Honey Bee Friendly

A honey bee about the size of a pinky fingernail—the Apis melliflera—lands on a camp chair and shows off its assets. The bug eyes. The fuzzy thorax. Truthfully, it’s kind of cute.

“They’re pretty adorable, right?” agrees Greg Hildebrand.

He should know. A passion for bees diverted his career from music to first-generation beekeeper. He wasn’t born into farming, but six bucolic acres of family land in northern York County now serve as home base for Honey Bee Friendly. It’s a business where the byproducts of naturally fed, migratory hives go straight into pure honey and soothing salves and balms.

The journey begins in Dillsburg, where Greg grew up in a family of educators.

“Maybe I was encouraged to be curious and encouraged to follow my passions,” he says. Initially, those passions led him to playing guitar with touring rock bands. Then a devastating car crash put life in a different perspective.

“It made me happy to be doing something I had control over,” he says now. “It was more for the enjoyment of life than about not being happy and slaving away.”

He was still performing when he started reading about bees. One book led to another. Two years later, spring was approaching, and it was time for Greg to put his hands-on proclivities to work.

“I’d been interested enough,” he says. “I’d read enough. I had a basic understanding.”

He bought two bee colonies. He joined bee clubs, learning where to catch swarms that were—understandably—unwelcome by their owners. By year’s end, he had nine colonies, on the way to today’s 250.

In two more years, he was hooked. Honey Bee Friendly took flight in 2014.

“Honey bees are the embodiment of altruism,” Greg says. “I look at a colony as the animal, not the bee. The bees themselves are just pieces of the organism. The colony of bees is the living being.”

He taught himself how to start a business. He explored the various pathways toward a viable enterprise, because bee management “can look a lot of different ways.”

Here’s how it works. In the bee industry, you can raise bees to serve the insatiable need of farms for pollination. Or, you can skip the beekeeping and simply acquire the beeswax, honey, and pollen needed to create and market honey jars, candles, salves, and balms.

Or you can do both, creating trusted products from the harvest of your own hives.

“Tara and I chose to do both, and we are actively committed to both,” says Greg. “I manage my bees and produce products of the hive, and I do it in a way that is friendly to the bees and helps them thrive.”

Bees flourish where peak blossoms offer abundant pollination. As seasons evolve, Greg trailers bee colonies to conservation lands in South Carolina, fruit farms and cider works in Pennsylvania, and the mountains of Virginia where native sourwood trees flavor a particularly prized honey.

Greg and Tara were friends before they started dating. They married in 2018, just after their first son, Gideon, was born. This fall, their second son is on the way.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Greg says. “It’s such a positive change.”

Tara is a talented cook whose keen palate drives the product side of the business.

“Tara has this touch that gives her the ability to create things that I never would,” Greg says. “Things I’m curious about and wanted to create or maybe dabbled with, she took to a whole other level.”

The fruits of those creative endeavors begin, of course, with raw honey, not heat-processed like the grocery brands that pasteurize out the honey’s beneficial enzymes. And because honey easily absorbs oils, there is raw honey flavored with orange ginger, chamomile calendula, or chili peppers. There is sweet orange lip balm and lemongrass herbal salve. There is bee pollen, honeycomb, and tattoo treatment blended with CBD.

Greg says that beekeeping agrees with him.

“This is my freedom,” he says. “It is an independence. I’m proud of what we’ve

been able to build. My goals and ambitions have me going much farther, but when I look back on where I came from, I’ve come a very long way.”