Think it, bee it
When Robert Redpath was a teenager his beekeeper father gave him a hive and told him to look after it.
Robert worked the hive and admired the togetherness of his bees’ and their ability to organise around a cause. Humans, he thought, didn’t always look after each other as well.
Many years later as an adult disenchanted with his academic career and business consultancy Robert decided to it was time to go back to his bees.
Bee Sustainable opened in 2011 in a small shopfront at the unfashionable end of Lygon Street selling hives, bee-keeping gear, flour mills, fermentation and cheese-making equipment and of course Robert’s honey, dispensed from big silver ten gallon drums.
Bee Sustainable was just around the corner from where I lived and it had all the things I loved doing; bees, seeds, preserving, bread and beer – oh a paradise!
I bought a veil and a smoker, handed over my money and exclaimed the shop was awesome. Inside however I feared something so beautiful and hopeful might not survive the real world.
My fears were misplaced, Robert’s timing, it turned out, could not have been better.
Catching the backyard beekeeping boom and a groundswell of interest in preserving and cheesemaking, Robert’s business model had a wonderful inbuilt unexpected extra – people needed to learn how to use the equipment and so workshops followed and things began to hum along nicely.
Now if you have bees, you have beeswax and if you have beeswax you make candles.
This was a fact that was not lost on Fair Food’s grocery buyer, Shell Carroll, though she had a bit of work to do to get there.
In box near Shell’s desk at the Fair Food warehouse was a growing pile of little brown glass skincare jars that customers had returned over the years.
Being an old design the jars couldn’t be refilled and so they sat there week after week, bugging Shell to come up with an idea to use them.
It took a while but one day Shell had a vision – little jars and bees…no little jars and bees wax! No little beeswax candles in jars!!
She asked Robert if he could make her vison real.
He could and he did and it worked a treat. There’s one in the pic above.
The box of little brown jars came back to the Fair Food warehouse as a box of beeswax candles the other day.
They’re very cute, they smell ridiculously good and they last for around 20 hours.
You can find them here along with all of Robert’s beautiful honeys.
CERES Harvest Fest
CERES Harvest Fest is just around the corner.
It’s our annual bash to say thanks to the good Earth, our awesome farmers, and the changing seasons.
The word outa the farm is that it’s set to be a goodun:
There’ll be farm tours & talks, lots of kids activities, story telling, Eritrean coffee making, basket weaving, and Indonesian cooking.
The CERES Home Harvest Awards are back on to show off serious vegetable growing skills – see the pumpkin from Harvest Fest 2018 above!!
There’s the smash-hit scarecrow building comp as well as local tunes, marketplace magic and lots of yummy local eats.
Harvest Fest is on Saturday 23rd March, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm.
Have a great week
Chris
