Love A Bee: The Roots

From a very young age, bees and honey have been a source of fascination for me.  As a child growing up in South Carolina, honey was everything – my favorite ingredient and my favorite word. It seemed to make everything better. A cough –  honey. A teething baby–honey and a tiny bit of Bourbon. Cataracts – honey. A wound that wouldn’t heal – honey. Honey on cornbread, honey on biscuits. Honey in sweet tea. 

I was also a little fearful of bees —  I knew enough to know the danger beekeepers endured when they harvested honey. I figured they had to be some of the bravest folks out there. I wanted to get to know them and be a little like them — but this was a dream that had to go into abeyance as I moved into adulthood. It was only after 8 years working as a freelance brand strategist and graphic designer in New York, that I was ready to return to bees, beekeeping, and honey, fortunately, in a more strategic way.

I was accepted into the MBA Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts, a program where students design their careers ‘while learning to lead complex solutions for twenty-first-century challenges.’

That’s how Love A Bee was born, in June of 2013. 

At the start of the DMBA program, some fellow students and I traveled all over California to find answers to a problem that was becoming increasingly urgent: why were bee colonies dying out in such large numbers?

• We heard about CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder), which is essentially, poor nutrition, varroa mites, over pollinating and getting trucked across the country and “cross pollinating” with other bees from all over. Naturally, cross pollination with other bees means that keeping disease from spreading is next to impossible. 

• Up until that time, pollination was the main source of income for commercial beekeepers and honey was a mere by-product (and almost an annoyance). Honey, the most pure and heathy thing that nature produces, made completely of flower nectar??!! 

• Further, most beekeepers were, and still are, older white males. In most cases their children had moved away, and did’t want to come home to take over the family business; beekeeping is a labor of love, and hardly lucrative.

In a nutshell: commercial beekeeping practices were resulting in unhealthy bees, honey was a mere by-product, and beekeepers were, literally, dying out.

The question is: how to address this problem?

After meeting many beekeepers, scientists, educators and testing the market for ourselves, it became clear that yes, honey was undervalued. No, honey should not be a commodity or by-product of any type. Bees would benefit from a diverse diet and beekeepers would benefit from shifting revenue streams from pollination to honey. They could put their hives in places that the bees loved and not truck them all over the place or mix them up in a yard full of other bees.

Forage diversity is key to bee resilience. For example, when bees forage on almonds and nothing else, that’s very little different from you or I eating beige fast food every day for days on end. 

You can easily see when things are going well: a hive frame with lots of color indicates that the bees are bringing in a lot of different pollens, that they’re likely to be healthier and that the honey will be complex and unique.

That’s why through Love A Bee, I have spent the past 10 years advocating for bees, advocating for diversity, marketing the diversity in unique taste profiles of each honey AND making sure that each and every person at a farmer’s market, school, university or potential vendor know why honey is expensive and why it should be. 

As bees are essential to producing a substantial part of our food supply, the health of the bee population and the human population are inextricably linked. 

Join me in making a difference — Love A Bee’s  raw, unprocessed honey is more than a purchase, it’s also a strategic investment in the US food supply! Treat yourself to the taste of our unique honeys, and take advantage of our gift boxes to add to the lives of your family and friends.