the dreamtime. Within these courses, I have learned so much about herstory, symbolism, myth and magic, in addition to our responsibility of being in relationship with the earth and our fellow creatures. I have also learned a great deal about how to tune into my own place of intuition and how to trust myself. Thank you so much for setting a beautiful example with your authentic and genuine expression of this work!
Valentine Lovecraft Falcon, Artist/Healer, California
I have been blessed to live with a secret grove, apple orchards and walk amongst candelabra mullein giants. Spaces that hold secrets,medicine,mythology, poetry, and reconnects one with infinite beauty and their place in the ecology of earth's cosmos.They hold a poetic resonant balm, that both calls you in and knows your soul.
The work of Ariella holds such a FORCE. She is clearly an EYE, an anchor of manifestation, the voice of Mystery & the Goddess, a keeper and steward of the INVISIBLE and visible realms. To participate in the ceremony of her offerings is to cross a star lit bridge into the Dreams of The Great Mystery and to once again commune with them in and out of time.
These women are space keepers, they hold the keys to an array of doors welcoming you in. Wild at times and wonderfully soothing at others your journey will offer transformation and an exquisite peep behind the veil.
I went with my daughter to Sol Henge in France in the summer of 2018 it was without doubt one of the most precious times i have had with her. The venue for the retreat is absolutely spectacular, the nature is liberating and will take your breath away. Just the memories fill my heart with gratitude, Thankyou so much Gina and Ariella for such a golden time.
Amanda, England (France Retreat 2018)