Four and a half years ago, we started with two packages of bees, a couple of empty hive boxes, and a whole lot of hope. Neither of us knew exactly what we were doing, we just knew we wanted to try! That first season turned out to be unprecedented: 32 pounds of honey from an operation that barely existed a few months earlier. We were hooked…

From there, things grew steadily, season after season. We added hives, learned from our mistakes, and got better at listening to what the bees were telling us. This year, we reached our largest operation yet: 15 hives spread across our property, each one a small, humming world of its own.

Much of that growth we owe to Hives for Heroes, a mentorship program that paired us with experienced beekeepers willing to share their knowledge and time. We're deeply grateful for that guidance, it saved us from countless mistakes, gave us confidence when we needed it most, and connected us to a community of people who genuinely wanted to see us succeed. We're proud to still be part of that program today, learning and growing right alongside the mentorship it offers.

But beekeeping has a way of humbling you. This past summer, we fought a long, exhausting battle against black bears determined to raid our hives. Despite fences, deterrents, and more sleepless nights than we'd like to admit, we lost ground. We're now down to 9 hives. It stung (pun intended), but it also taught us more about resilience, adaptation, and protecting what we've built than any smooth season ever could.

Through it all, one thing hasn't changed: we do this ourselves, start to finish. We tend every hive by hand, harvest and extract our own honey, and bottle it right here at home. Nothing is outsourced, nothing is mass-produced. When you pick up a jar of our honey, you're getting a small batch that reflects this exact place, this exact season, and everything our bees (and we) went through to make it.

We sell locally because we believe good honey should stay close to where it's made. Thank you for supporting a small, hands-on operation that's still learning, still growing, and still showing up for our bees every single day.

Honey isn't the only thing our bees give us. We also harvest and process our own beeswax. While we sell blocks of beeswax, we also turn it into pure, clean-burning candles right here at home. Nothing added, nothing synthetic — just wax the way our bees made it.

One of our favorite things to make (and share) is our birthday candle gift set, a small, meaningful way to celebrate a birthday with something handmade and a little different from the usual. It's become a bit of a signature item for us, and we love the reaction it gets every time.