SweetNes Honey
When I was 8 years old while living in Houston, Texas, we had a Wax Leaf Ligustrum shrub right outside our kitchen window. Every spring it would be buzzing with honeybees and other cool looking pollinators. I was fascinated with it and loved catching and releasing bees. I would use Ziplock bags to catch the bees and pop them into a large plastic coke bottles (dry of course) with holes poked in it. I would keep count how many I could get. Through observation I learned they were collecting the pollen from the flowers and storing it on their legs. It was so cool watching them! I got stung all the time and my mom would tell me to stop playing with the bees after doctoring up my many stings. Yet every time I would run back out to catch more. The year was 1988 and I had never really heard much about beekeeping or beekeepers. I knew they existed but never really knew what they did. My friends would sit far away on the sidewalk to watch. I don’t know why they never wanted to catch bees with me?! All of my family and friends called me “Nes” or “Nessa” growing up. I would joke that if I ever owned a boat, I would name it Sweet Nes.
Fast forward many years later, after school, college and many different jobs, I met my husband Brent. We married and moved from our 1-bedroom condo near the Houston Galleria to the suburbs in Sienna, in Missouri City. We had two super cute little boys and a dog named Sketch. I was working as the office manager for Brent’s company in the industrial safety business. Although I liked my job and did a good job, I was not passionate about the work I was doing. I hated being stuck indoors behind a computer screen on beautiful days. One evening while sitting in bed working on my laptop, I sat up and blurted out to Brent, “You know what I really want to do? I want to be a beekeeper!” And then silence...LOL! He looked at me like I had grown a third eye. He thought I was crazy.
I started studying everything I could find about bees and beekeeping. I followed beekeepers on social media, collected books and joined all the local bee clubs I could find. I attended the Fort Bend Beekeepers Association and forced a senior beekeeper to mentor me. He reluctantly did so. He was a grump guy. I ran full speed ahead! Caught my first swarm of bees in my own backyard! I was officially a beekeeper! By the end of the week I had two, by the end of the month I had 6 hives. I partnered up with another hobbyist beekeeper and we started providing bee removal service to our community. We did professional cutouts and repairs to safely remove the bees. Doing this grew our apiary rapidly. We did bee removal for a few years. Brent and I started a Farmers Market in our community and sold honey there as well. I bought a large block of beeswax from my mentor and started teaching myself how to make candles and other beeswax products. My candles were beautiful and smelled amazing! I decided to create an Etsy shop to see if they would sell. I had to come up with a name for my shop and I already knew that SweetNes would be a part of it. SweetNes Honey Apiaries & Beetique was born 2016.
SweetNes Honey Apiaries & Beetique simply wants to give the world “A little something to make life sweeter!”