“I am a business owner of both a pizza shop  and as a bee keeper with Shady Nook Bee Farms. Our bees are located in Harvey’s Lake of Northeastern Pa. My boyfriend Eric and I got our first 2 hives of bees about 6 years ago and I have been hooked ever since. I keep bees because I love them and the magic that they carry. They never cease to amazing me. They are spectacular creatures that teach me something new every time I am with the hives. When I am working with them, time seems to slip away. It becomes a meditation of sorts. After about a years of keeping bees, I started sourcing wax and honey from my hives to make cold press soaps. I love this almost as much as I love working with the bees themselves. I use organic ingredients in my recipes (with the exception of a few essential oils) and I keep the ingredient list short. I never use harsh chemicals, fragrances or preservatives. I think it is important to know what you are putting on your body and it should be good for you! My line of products has slowly expanded to include body bars, face bars, shampoo bars (for both dogs and people), shave soaps and kits, loofah soap and sea sponge soap. I think I enjoy it so much because I am creating something that I truly love and I am adding wax and honey from my precious bees in all the recipes.

I am a treatment-free bee keeper. (I do not use any chemical treatments to control disease or mites in the hives.) This is a controversial subject in itself and challenging to say the least. From the beginning it has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride. Some years we lose nearly all of our bees but we are in the process of working to build a solid foundation of treatment free stock. I try to take what I learn from the bees to better the way that I am keeping them. Above all, when something isn’t going as planned I try to remember to take a step back and pay attention to what the bees are doing. They are the real teachers.

It is very rewarding for people to respect what I do and to recognize how important honeybees are to our planet, but I think it’s extra rewarding when people realize that most of these problems (if not all) stem from what is happening to our agricultural world. We are destroying our planet and creating unnatural situations for our entire ecosystem. So, to help in any tiny way by keeping our bees (treatment free) and to have people understand what is really happening, is a huge benefit to everything that we are doing.

You can find me on Facebook at Shady Nook Bee Farms and on Instagram at shadynookbeefarms. I also sell soaps at local markets. If you are not local, you can check out our Etsy shop at hhtps:/www.etsy.com/shop/ShadyNookBeeFarm?ref=hdr

“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”~ Henry David Thoreau”