My beauty product review for today is from The Savanna Bee Company.

Photo from My Bathouse, on sale for $2.50 for 2 oz bottle.

I really like this body lotion as it goes on very nice.  It is lightweight in texture.  The gentle moisturizer combines beeswax and royal jelly with peach kernel, pecan and sweet almond oil. All of which are quality ingredients used in skincare.

The lotion is rich with antioxidants and infused with a natural mint julep fragrance.  It is meant to be used on all skin types. 8 oz bottle retails for $12.99.  But I have a small 2 oz bottle (as seen in pictured) that is perfect for travel.

The lotion I have from The Savanna Bee Company is “Mint Julep”.  Peppermint is my all time favorite scent (as well as herb).  It is the first scent I go to in the summer time.  I also like to use peppermint oil when I feel a headache coming. Most of the time it works, otherwise I have to reach for other pain reliever pills.

Ted Dennard is the founder of The Savannah Bee Company based out of Georgia.  They sell mostly high quality honey, such as Tupelo honey.  He’s been in business since 2002 and is still growing strong.  His company may not be as well known as Burt’s Bee, but it seem he has found his true calling in life.  Or at least with the bees that have provided him with so much more than great honey.  As for what he does, Ted said, “I just love it.  I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Here is Ted’s little story:

I was bottling honey in the kitchen then,” he recalls. When four other Savannah stores wanted to sell his honey, he had to move the operation into the garage. Then he “just started growing, growing, growing,” until one day, he was forced to ask himself the ultimate question: To bee or not to bee?

The answer was obvious. “I decided I just couldn’t ignore it, so I quit my job in January of 2002, mortgaged the house, and put all the money into the business.” He expanded the honeymaking “plant” into an old classroom at the Oatland Island Wildlife Preserve where he used to teach. A former national retirement home for railroad engineers, the facility offered Ted 800 square feet of elbow room and all the mountain lions, forest bison, and alligators a man could wish for.

As a concerned beekeepers here is what Ted Dennard has to say about Colony Collapse Disorder:

What Other Challenges do Beekeepers Face?

We beekeepers are always struggling with some malady. With pests and diseases globalizing, beehives here in the United States have been hit with something new every ten years or so. In the mid-1980s the arrival of mites decimated honeybee hives. By the mid-1990’s the Department of Agriculture was estimating that 90% of our wild honeybees had been wiped out. In the late 1990’s here in Georgia, a beetle arrived from South Africa and began causing serious problems in our hives and then rapidly spreading across the country. In response to these problems, beekeepers began breeding extra hives to make up for losses, re-populating the wilds with escaping swarms that over time have developed a resistance to these ailments.

My Takeaway

I think the world has been given a wake-up call. The intricate web of dependency between species has been reinforced. The major role of the honeybee in our world has been underscored. People often tell me that they never knew that more than a hundred of our foods were dependent upon bees and how closely our lives are intertwined with theirs. Beekeepers have begun to reconsider exposing their bees to the stresses of long-distance travel and medicinal treatments. Because the stakes are so high, I’m confident that we will find a solution to CCD as well as the other challenges we face. Ever hopeful, I see the media exposure to bees and the beekeeping world as a positive awareness-broadening event.