Our Story

About Woodside Bees

Hello! And welcome to Jill & Clare’s Woodside Bees, LLC. Our beehives and our business are all located at our ½ acre suburban home in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

new batch of honey in jars

Here is some information about our little company. In 2016 both of us had become semi-retired. Jill had always wanted to be a beekeeper, and now we had the time to pursue this undertaking. After attending classes and watching YouTube videos and reading everything we could get our hands on, we started with two bee hives. It wasn’t long before we had three, four and then five beehives, which is about all we can handle. Much to our surprise, the bees started generating more honey than we, our family and friends could consume. So we started selling our honey from our front lawn.  

selling honey from table in the yard

It wasn’t long before we started to harvest the beeswax that was produced with our honey and make pure handmade candles in various forms. It actually takes bees seven times the amount of nectar to produce an ounce of beeswax than it does to produce honey. Then we ventured into honey, pollen, and beeswax homemade soaps. This was fun, and soon our soap making extended to the use of other pure and natural soap ingredients.

With all of this honey, beeswax candles, and pure and natural homemade soap, we began to sell our products at craft fairs and farmers markets. We have a Facebook page (Jill & Clare’s Woodside Bees) but we were receiving many requests for an online store.

So here we are! We hope you enjoy our site and our products, all made with love. 

inspecting the beehives

 

Gardening has always been a passion for us, even before we got our honey bees. This year we decided to enter the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s (PHS) Gardening Contest … and lo and behold we won a Blue Ribbon for our outdoor gardens. The honey bees are definitely our muses, and good luck charms.