About Us
Our Story
The idea of BeeFoster was born in the pawpaw grove of RockSpan Farm. Pawpaws are a native, tropical-tasting fruit with specific pollination needs. With no pollinators around to help the trees bear fruit, we found ourselves painstakingly pollinating each bloom by hand. We asked ourselves, shouldn't bees be doing this? Where were they?
Realizing that our situation is far from unique, we decided to do our part to help support pollinators worldwide. We read that mason bee hotels were rising in popularity despite the fact that most of them were poorly-designed and deadly. The world needed a better solution.
Why not leave it up to a scrappy father-daughter team from the Ozarks to find it?
We came up with the Beestra: a new kind of bee hotel that allows anyone to take charge of their own pollinator situation.
We still have to pollinate the pawpaws by hand, by the way. Turns out they need flies, not bees, and there's not much of a market for fly hotels. Go figure.
Rockspan Farm
We’re a family tree farm on a hilltop in the Ozark Mountains, right outside Springfield, Missouri. We manage native trees, orchards, gardens and native plant beds. Pollinators are critical to our success and we developed BeeFoster for our own use. It turns out everyone has the same problem: the pollinators are dying and that’s a catastrophe in the making. On our Rockspan Farm website, you’ll see how we’re working to restore degraded soils and restore riparian corridors that run alongside our section of the spring-fed Sac River. We’re putting in large pollinator plots, restoring old farm ponds, establishing silviculture stands and using bio-char to restore soils without over-fertilizing. We’re planting large stands of native bald cypress which have lifespans of up to 1800 years. So, we’re in this for the long haul and we hope you are too.
To the right is Mysterious Building 137, home of BeeFoster Operations on RockSpan Farm
Meet the Founders
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Ames Chiles
With a background in biology research and a deep love of nature, Ames was eager to lend her scientific perspective to the fight to save pollinators. Since founding BeeFoster with her father Dan, she has earned a patent and a spot in the Missouri Association of Manufacturers.
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Dan Chiles
Dan has worn many hats in his life: inventor, outdoorsman, environmental activist, steward of the land, political muckraker, philosopher, writer of inflammatory editorials. Now that he's retired he's busier than ever. Check out some of his projects at the RockSpan Farm website.
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Bingo Chiles
Resident farm dog Bingo is our Chief Motivational Officer and he takes his job very seriously. When he's not bringing joy to all at BeeFoster, he enjoys chasing squirrels, stealing cat food, and being extremely handsome. He even has his own Instagram account so fans can follow his antics.
