Spotlight: Sweet Bee Apiary — Mountain Honey with a Mission

Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Asheville, Sweet Bee Apiary manages over 200 hives across three counties. But for founder Maria Santos, the apiary is about more than honey. It is about protecting pollinators and building a sustainable local food economy.

We visited the apiary to see how they turn mountain wildflowers into some of the best raw honey in the Southeast.

How it started

Maria started with two hives in her backyard in 2009. "I was a gardener first," she says, standing under a red maple at the edge of her main bee yard. "I got bees to improve pollination. The honey was almost an afterthought."

The garden was a half-acre of mixed vegetables and a small berry patch behind a 1920s farmhouse outside Black Mountain. The bees did exactly what she hoped — yields jumped, the squash set fruit reliably for the first time in years — and within two seasons she was running eight hives. By 2014 she was selling honey at the West Asheville tailgate market on Saturdays. By 2018 the operation had grown enough that she left her job teaching middle-school science.

Seventeen years later, Sweet Bee is a full-time operation with a team of four: Maria, her partner Diego, a year-round apprentice (currently a former forestry student named Owen), and a part-time bookkeeper who works from home in Weaverville.

The yards

The 200-plus hives are distributed across three counties: Buncombe, Madison, and McDowell. The yards are positioned strategically — on properties whose surrounding flora produces the varietal honey Maria wants to harvest from each yard. A Madison County yard sits on a dairy farm whose pastures back up onto sourwood ridges. A McDowell yard is in a private cove surrounded by mature tulip poplars. The Buncombe yards are closer to home and more general; they produce the spring wildflower and the autumn goldenrod.

What they make

The apiary produces five varieties of honey, each reflecting the seasonal flora of the Blue Ridge.

Spring wildflower

Harvested in late May from the Buncombe yards. The bees pull from black locust, blackberry, tupelo, and a long list of understory wildflowers in the mixed-deciduous forest. Pale gold, bright, slightly floral. The most accessible of the five and the one Maria recommends to first-time customers.

Tulip poplar

Harvested in early June from the McDowell cove yard. Tulip poplar is one of the largest sources of nectar in the Southern Appalachians; the trees bloom in late spring with cup-shaped greenish-orange flowers most people never look up to notice. The honey is deep amber with a faint smoky-molasses finish — closer to a dark chestnut honey than to a standard wildflower.

Sourwood

The flagship. Sourwood honey is their flagship product. Harvested in July when the sourwood trees bloom on the higher ridges, it has a buttery, almost caramel-like flavor that has earned it a devoted following. The bloom is brief — usually 10 to 14 days — and weather-dependent. A wet July can collapse the entire harvest.

In a good year, Sweet Bee pulls roughly 800 to 1,200 pounds of sourwood. They typically sell out within weeks of harvest. Most years it ships out as soon as it is bottled, mostly to repeat customers on a notification list.

Goldenrod

Harvested in October from yards positioned near old hay fields and roadside meadows. Goldenrod is what bees turn to when summer is winding down and not much else is blooming. The honey is darker, grassier, and has a faint funky note in the comb that mellows out within a few weeks of bottling. Excellent on roasted root vegetables and stirred into strong tea.

Mountain blend

A limited-edition annual release. A blend of leftover frames from each varietal harvest, bottled in 8-ounce jars and released around Thanksgiving. Sold only on the apiary website and at two regional markets. The exact flavor profile changes year to year, which is the point.

For more on what makes one varietal honey different from another, our [complete buying guide to raw honey](https://brothh.com/blog/how-to-choose-raw-honey-a-complete-buying-guide) walks through the major varietals you are likely to find at any apiary.

Beyond honey

Maria treats the hive as a complete output, not a single-product operation. The apiary sells:

• Beeswax candles in three sizes — taper, pillar, and votive. All cap-wax from her own extractions, all 100 percent beeswax with cotton wicks. The bestseller is a 6-inch taper sold in pairs.
• Beeswax lip balm and salve in small batches, mixed with calendula and infused olive oil from a friend's farm in Marshall.
• Bee pollen harvested with pollen traps on a few selected hives during the spring flow. Sold in 4-ounce jars; popular with athletes and people working through allergies.
• Honeycomb in 1-pound trays during the summer months. Harvested directly from the supers without uncapping; the customer gets the cap, the cells, the honey, and the wax all at once.

For a deeper look at beeswax products specifically, our piece on [beeswax wraps and candles](https://brothh.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-beeswax-wraps-and-candles) covers what to look for in a candle made from real cap-wax.

Pollination services

Sweet Bee also offers pollination services to local farms — placing hives in orchards and berry fields during bloom season. The contracts are mostly with apple orchards in Henderson County and a few blueberry growers near Hendersonville. The honey produced during pollination contracts is set aside and sold separately as service yard honey rather than blended into a varietal jar.

The advocacy work

Maria is an outspoken advocate for pollinator health. She runs free workshops on bee-friendly gardening at local extension offices and at the Asheville Botanical Garden, and she donates a percentage of every sale to native pollinator habitat restoration through the Xerces Society.

Her message at the workshops is consistent and a little contrarian: most home gardeners are doing more for pollinators by planting native flowering shrubs (serviceberry, viburnum, native honeysuckle) than by buying a hive. Honeybees are not native to North America; the native pollinators — mason bees, leafcutter bees, bumblebees, hundreds of species of solitary bees — are the ones doing the heaviest pollination of native plants and many crops, and they are the ones in the most trouble.

"I love honeybees," Maria says. "They are not what is wrong with the ecosystem and they are not what is going to save it. The native bees are."

Where to find them

Sweet Bee sells through three channels:

• The apiary's own website, which ships nationwide.
• The West Asheville tailgate market, every Saturday, year-round.
• A short list of regional independent grocers and food co-ops in Asheville, Hendersonville, and Black Mountain.

The sourwood is reliably the first thing to sell out. Sign up for the email list in late spring to get the harvest notification.

"Every jar of honey is a vote for the kind of agriculture you want to see," Maria says. "When you buy from a local beekeeper, you are supporting the bees, the wildflowers, and the whole ecosystem that makes local food possible."

Ready to find a beekeeper near you? [Browse honey producers on Brothh](https://brothh.com/browse) or read our other [producer spotlight stories](https://brothh.com/blog) for more profiles like this one.