Our beekeeping activities have been featured from National Public Radio to The New York Times.

Here’s how the buzz started:

Portrait of Adriana, the Founder of South Mountain Bees with a yellow flowers background in her backyard.

I’m Adriana Compagnoni – beekeeper and founder of South Mountain Bees.

By 2011, the number of honeybee colonies in the US had been sharply declining for over two decades, and colony collapse disorder had become a household name. There are so many factors that it’s somehow nobody’s fault.

It’s a case of death by a thousand cuts.

Recent studies have shown that commercial farming and gardening practices are reducing pollinator numbers at staggering speeds.

In the summer of 2011, we visited friends in the Nebbiolo region of Piedmont, Italy. It was a sunny afternoon; they had two hives of buzzing honeybees, and we sat in the shade of centenary chestnut trees to savor acacia and chestnut honey that they had harvested that year. I was ready to retire! What else could anybody want? That was a pivotal moment. We then said, this is it! We are going to do our part.

Butterfly on purple coneflower

We decided to transition our garden into a pollinator haven and found out how to keep bees. The rewards were bound to be sweet! We landscaped our yard using as many natives as possible, and we continued growing our vegetables using organic practices.I joined the Essex County Beekeepers Society (ECBS), my local chapter of the New Jersey Beekeepers Association (NJBA), and I took their beginners' beekeeping course.

Adriana with an open hive of honeybees in her beekeeping suit holding a box full of bees and honey.

In April 2012, we got our first bees, and our backyard beekeeping family adventure began. We started with two hives and a lot of enthusiasm. We were busy, but we felt it was important to dedicate time and resources to care for the bees. 

Supporting Our Community

At South Mountain Bees, we care for our community and we support the Elizabeth Coalition To House The Homeless. Executive director, Linda Flores-Tober, shared a quote from one of the families the Coalition serves:

 “Miss Linda, when you are homeless, people act like you are invisible. They don’t look at you, they don’t acknowledge your presence. It makes you feel like you don’t exist”.

Those words stayed with me, and I wanted to make sure that we don’t forget our homeless, and although a scented soap is not a home, it can give them a small moment of happiness knowing that they are acknowledged.

During the Holiday Season, they are the beneficiaries of our Giving Tuesday campaign.

How frozen beeswax started the online shop

(+ helps you eliminate pesticides)

We started to wonder what we were going to do with the beeswax that was accumulating in our freezer after each honey harvest. I looked into a local artist who was doing encaustic painting, but then I found a recipe of furniture polish using beeswax, that ended up being my first butcher block’s paste. That gave me the idea of eliminating as many pesticides as possible from our daily lives. The ideal candidate was soap. The kids were old enough to have lye in the house, and we all use soap many times a day so that single product will make a big difference in our chemical footprint.

Next, came lip balm. I don’t know if there are any studies of how much lip balm we end up eating, but if any, we want it to have no chemicals in it.

In February 2015, we opened our online store.

With every bar of soap, tin of lip balm, or jar of honey that you purchase, you are joining us in helping save the honeybee. In return, the bees will reward you with the amazing products they help us create, provide free pollination services to the neighborhood gardeners, and help produce wild fruits and berries for the local wildlife.

While I am a hobbyist and my bees deliver free pollination services to our neighborhood, my fellow commercial beekeepers play an essential role in bringing food to our table. Unfortunately, beekeeping is often an invisible aspect of farming. When we go apple picking in the Fall, we often forget that where there’s an apple once there were a flower and a bee. So now you know that, with every purchase, you are not only helping a small business, you are also helping beekeeping.

Things We Are Proud Of:

  • 2020 Winner of The New Jersey Honey “Best in Show.” A little-known fact is that besides the bragging rights that come with every award, The Honey Show winning entries are displayed in the State House bringing awareness to our legislators to support beekeeping in the State of New Jersey. (See more of our awards here!)

  • I am also an enthusiastic organic gardener. I’m obsessed with avoiding pesticides, herbicides, and any other -cides at all costs. I painstakingly pick up slugs by hand (with gloves, ew!) when they come out by the hundreds after 11PM in the summer.

  • One of our top 3 best selling products is our lip balm. One of our customers says it best: "Nothing would heal my chapped lips until I used this balm. 10/10!" Alice

  • When not taking care of the bees, you can find me singing in a choir. I’ve been singing since high school and you can see me singing at our local church. Here's one of my favorite songs from the 2021 Christmas concert, "O Magnum Mysterium" by Tomás Luis de Victoria. Did you find me in the video?

  • I have a PhD in Computer Science and was a college professor for over 20 years.

In The News:

We were interviewed on All of It with Alison Stewart on WNYC, New York Public Radio after collecting a swarm of bees had an unexpected turn of events. Check it out!

For more media coverage read here.

Keeping bees keeps us honest

To the best of our ability, we use ingredients that do not hurt the bees. Our products are carefully crafted in small batches using honey and beeswax.

We spend countless hours caring for our hip suburban honeybees, that live a healthy life sheltered from the harmful chemicals of traditional commercial farming, foraging freely in the South Mountain Reservation, and in our neighbors’ yards.

Having the bees has brought change to the neighborhood, not only do you see more flowers, but many neighbors have told me how they changed the way they care for their lawns, and how they started planting pollinator-friendly plants for our bees.

Join us in our mission to help create a world where we can meet our needs and even our wants without hurting our environment.