“It was an amazingly intense connection,” explains Barnaby Draper of his first time watching bees zoom in and out of his Flow Hive, a type of beehive that allows you to harvest honey with minimal disturbance to the bees.
Draper and his partner, Ashley Farrell, quickly fell in love with beekeeping — the process, the mission, the honey. So they decided to open Santa Barbara Hives in Carpinteria to share this passion with the community, sourcing honey and beeswax from nearly 700 hives across Santa Barbara County. The retail shop sells all things bee, from wax, candles, soap, and jun (which is a type of kombucha with honey) to Flow Hives, “nucs” of bees, and hive maintenance tools, which could help you yield 48 to 54 pounds of honey per year.
“It’s part of the solution,” said Draper about the positive environmental impact of keeping bees while acknowledging the simple beauty of keeping your own hive. “The process of owning bees and watching them come and go is so soothing for the soul.”