Meet the maker: A chat with Arnprior’s Bee Savvy Honey + A body care giveaway!

Bee Savvy Honey sent me the products in this post in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. 

🎵 You make me feel, you make me feel, you make me feel like a na-tur-al woman 🎵  •  You know a product’s good when it makes you want to sing. This week I’ve been trying some all-natural body balms and scrubs from a local company called Bee Savvy Honey and I’m bee-yond excited to share them with you. 🐝 (And you can bet I’m pollen out all of the buzzwords while I’m doing it.) I have a Q & A with one of the co-founders (thanks Alicia!), some info on the products I’ve tried and a chance to win a gift card to the shop. It’s a honey of a post, so pour yourself a cup of tea and get comfy!

First a chat with Alicia, who co-founded and runs Bee Savvy Honey with her husband Matthew.

What’s Bee Savvy Honey? 

Bee Savvy Honey is a young company, located in the town of Arnprior, nestled alongside the Ottawa River in Eastern Ontario. Bee Savvy specializes in creating unique infused honeys that inspire our fellow foodies, and incredibly effective and healthy, natural body moisturizers.

We are beekeepers and the makers of all our products. We pride ourselves on being involved in every step of the creative process, from working with our bees while harvesting our quality honey and beeswax, to hand pouring each body balm and lotion bar.

How did it come about?

Matthew has a work history in both marketing and journalism, but always felt more at home in the outdoors than in an office. After a battle with cancer in his early 30s, Matthew decided that a career change towards more holistic “work” was needed. He began a beekeeping mentorship program with an Ottawa beekeeper and fell in love with the work immediately. In 2015 Bee Savvy Honey was born with only four hives and now in 2019 we have 40 hives.

Alicia has always felt a need to express herself creatively. Through managing Bee Savvy’s social media accounts, attending vendor shows, creating the body-care and assisting in the bee yard during harvest, Bee Savvy has provided her a wonderful sense of fulfillment. When she’s not brainstorming the next expansion of Bee Savvy’s top quality goods, Alicia is the Executive Assistant to MacOdrum Library’s Head Librarian at Carleton University.

What does a typical business day look like for you?

Bee Savvy Honey is Matthew’s full-time work and a nearly full-time endeavour for Alicia. The business requires year-round attention despite revolving around seasonal agriculture and vendor show schedules. As with any sort of agriculture the risks are high and the heartbreak frequent. However, this hard work is honest and the rewards great whenever we have a good season. We use everything that comes from our hives. Our raw honey is typically from wildflowers and wild apples & cherry trees. We’re fortunate to have our bees located in areas where active farming is rare and sprayed crops aren’t a concern. Our golden beeswax is a key component in our highly moisturizing body-care.

And a typical rest day?

Lots of Snark coffee and Saturday morning cartoons! Spending time with our kids and dogs. We love canoeing, camping and going for hikes.

What’s new and next for the business?

In an effort to make a difference in the local food-to-table agricultural community, we promote the belief of collaboration before competition. We do everything in our power to help fellow growers, creators and entrepreneurs succeed through exposure, promotion and – most importantly – by sourcing many of our materials and ingredients from them.

Bee Savvy sources 100% of our ingredients, promotional items and production equipment from reputable Ontario and Canadian companies. This is a more expensive approach, but as farmers, and dedicated supporters of fellow Canadian businesses, we feel it is important to set an example of sustainable business practices.

We’re currently experimenting with different honey face mask recipes. We’ve done a lot of vendor + artisan shows and we’re looking to expand our retail shops we supply for our customers to have more access to our products.

We’re also in discussion with a few restaurants and cafes on using our honey in their food recipes, cocktails and cocktails.

Bee Savvy Honey’s body products include body balms, body scrubs and push-up lotion bars in each of four scents: Lavender + Mint, Grapefruit + Vanilla, Lemongrass, and Earl Grey. They also make an unscented body balm, eight different lip balms and a hand lotion bar.

🐝 The buzz on Bee Savvy Honey 🐝

I’ve been using the body balms and lotion bars on all my dry spots (and I have a lot) and they truly feel so much softer. What a difference! My alligator shins, heels and elbows are no more. It’s like I’ve got all-new skin! And the scents Alicia sent me are heavenly. The grapefruit + vanilla smells like fresh-baked sugar cookies, which seems like a perfectly cozy, winter-y kind of scent. Maybe that’s part of the reason I love the lavender + mint so much right now — it’s fresh and zippy and alive, just like the season we’re in.

And just a little of the body scrub goes a long way. I’ve got it shown in a big scoop below like bath salts but what you want to do is just put a teaspoon or two in a dish and mix it into a paste with a little water. Lovely for a gentle exfoliation on the hands, heels and upper arms, but really you could use it wherever you like.

If you’re in the Ottawa area, you can meet Bee Savvy Honey’s co-founder and beekeeper Matthew from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday June 1 at the Sidehustler Market in the Carleton University Fieldhouse. Admission is $2/person.

Giveaway!

Thanks to Alicia and Matthew, I’ve got a $75 Bee Savvy gift card for any body care products to share with one of you! To enter to win, tell me which product (and in which scent) mentioned in this post that you’d love to try first or a product or scent you’d love to see Bee Savvy Honey make. Put your answer in the comments below, svp. This entry is mandatory.

For another entry, follow try small things and Bee Savvy Honey on Facebook, share this post (you’ll see the share buttons below) and tell me your Facebook name in the comments below. 

And feel free to tweet the following once per day and leave the url for your tweet in the comments below (one entry per tweet). Make sure you’re following try small things for your entry to count.

Meet the maker: A chat with Arnprior’s Bee Savvy Honey and win a $75 body care gift card from @trysmallthings! 🐝🐝 https://wp.me/p4xBed-7oA CAN/US 6/20 

I’ve also got the giveaway running on Instagram, so feel free to enter there too.

The contest is open to Canadian (excluding Quebec) residents 18+ and ends at 11:59 p.m. EST on June 20, 2019. The potential winner (chosen at random) must respond to prize notification within 48 hours and provide the correct answer to a skill-testing question, otherwise another winner will be selected.

Good luck, everybody!