An engineer who keeps bees
Three generations on the same property in Rodeo, California — raising bees, and building the hives ourselves.
The family
Bay Beez Honey is a family apiary. We’ve worked the same property in Rodeo, California for three generations, and the bees have been part of it for a long time. We’re not a brand and we’re not a warehouse — we’re a family that keeps bees, harvests honey, and sells it the way our grandparents would recognize: in person, jar by jar, to people who come back.
Most of what we make still goes out the way it always has — at the farmers market, over a table, with someone explaining the difference between honey that’s been heated and filtered and honey that hasn’t. This website is just a way to do that when you can’t make it to the market.
The craft
Here’s the part most beekeepers can’t say: we design and build our own equipment. The hives, the frames, the racks the comb sits in — drawn up in SolidWorks and built by hand. Over a hundred pieces of beekeeping equipment, engineered for our bees and our place, not bought off a shelf.
That’s the whole idea. An engineer who keeps bees builds the tools the bees actually need, then gets out of their way. The honey tastes like the flowers that were blooming that season, because nothing was added and nothing was taken out.
Built, not bought
Larry designed more than a hundred pieces of beekeeping equipment in SolidWorks — bee barns, hive frames, honeycomb racks. The engineering drawings sit right next to the golden honey, and that juxtaposition is the brand in one glance: a craftsman who builds his own tools. (Selected drawings coming to this page soon.)