I'm pretty sure I've said (or at the very least, implied) on my website multiple times that I am a tree hugger. It annoys my family to no end, but I have a huge heart for all of the animals and plants on the earth, and I do everything in my power to do my part. At school, I use canvas bags on my trip to the grocery store (I buy a lot of my produce at Aldi, where they don't hand out plastic bags, either), and just this past week while I was at the beach, I picked up the trash I found on the shoreline, but I always feel that I could do more.
You probably have heard the discussion on bees within the past few years. Some scientists argue that without bees, our world would fall into chaos. Okay, not really chaos, but eventually, we would suffer from a great loss. Without bees pollinating, fruits and vegetables would not flourish. With that goes a vital food source for both humans and animals.
So while I was at the beach this week, and as I was shopping in the traditional Myrtle Beach stores on the water, I stumbled into a store called the Savannah Bee Company, complete with a bee farm in the back.
Naturally, I was intrigued, so I forced Matt inside.
This store was one of the highlights of my vacation! That doesn't seem like much, but it was one that I had never seen before. I loved what it stood for and the products it sold, so I had to write about it!
The Savannah Bee Company's main service, obviously, is local honey, provided by the local bees! The profits they make by selling these products help to fund the Bee Cause Project, which helps protect bees in their habitats.
This store just opened up in Barefoot Landing in North Myrtle Beach last summer, but they have plenty of other stores in the south that you can travel to!
A must-have for a Madison-approved store is free samples, and the Savannah Bee Company offered some of the most unique items I've ever seen! They showcased samples of their skin care products, made from beeswax and royal jelly, and their edible items, such as full pieces of honeycomb and different genres of honey. You had your simple honey, whipped honey, and even honey-based mead.
You read that right. Mead.
In the back of the store stood a full-length farmhouse-style bar, which offered mead tastings. For $10, you got to try six different types of all-natural and honey-based meads. My personal favorite was the Bananas Foster Forever, which was a dessert mead that tasted like coffee, followed closely by the John Lemon (not to be confused with John Lennon).
The best part about the mead tasting was the knowledge the bartender had on the history of mead. It's the oldest form of alcoholic beverage, dating back to the B.C. ages, and its key ingredient is fermented honey.
They also offered you to try a piece of raw honeycomb, which I was a bit skeptical about. But it tasted exactly like you would imagine: sweet, sticky, and crunchy! It was served with a piece of parmesan cheese and a blueberry, and surprisingly, I was in love with one bite.
I kept stopping by to snag more!
I couldn't leave the store empty-handed, so I purchased a few skincare items: a hand cream and a body butter. The hand cream is an organic lotion that is super thick, and made with beeswax, royal jelly, and honey. It has a pretty neutral smell, but it worked wonders on my hands! The body butter's ingredients are pretty similar, but this time, the smell is AMAZING. And it comes in the cutest jar that I will definitely be reusing once the body butter is gone!
But the main reason I fell in love with this little store is not the products; it's the message behind it. Inside, there was a hive that was concealed for beekeepers to use. You could see the sugar and water drip inside it, and watch the bees work, and it was so incredible to see such an amazing organization promote itself through wonderful customer service and product. It warms my heart, as a treehugger, to see people work hard to keep the bees and the environment safe.
When I move to South Carolina in the future, I'll be mapping out the nearest store.
xoxo, Madison