Our Story
We are Edwin Smyth & Donna Sturm and together we run The Green Bee.
I’m originally from Dunboyne in Co. Meath and Donna is originally from Zwaag in the Netherlands. I was beekeeping for a number of years as a hobby in Meath but my location limited me to the amount of honeybee colonies I could keep. So in order to expand we knew we needed to move to a more rural location with plenty of wild flowers available for our bees to forage on.
We began looking for a new home in 2016 and the following year while on a trip along the Wild Atlantic Way we drove through Camus and saw this house for sale. We noticed there was a large variety and quantity of wild flowers for miles around which meant this house would be perfect for our beekeeping plans so we made an offer on the house and luckily it was accepted.
We moved in in February 2018 and began to renovate the house. The hot weather that June was perfect for our honeybees to collect nectar and produce a great quality raw honey.
In order to sell our raw honey we placed an honesty box at the front of our property. In the Netherlands this is a popular way for beekeepers to sell honey and they are a common sight in Donna’s hometown. We have plenty of repeat customers who are living locally and we get a good supply of holiday makers who stop by while travelling the Wild Atlantic Way.
We also use our honesty box to sell a few of our other homemade products such as our homemade shampoo bars, shower soap bars, lip balm, beeswax candles, jams & marmalade, bird boxes & occasionally fresh hen eggs.
Our raw heather honey recently featured in a BBC Travel article which can be found here: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20221128-a-quintessentially-irish-way-to-travel